Contributors to Issue XXVI

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Mary Angelino

Mary Angelino’s poetry is forthcoming in Foglifter and in the New York Quarterly’s anthology, Without a Doubt. Recent publications include the Arkansas International, where she received a 2021 Pushcart nomination, and the Southern Humanities Review, where she earned an honorable mention for the 2019 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Her poems appear in the Best New Poets 2017, 2015, and 2010 anthologies. She lives in Santa Clarita, California, where she is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at College of the Canyons.

Ivana Aponte

Ivana Aponte (Caracas, Venezuela, 1990) earned a degree in literature from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas. She is currently studying towards her Masters degree in literature at the University of Chile. She is a copy editor, independent editor, and Spanish as a Foreign Language teacher. Her poems have been published in Orquídeas voces: Muestra de poesía venezolana contemporánea (Fundación Pablo Neruda, 2021), Letralia, La Parada Poética, Pruka, Los Poetas del 5, and in the anthologies Me Vibra II Brevísima Antología Arbitraria Panamá Venezuela (LP5 Editora, 2020) and Una cicatriz donde se escriben despedidas: Antología de poesía venezolana en Chile. Her first poetry collection, Afectos, will be published by LP 5 Editora in April 2022 and a selection of her work is forthcoming in A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written: The Poetry of Venezuelan Migrants in Chile (LSU Press, 2023). She has lived in Santiago, Chile, since 2017.

Nicky Beer

Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and author of The Diminishing House (2010) and The Octopus Game (2015), both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Her third book of poems, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, will be published by Milkweed Editions in March 2022. She has received honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is as a poetry editor for Copper Nickel. A recent essay, “My Brother Says ‘What the Fuck,’” was listed as “Notable” in Best American Essays 2021.

Rosebud Ben-Oni

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which received a Starred Review in Booklist, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019). Her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets, which appears in Black Warrior Review (2020), is part of a larger future project called The Atomic Sonnets, which she began in 2019, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. She has received fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, City Artists Corps, CantoMundo and Queens Council on the Arts. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, among others. In 2017, her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. Recently, her poem “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” was featured in Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown.

David M. Brunson

David M. Brunson (Virginia, 1994) has an MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas. His poems and translations have appeared in or are forthcoming from Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, Booth, On the Seawall, The Bitter Oleander, Nashville Review, Asymptote, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, The Inflectionist Review, Split Rock Review, The Journal of Italian Translation, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is the editor, anthologist, and translator of A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written: The Poetry of Venezuelan Migrants in Chile, forthcoming from LSU Press.

Celeste Chen

Celeste Chen lives in D.C. Recent work is in/forthcoming in Indiana Review, Shenandoah, SmokeLong Quarterly, A Velvet Giant, and elsewhere. She’s the winner of Pigeon Pages’ Summer 2021 Flash Contest, judged by Dantiel Moniz; X-R-A-Y’s Special QTPOC issue, judged by Daisuke Shen & Liz Crowder; and Sine Theta Magazine’s 2021 Summer Writing Contest, judged by R. F. Kuang. Find her on Twitter @celestish_ and online at https://celesteceleste.carrd.co/.

Brian Clifton

Brian Clifton is the author of the chapbooks MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). They have work in: Pleiades, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Colorado Review, The Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. They are an avid record collector and curator of curiosities.

Paola d’Agnese

Paola d’Agnese, born in Naples, is an actress, playwright, and writer. She is a founder of the cultural association Donne e Poesia of the Casa Internazionale delle Donne, in Rome, where she has led workshops as well as organized readings and conferences for more than a decade. She is the author of the poetry collections 58 secondi (Zona, 2010, accompanied by a note by Ennio Morricone), Rima di frattura (Guida, 2019, in collaboration with Fabrizio Falconi), and Così diviso il corpo (Samuele, 2021).

Jose Hernandez Diaz

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, Poetry, The Southern Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He teaches creative writing online and edits poetry for Frontier.

Andrew Grace

Andrew Grace is the author of three books of poems. A new edition of his book SANCTA is recently out from Foundlings Press. He teaches at Kenyon College.

Patrycja Humienik

Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, performer, and editor based in Seattle, WA. Her poetry is featured/forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Southeast Review, Passages North, Columbia Journal, BOAAT, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She is working on her first book of poems, Anchor Baby. Find Patrycja on Twitter @jej_sen.

Rochelle Hurt

Rochelle Hurt is the author of the poetry collections The J Girls: A Reality Show (Indiana University Press, 2022), which won the Blue Light Books Prize from Indiana Review; In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize; and The Rusted City (White Pine, 2014). Her work has been included in POETRY magazine and the Best New Poets anthology. She’s been awarded prizes and fellowships from Arts & Letters, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. Hurt lives in Orlando and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.

Diana Garza Islas

Diana Garza Islas, born in 1985 in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, has published three books of poetry: Caja negra que se llame como a mí (2015); Adiós y buenas tardes, Condesita Quitanieve (2015); and Catálogo razonado de alambremaderitas para hembra con monóculo y posible calavera (2017). This “first yellow cycle” of writings was collected and published as Todo poema es yo de niña mirándola (2018). She has also published a pair of plaquettes: La czarigüeya escribe (2014) and Primer Infolio de las Vidas Reunidas de Almería Smarck (2021). She actually works on her MA on Critical Theory and develops and art investigation on abstract drawing and asemic writing. Her photographs, drawings, and video installations have been featured in various publications, interdisciplinary festivals, and collective expositions. She has twice received grants from FONCA (National Fund for Culture and the Arts). Texts and visuals: hastrolabia.net / @hastrolabia.

Ruth Joffre

Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Lightspeed, Gulf Coast, The Masters Review, Pleiades, The Florida Review Online, Flash Fiction Online, Wigleaf, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest. She lives in Seattle, where she serves as Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House.

Clare Labrador

Clare Labrador is a Filipino writer based in Manila. She was born and raised in Paoay, a town off the northern coast of the Philippines. She has a BA in Creative Writing from the Ateneo de Manila University, and is currently pursuing a Juris Doctor degree.

Cate Lycurgus

Cate Lycurgus’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2020, American Poetry Review, Tin House, Boston Review, Best New Poets 2019, and elsewhere. She has also received scholarships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences and was named one of Narrative’s 30 Under 30 Featured Writers. Cate lives south of San Francisco, California, where she interviews for 32 Poems and teaches professional writing.

Matthew Mastricova

Matthew Mastricova is a teacher and writer in New York. Their work has appeared in Catapult, Joyland, Foglifter, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.

Paula Mirando

Paula Mirando is a queer Filipina American writer from the Bay Area. Her writing has been supported by the Kearny Street Workshop Interdisciplinary Writers Lab, Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, and Philippine American Writers and Artists. She is currently working on a collection of linked short stories.

Tomás Q. Morín

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the collection of poems Machete and the forthcoming memoir Let Me Count the Ways, as well as the poetry collections Patient Zero and A Larger Country. He is co-editor with Mari L’Esperance of the anthology, Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Rice University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Trey Moody

Trey Moody is from San Antonio, Texas. His first book, Thought That Nature (Sarabande Books, 2014), won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. His more recent poems have appeared in The Believer, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, and New England Review. He teaches at Creighton University and lives with his daughter in Omaha, Nebraska.

Toti O’Brien

Toti O’Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. Born in Rome, living in Los Angeles, she is an artist, musician and dancer. She is the author of Other Maidens (BlazeVOX, 2020), An Alphabet of Birds (Moonrise Press, 2020), In Her Terms (Cholla Needles Press, 2021), Pages of a Broken Diary (Psky’s Porch, 2022) and Alter Alter (Elyssar Press, 2022).

Aoghan O’Rathaille

Aoghan O’Rathaille (1670-1725) was born in County Kerry, Ireland, into a prosperous family whose wealth, means, and social standing eroded precipitously over the course of his lifetime, in particular after the defeat of James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1691. This final catastrophic defeat by the centuries-entrenched British colonial forces spelled the collapse of traditional bardic culture and lead to the implementation of wide-ranging and repressive penal laws. O’Rathaille was educated at the bardic school of one of the Brehon clans and rose to ollamh, the highest of the fili, the native culture’s elite class of poets. O’Rathaile is credited with inventing the asiling, a poem in which Ireland is personified as a beautiful woman, a genre that encoded political considerations that would be dangerous to speak about openly. The last of the traditional bards, Aoghan O’Rathaile died in destitution and is buried near Killarney at Muckross Abbey.

M.R. “Chibbi” Orduña

M.R. “Chibbi” Orduña (he/they) is a Mexican-born, Texas-raised queer poet and actor, the founder of Laredo BorderSlam, a founding member of Write About Now, Director and co-host of the Words and Sh*t virtual talk show and podcast, and 2-time San Antonio Slam Champion. He has self-published two books and was the co-editor of the anthology Contra: Texas Poets Speak Out (Flowersong Press, 2020). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Texas Review, The Acentos Review, Defunkt, Voices de la Luna, The Latino Book Review Magazine, The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, Wax Nine, We Are Mitu, George Takei, Button Poetry, and Write About Now. You can follow him on IG @gemineyes and Twitter @gemineyespoetry.

Salvatore Pane

Salvatore Pane is the author of two novels and a book of nonfiction. His shorter work has appeared in Indiana Review, American Short Fiction, and Story Magazine. He writes video games and is an associate professor of creative writing and new media. He lives in St. Paul and can be reached online at www.salvatore-pane.com.

Paul Rabinowitz

Paul Rabinowitz is an author, photographer and founder of ARTS By The People. Paul’s photography, short fiction, and poetry have appeared in many magazines and journals including New World Writing, Pif Magazine, Courtship of Winds, Burningword, Evening Street Press, Grub Street Literary Journal, The Montreal Review, The Metaworker, The Sun, Adirondack Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, The Oddville Press, and others. Paul was a featured artist in Nailed Magazine in 2020 and Mud Season Review in 2022. Paul was nominated for Best of the Net in 2021 for his Limited Light photo series and also nominated for the Maria Mazziotti Gillan Literary Service Award. Paul is the author of Limited Light, a book of prose and portrait photography, and a novella, The Clay Urn. Paul is working on a multimedia novel Confluence, and has completed a poetry collection called truth, love and the lines in between. His poems and fiction, “Little Gem Magnolia,” “Villa Dei Misteri,” “Confessional,” and “The Lines In Between” are the inspiration for four short films. Villa Dei Misteri won best Experimental Film at the RevolutionMe International Film Festival in 2021.

Sara Daniele Rivera

Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban/Peruvian artist, writer, translator, and educator from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Loft Anthology, The Green Mountains Review, Storyscape Journal, The Portal Prize Anthology, SeedBroadcast, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: a Latinx Anthology, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of a 2017 St. Botolph Club Emerging Artist Award, the winner of the 2018 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry from Solstice Magazine, and a 2022 Tin House Resident.

Edward Sambrano III

Edward Sambrano III is a Latinx poet and critic from San Antonio, Texas. An MFA candidate at the University of Florida, his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Spillway Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a scholarship to attend the 2021 Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshops, and has been nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. He can be found on Twitter @SambranoPoet.

Leah Tieger

Photo Credit: James Khattak

A recipient of support from the Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Leah Tieger is currently Dornsife Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Blackbird, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, and other places.

Daniel Tobin

Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, including From Nothing, winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award; The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the German of Paul Celan; and most recently Blood Labors, named one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year for 2018 by the New York Times and The Washington Independent Review of Books. His poetry has won many awards, among them the Massachusetts Book Award and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. His critical and editorial works include Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Awake in America, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, and To the Many: The Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge. His most recent work is On Serious Earth: Poetry and Transcendence. A trilogy of book-length poems, The Mansions, will appear in 2023. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston.

D.S. Waldman

D.S. Waldman is a Marsh-Rebelo scholar at San Diego State University. His work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Narrative, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, The Common, Missouri Review, Cherry Tree, and Los Angeles Review. Waldman has received fellowships, support and awards from Middlebury College, Kenyon Review summer workshops, San Diego State University, and Georgia Review. He directs the San Diego-based organization Poetic Youth, which brings MFA creative writing students into under-resourced high school classrooms to facilitate creative writing workshops.

Ross White

Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the 2019 Sexton Prize, and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society, and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. He teaches creative writing and grammar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is the co-host of The Chapbook, a podcast devoted solely to chapbooks. Follow him on Twitter @rosswhite.

Jemimah Wei

Jemimah Wei is a writer and host based in Singapore and New York. She was recently named a 2020 Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University, a 2021 Standiford Fiction Fellow, and is a Francine Ringold Award for New Writers honouree. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies, received support from Singapore’s National Arts Council, and appeared in Narrative, Nimrod, and CRAFT Literary, amongst others. Presently a columnist for No Contact Magazine, Jemimah is at work on a novel and three story collections. She loves to talk, and takes long, excellent naps. Say hi at @jemmawei on socials.

Sam Herschel Wein

Sam Herschel Wein (he/they) is a lollygagging plum of a poet and an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Their second chapbook, GESUNDHEIT!, a collaboration with Chen Chen, was part of the 2019-2020 Glass Poetry Press Series. He co-founded and edits Underblong. Recent work can be found in Split Lip Magazine, Shenandoah, and The Adroit Journal, among others.

Aaron Zhang

Aaron Zhang is a junior at Lakeside School in Seattle, WA. His work appears in The New York Times. His favorite poets are T. S. Eliot and Odysseas Elytis. Outside of writing, he edits his school arts & literary magazine Imago, writes for his school paper Tatler, and composes music.