Contributors to Issue XXX
Amy Wang
Amy Wang is a writer from California. When not crying over fanfiction, she can be found translating Chinese literature, coding, and taking long walks.
Andrew Hemmert
Andrew Hemmert is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review. He earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and currently lives in Thornton, Colorado.
Arah Ko
Arah Ko is a writer from Hawai'i and the author of Brine Orchid (YesYes Books 2025) and Animal Logic (Bull City Press 2025). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Arah was nominated for Best of Net and Best New Poets and received her MFA in creative writing from the Ohio State University. Arah edits at Surging Tide Magazine. Catch her at arahko.com.
DeeSoul Carson
DeeSoul Carson (He/They) is a poet and educator from San Diego, California, currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. His work is featured or forthcoming in Voicemail Poems, Muzzle Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Offing, & elsewhere. A Stanford University alum, DeeSoul has received fellowships from The Watering Hole and New York University, where he is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com.
Emily Daniel
Emily R. Daniel's chapbook, Life Line, was selected as a winner of the 2020 Celery City Chapbook Prize. Her poems can be found in The Penn Review, Olit Magazine, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. Emily lives with her family in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Western Michigan University.
Flower Conroy
LGBTQIA+ artist, NEA and MacDowell Fellow, and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy is the author of Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder, A Sentimental Hairpin, and Greenest Grass. Her/their poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, American Literary Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Currently she is working on a series of Ephemeral Altars that celebrate poetry collections through assemblage art.
Jerry Xiao
Jerry Xiao, a high-school senior from Collierville, Tennessee, is an alumnus of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and the Adroit Summer Mentorship Program. His writing has been published in Crab Creek Review, Cream City Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and has previously been recognized by YoungArts (2023, 2024) and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. He is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee.
Kathryn Smith
Kathryn Smith is a queer poet and mixed-media artist. Her most recent poetry collection, Self-Portrait with Cephalopod (Milkweed Editions, 2021), won the Jake Adam York Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She has received awards from Artist Trust, Spokane Arts, and the Allied Arts Foundation. Her poems and visual poetry have appeared in DIAGRAM, Copper Nickel, Ninth Letter, Fugue, Gettysburg Review, RHINO, Brink, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She lives in Spokane, Washington.
Lawrence Di Stefano
Lawrence Di Stefano is a poet and photographer. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Columbia Journal, Salt Hill, Southern Humanities Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Sugar House Review, and RHINO, among other publications. He holds an MFA in poetry from San Diego State University and is co-editor of poetry at the Los Angeles Review. He is currently working on his first collection of poems, Relapsing Green. Find him at www.lawrencedistefano.com.
Lisa Huffaker
Lisa Huffaker creates poetry, collage, assemblage, artist’s books, and many combinations of these. Her work is published or forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, Sixth Finch, Thrush, 32 Poems, and many other journals. Her visual poetry manuscript in progress was exhibited internationally as part of TU Delft and Cornell Tech’s 3rd Workshop on Obfuscation. Find her at www.lisahuffaker.com.
Matthew Nienow
Matthew Nienow is the author of House of Water (2016) and If Nothing (forthcoming in 2025), both from Alice James Books. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and has been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and two sons, and he works as a Mental Health Counselor.
Nancy Miller Gomez
Nancy Miller Gomez’s first full-length collection, Inconsolable Objects, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2024. She is the author of the chapbook Punishment (Rattle chapbook series), a collection of poems and essays about her experience teaching in prisons and jails. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, New Ohio Review, River Styx, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She co-founded Poetry in the Jails, an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men. She lives with her family in Santa Cruz, California. Find more at nancymillergomez.com.
John Fry
John Fry is the author of with the dogstar as my witness (Orison Books, 2018). His poems and lyric essays appear in Waxwing, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, Last Syllable, and IMANIMAN: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands (Aunt Lute, 2016), among others. He received an MFA from Texas State University, a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, and teaches at Southeast New Mexico College. He lives in Carlsbad with his dog and cat.
Ruth Awad
Ruth Awad is a Lebanese American poet, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy, forthcoming from Third Man Books, and Set to Music a Wildfire, winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work appears in The Atlantic, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Believer, New Republic, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Topaz Winters
Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022), Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019), and poems for the sound of the sky before thunder (Math Paper Press 2017). She serves as editor-in-chief of Half Mystic Press, an independent, international, and interdisciplinary publishing project, and as co-editor of Kopi Break, a journal of new Singapore poetry. Her work has been published in and profiled by Poets.org, The Drift, Passages North, Hobart, The Boiler, The Straits Times, American Banker, The Business Times, the National University of Singapore, and the Center for Fiction. She lives between New York and Singapore.
Lindy Biller
Lindy Biller is a writer based in Wisconsin. Her fiction has recently appeared in The Citron Review, Gone Lawn, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Empty House Press. She can be found on Instagram at @lindymbiller.
Chas Carey
Chas Carey is a public servant and member of the multidisciplinary performing arts collective Wolf 359. His writing has appeared in outlets such as Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, the children's podcast Smash Boom Best, and the long-running Hearth Gods reading series in New York City. He holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College and is at work on a novel, like everyone else. His website is chascarey.com.
Dara Yen Elerath
Dara Yen Elerath’s debut collection, Dark Braid (2020, BkMk Press), won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. A recipient of both the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the New Flash Fiction Award, her short-short fiction has appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Vestal Review, and Miracle Monocle. Her poetry has appeared in venues such as the American Poetry Review, Poetry, AGNI, Poets.org, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Nazifa Islam
Nazifa Islam is the author of the poetry collections Searching for a Pulse (Whitepoint Press) and Forlorn Light: Virginia Woolf Found Poems (Shearsman Books). Her fiction, paintings, and poems have appeared in Liminal Stories, RHINO, Blue Mesa Review, Gulf Coast, and The Missouri Review, among other publications. She earned her MFA at Oregon State University. You can find her @nafoopal.
Andrew Nickerson
Andrew Nickerson is a fiction writer who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and grew up in Connecticut. His work, which explores queer relationships and identity, has appeared in Stoneboat Literary Journal, Guesthouse Magazine, and Euphony Journal. He received an MFA from Emerson College.
Jessa Queyrouze
Jessa Queyrouze is a writer and poet in Louisiana. Her work has recently appeared in Smartish Pace and Poetry South.
Para Vadhahong
Para Vadhahong is a Thai-American writer whose poetry and fiction are published in Hyacinth Review, DVAN, Sine Theta, Honey Literary, and others. They are the winner of Salt Hill's Arthur Flowers Flash Fiction Prize (2022), the Lex Allen Literary Festival's Fiction Prize (2023), Hollins University’s Nancy Thorp Prize for Best Poem in Cargoes (2023), and Palette Poetry's Sappho Prize for Women Poets (2023). You can read more of their work at paravadhahong.weebly.com.
Katarina Frostenson
Katarina Frostenson is one of the most notable living Nordic poets. The author and translator of over thirty volumes, her work has had a major influence on contemporary Swedish poetry. She has in addition written dramas, prose, and an opera libretto, and translated works by Duras, Bataille, Bove, and Michaux. Frostenson has received nearly every literary prize in Sweden and many across Europe. She was awarded the 2016 Nordic Council Literature Prize for the 2015 collection Sånger och formler, forthcoming in autumn 2024 in English as The Space of Time. In 2019-2021, she released the autofictional trilogy K, F, and A, the first of which premiered as a stage play in October 2022 at the Folkteatern in Gothenburg. Her latest book, Alma, appeared in 2023.
Bradley Harmon
Bradley Harmon is a writer, translator and scholar of Nordic and German literature, film, and philosophy. Currently a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University, he has been an American Scandinavian Foundation fellow at Södertörn University, and an Emerging Translator mentee with the American Literary Translator’s Association. Harmon’s book-length translations include Katarina Frostenson’s The Space of Time (Threadsuns Press, 2024) and Birgitta Trotzig’s A Landscape (Sublunary Editions, 2025). He also is co-editor of the volume Rilke’s Poetry and the Horizons of Phenomenology (2025) and a special issue of Modern Language Notes on translation and literary citizenship in the American academy (2023).
Kim Eon Hee
Kim Eon Hee was born in 1953 in Jinju, South Korea. She is the author of five books of poetry, including Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days?, translated into English by Eunsong Kim and Sung Gi Kim.
Soje
Soje is a poet and the translator of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla (Tilted Axis Press, 2020), Lee Soho’s Catcalling (Open Letter Books, 2021), and Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, 2021). They also make chogwa, an e-zine that features one Korean poem and multiple English translations per issue. Find them at smokingtigers.com/soje.
Argyris Stavropoulos
Argyris Stavropoulos, a poet from Sparta, Greece, has published three collections of poetry: Συναντήσεις (Encounters – haiku, LogoTypos 2010); Αυτοεξόριστος εντός μου (Self-exiled within, 24Grammata 2018), awarded the Polydouri Poetry Prize; and Οι τύψεις της θάλασσας (The sea’s remorse, 24Grammata 2020). A new collection, Καλοκαιρινό παλτό (Summer coat), forthcoming in 2024, has been awarded the Techni Kilkis Poetry Prize.
Gigi Papoulias
Gigi Papoulias’ translations and fiction have been published in Lunch Ticket, Mayday Magazine, Toasted Cheese, (de)kata, and others. She was a selected participant at Princeton University’s Literary Translation seminar, with a translation from the work of Greek author Marios Hakkas. A graduate of Boston College, she focused on Modern Greek Studies in her academic work. As a grant recipient at the University of Athens, she completed advanced coursework in Greek Literature. She lives in Athens and has roots from the same Spartan village as the poet.
Dimitri Psurtsev
Dimitri Psurtsev is a poet and translator who has written five books of poetry (Ex Roma Tertia, Tengiz Notebook, Between, Tired Happiness, and Murka and Other Poems) alongside numerous translations of classics from English world literature. His poems in English translation have appeared in The Dodge, Ergon, Guernica, Image, The Journal, The Offing, Presence, and World Literature Today. He teaches at Moscow State Linguistic University and lives with his wife, Natalia, outside Moscow.
Philip Metres
Philip Metres is the author of Fugitive Refuge (2024), Ochre & Rust: New Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2023), Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening (2018), and Sand Opera (2015), and other books. His work has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lannan Foundation, NEA, and the Ohio Arts Council. He has received the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University and Core Faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Laura Rockhold
Laura Rockhold is a poet and visual artist living in Minnesota. She is the inventor of the golden root poetic form and 2022 recipient of the Bring Back The Prairies Award and Southern MN Poets Society Award. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and is published or forthcoming in Birdcoat Quarterly, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Cider Press Review, deLuge Journal, Scarlet: A Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, The Hopper, Yellow Arrow Journal, and elsewhere. She holds a BS from the University of Minnesota. Her website is www.laurarockhold.com.
