Contributors to Issue XXXVI
Elzbieta Zdunek
Elzbieta “Ela” Zdunek is a writer and a collage artist specializing in digital, predominantly grayscale compositions. Both in her written and visual works, she aspires to create a confusing, immersive experience by exploring themes such as alienation, resentment, and the subjectivity of perspective, shaped by individual histories and biases. The biggest question behind her works is what makes us who we are and how many people - both heroes and villains - we are, depending on the context.
Originally a photographer, Ela doesn’t focus on the photographed object, but rather its perception. This approach remains at the forefront in her collages too. She portrays the action and inaction, the moment of change, when we don’t know yet if the result is a blessing or a curse, but it’s going to define us in the eyes of others.
Her favorite sources of inspiration are silent films and historical theater. She has exhibited among others in Omnibus Gallery, Chromart Art Space, and the famous Berlin Kitkat Club. Her artworks have been published in magazines such as The Adroit Journal, The Maintenant Dada, and Door is a Jar.
Alonso Llerena
Alonso Llerena is a Peruvian writer, visual artist, and educator. He holds an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. His work explores the interconnections between the poetics of exile and the poetics of remains, attending to the concrete materiality of trace and ruin—whether physical or lodged in memory. He is a poetry and prose editor at Cobra Milk. He is the winner of the 2023 Ninth Letter Literary Award in Poetry, a Tin House alumnus, and a recipient of fellowships from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and Brooklyn Poets. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Offing, FENCE, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.
Anaya Marei
Anaya Marei calls three continents home. Her work can be found in Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, the North American Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere.
Bethany Bruno
Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author. She holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Sun, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Common, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and The Huffington Post. She won Lunch Ticket’s Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest, and the Tennessee Williams Short Story Contest. She was also a finalist for CutBank’s Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction and a Best of the Net nominee. Learn more at bethanybrunowriter.com.
Brett Glasscock
Brett Glasscock is an emerging queer writer based in Texas. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Rhetoric & Writing from the University of Texas at Austin, and he works a higher education administration job to make ends meet. "A Cold Duck in Deep Winter" is his fiction debut.
Chiagoziem Jideofor
Chiagoziem Jideofor is Queer and Igbo. Her poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in The Hopkins Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Callaloo, and elsewhere.
Claudia Monpere
Claudia Monpere's flash fiction and flash nonfiction appear in Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge, Craft, Trampset, Centaur, and elsewhere. Her poems appear in such journals as The Cincinnati Review, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and New Ohio Review. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review, and the Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine. She has stories in Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025 and Best Microfiction 2025. Her flash collection, The Periodic Family, is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press.
C. Schneider
C. Schneider lives in the Shenandoah Valley, writing fiction, non-fiction, and memoir. When she’s not writing, she’s stomping around in the Appalachian wilderness with her dog or getting lost in the stacks at a local bookstore.
Dawn Tasaka Steffler
Dawn Tasaka Steffler is an Asian-American writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow, winner of the 2023 Bath Flash Fiction Award, and has been selected for Best Small Fictions and An Anthology of Rural Stories by Writers of Color, 2025 (EastOver Press). Her stories appear in Pithead Chapel, Moon City Review, The Forge, Sundog Lit, Cutleaf, and more. Find her online at dawntasakasteffler.com and on BlueSky, Instagram, and Facebook @dawnsteffler.
Edward Sambrano III
Edward Sambrano III is a Latinx poet, critic, editor, and educator from San Antonio, Texas. They received their MFA from the University of Florida, and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Community of Writers, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Poetry editor for The Dodge, they have writing in or forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Their debut full-length poetry manuscript was named a semifinalist for Tupelo Press’s 2025 Helena Whitehill Award, and their debut chapbook manuscript was named a finalist in the 2025 Gold Line Press chapbook contest and 2025 Sixth Finch chapbook contest. They teach at the University of Michigan.
Emily Goh Yi En
Emily Goh Yi En is a writer from Malaysia. Her fiction has appeared in Milestones, a local anthology. She works as a copywriter and is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel. When she isn’t at her desk, she can be found reading or crocheting at home, usually with a warm beverage. You can find her on TikTok at @emilygetslit.
Erick Verran
Erick Verran is the author of Obiter Dicta (Punctum Books, 2021) and a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. His writing is forthcoming or appears in the Times Literary Supplement, the Hopkins Review, the American Poetry Review, the Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, the Harvard Review, the Poetry Project Newsletter, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Massachusetts Review, the Cleveland Review of Books, and other venues. He lives in Salt Lake City where he is the Book Reviews editor for Quarterly West.
Hannah Wederquist-Keller
Hannah Wederquist-Keller is a writer in Brooklyn, New York. Her fiction has appeared in The Southampton Review and New Delta Review. She received her MFA from Columbia University where she now teaches creative writing.
Jenny Molberg
Jenny Molberg’s most recent poetry collection, The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her fourth book of poems, The Medium, is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2027. Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. She is Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares at Emerson College.
Kara Dorris
Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections: HitBox (Kelsay Books 2024), Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press. She has also published five chapbooks, including prose chapbook Carnival Bound [or, please unwrap me] (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Nine Mile, DIAGRAM, Puerto del Sol, and swamp pink, among other literary journals, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Her prose has appeared in Wordgathering, Breath and Shadow, The Past Ten, Waxwing, and the anthology The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com.
Kelli Russell Agodon
Kelli Russell Agodon is a bi/queer poet and editor from the Pacific Northwest. Her fifth collection of poems, Accidental Devotions, was recently published by Copper Canyon Press. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press, teaches in Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program, and cohosts the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. Kelli lives in a small seaside town in Washington State, where she writes poems, paddleboards, and occasionally keeps company with the ghosts. Read more at www.agodon.com.
Kevin McLellan
Kevin McLellan is the author of Sky. Pond. Mouth. (Yas Press, 2024), which won the 2024 Granite State Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry; in other words you/ (The Word Works, 2023), which was a selection for the 2022 Hilary Tham Capital Collection; Ornitheology (The Word Words, 2018); Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015); and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010). He is also the author of poetry book objects, including Hemispheres (Fact-Simile Editions, 2019), which resides in the special collections including at the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona and Harvard University. Read more at https://kevmclellan.com/
Lena Crown
Lena Crown is a writer, editor, and educator from Northern California. Her work has been published in Guernica, The Rumpus, Joyland, Passages North, Gulf Coast, Narratively, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships and grants from the Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, PEN/Faulkner, the Peter Bullough Foundation. She served as the 2023-24 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Nonfiction at Colgate University, and she is now pursuing a PhD in English Literature at Rutgers University. She edits books for Autofocus, a small press, and she produces and hosts Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts.
Luisa Muradyan
Luisa Muradyan is originally from Odesa, Ukraine and is the author of American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press) which won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. She is a member of the Cheburashka Collective and additional work can be found at Best American Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, and Guernica, among others.
MaxieJaneFrazier
MaxieJane Frazier wrangles a stubborn pen from the rural reaches of the American West. She is a writer, educator, and editor. You can find her words in Complete Sentence, Gooseberry Pie, Switch, Cleaver Magazine, Booth, and other places. Maxie has an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. She co-edited the book Necessary Turbulence about the 50-year journey of women at the Air Force Academy and beyond. She founded Mighty Mule Editing. Learn more at maxiejanefrazier.com.
Piper June
Piper June is a trans visual artist, essayist, and musician currently based in northern Michigan where she lives with her two cats, her partner, and her partner's horse, Clementine, whom she oddly envies but loves very much anyways. An avid fan of bossa nova, girls who are weirdly tall, video & board games that require you to use a calculator, and lost piercings, Piper has many things to distract her from writing. She can't wait to eat a fresh heirloom tomato this July.
Prosper Ifeanyi
Prosper Ifeanyi is a writer from Lagos, Nigeria. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Transition, Plume, Poetry London, Shenandoah, Epoch, Muzzle Magazine, RHINO, among others. He has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Pushcart prizes. He is an MFA candidate in the University of Alabama’s creative writing program.
Rebecca Suzuki
Rebecca Suzuki is a Queens-based poet, writer, and translator. Her book, When My Mother Is Most Beautiful, was winner of the Loose Translation Prize and published by Hanging Loose Press in 2023. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Killing the Buddha, River Teeth, and other places. She teaches writing at Queens College, CUNY.
Rosebud Ben-Oni
Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections, including the forthcoming The Last Great Adventure is You (Alice James Books, 2027), a sequel to If This is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which won the Alice James Award. Her work has been commissioned by Paramount, the National September 11th Memorial, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Queens Arts Fund, Cafe Royal Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Writer's Chronicle, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Tin House, among others.
Ryan Collins
Ryan Collins is the author of A New American Field Guide & Song Book and several chapbooks. Recently he was a finalist in the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest, and the Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared in Apartment, The Biscuit Hill, Coma, The Laurel Review, Ninth Letter, Past Ten, Sink Review, swamp pink, and many other places. He hosts the SPECTRA Reading Series in Rock Island, Illinois, where he lives.
Victoria Jean Reynolds
Victoria Jean Reynolds holds a MFA in poetry from George Mason University. Her work has been recently featured in West Branch, Michigan Quarterly Review, Salt Hill Journal, and Muzzle, and is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner. She was selected and served as an Isle Royale artist-in-residence during the summer of 2025. She currently works as the poetry editor for Stillhouse Press and Off Season Mag. You can find her at www.victoriajeanreynolds.com and on Instagram @toreyntial.
Victoria J. Sun
Victoria J. Sun is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best Microfictions. She was a finalist for the 2024 Ploughshares Emerging Writers contest.
Victoria Punch
Victoria Punch is a voice coach and researcher. Published in Poetry, Poet Lore, Mslexia, Under the Radar, Journal of Italian Translation, The Interpreter’s House, and Gods and Monsters (Pan Macmillan 2023), and longlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2025, Victoria has chapters published in The Routledge Companion to AI and Literature (Routledge, 2024) and in Women Re-Creating Classics: Contemporary Voices (Bloomsbury, 2025). Her research is funded by SWWDTP. Found on Instagram @victoriapunch_
