Contributors to Issue XXXII
Liane Tyrrel
Liane Tyrrel is a painter and poet. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Image Journal, Four Way Review, and diode, among others. She lives in a small house next to a large vegetable garden surrounded by forest.
Adam Clay
Adam Clay’s latest book is Circle Back (Milkweed Editions, 2024). He is Director of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University.
Afri Arebu
Afri Arebu is an Ethiopian-American from Northern California. She received a minor in Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. She likes writing all sorts of things, all of which include some sort of speculative element.
Alejandro Lucero
Alejandro Lucero’s chapbook, Sapello Son, was named the Editors’ Selection for the 2022 Frost Place Competition (Bull City Press, 2024). His latest work appears and is forthcoming in Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, The Florida Review, Passages North, RHINO, and The Southern Review. He lives in Baltimore, where he is an MFA candidate in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and is a managing editor for The Hopkins Review.
Alix Anne Shaw
Alix Anne Shaw is the author of three poetry collections: Rough Ground (Etruscan 2018), Dido in Winter (Persea 2014), and Undertow (Persea 2007), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in journals including Harvard Review, Black Warrior Review, Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, and New American Writing. She lives in Milwaukee and can be found online at alixanneshaw.com. Her visual art can be seen at alixanneshaw@carbonmade.com; you can contribute to her interactive dream archive at otherpeoplesdreams.net.
Ani King
Ani King (they/them) is a queer, gender non-compliant writer, artist, and activist from Michigan. Ani is the first place winner of the 2024 Blue Frog Annual Flash Fiction Contest, a SmokeLong Grand Micro Competition 2023 Finalist, and has had work featured in Split Lip Magazine. They can be found at aniking.net, or trying to find somewhere to quietly finish a book without any more interruptions.
Asheley Nova Navarro
Asheley Nova Navarro is a Dominican poet and translator. She is the founding editor of Sontag Mag and a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal. Her poems and poems-in-translation are published or forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review, Revista Casapaís, and Revista Aguacero, amongst others. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Carrie Lee South
Carrie Lee South earned her MFA at the University of Central Arkansas and is an editor at StoryBottle Co. Her writing has appeared in f(r)iction, Fourth Genre, Iron Horse Literary Review, Opus Comics, and elsewhere. She loves stories that keep you awake at night. When she’s not reading and writing, she’s spending time with birds. Read more at carrieleesouth.com
Cheta Igbokwe
Cheta Igbokwe is a Nigerian writer, editor, and teacher. His play Homecoming won the 2021 ANA Prize for Drama and was longlisted for the 2023 Nigeria Prize for Literature. He is currently an MFA Theatre Arts-Playwriting candidate at The University of Iowa.
Christopher Nelson
Christopher Nelson is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and five chapbooks, including Blue House, winner of a Poetry Society of America Fellowship. The recipient of the 2023–24 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, he is the founding editor of Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation. He has edited two anthologies, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora—recipient of a Midwest Book Award—and Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry. Visit christophernelson.info.
Cristi Donoso
Cristi Donoso is an Ecuadorian-American writer whose work has been published in The Journal, The Threepenny Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Shore, Lake Effect, and others. Her first collection of poetry was a finalist for the 2024 Akron Poetry Prize and the 2024 Gatewood Prize. Born in Quito, she now lives in Virginia.
Edward Sambrano III
Edward Sambrano III is a Latinx poet, critic, and educator from San Antonio, Texas. They received their MFA from the University of Florida, and have received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Their writing has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere.
Elena Mikhailik
Elena Mikhailik was born in Odesa in 1970. She graduated from Odesa State University, where she studied literature. In 1993 she emigrated to Australia and since that time resides in Sydney. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of New South Wales with a dissertation on “Varlam Shalamov: The Poetics of the ‘New Prose.’” She teaches translation at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of four collections of poetry, Ni snom ni oblakom (Not by Dream or Cloud, 2008), Ekspeditsiya (An Expedition, 2019), Ryba skazala “da” (The Fish Said Yes, 2022), and Ne s toi storony zemli (On the Wrong Side of Earth, 2023) and her poems have been published in Vozdukh, Volga, Arion, The Café Review, and other journals. Her scholarly monograph, Nezakonnaia kometa. Varlam Shalamov: opyt medlennogo chteniia (Illegal Comet: Varlam Shalamov, an Exercise in Close Reading, 2018), on the poetics and rhetoric of the Kolyma Stories, received the Andrei Bely Prize (Humanities) in 2019.
Emily Montgomery
Emily Montgomery is a writer and educator based in Richmond, Virginia. Her writing has been published in the Cimarron Review, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel based on her experience living and working in Big Sur, California. You can follow her on her Substack Field Notes where she shares her favorite poems along with short essays on cabins, parties, and other good things.
Evan Wang
王潇/Evan Wang was the first Youth Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The Journal, RHINO, and elsewhere, and has been performed at and recognized by the White House, Button Poetry, NPR, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Miami Book Fair, and Wawa Welcome America. He is the editor-in-chief of Hominum Journal and the youngest appointed member of the Montgomery County Commission on LGBTQIA+ Affairs.
Gabrielle Fernandez
Gabrielle Fernandez is an MFA Candidate and Provost Fellow at the University of Central Florida. Her fiction has appeared in The Racket Journal, Unstamatic, and SORTES. She attended the 2023 Bread Loaf Writers Conference and was a finalist for the 2024 Barry Hannah Prize for Fiction. She loves writing stories that are spooky, dark, and twisted.
Ge Fang
Ge Fang is a writer and literary translator from Xi’an, China. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Epoch, The Margin, and Sine Theta Magazine. She lives in Southern California.
Geoffrey Brock
Geoffrey Brock is the author of several collections of poems, most recently, After (Paul Dry Books, 2024); the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry (FSG, 2012); and the translator of numerous volumes of poetry, prose, and comics. His translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's Allegria (Archipelago, 2020) received ALTA's National Translation Award for Poetry. He teaches at the University of Arkansas, where he is the founding editor of the Arkansas International.
Jay Hopler
Jay Hopler (1970-2022) is the author of three books of poetry—Green Squall (2006; chosen by Louise Glück for the Yale Younger Poets Prize), The Abridged History of Rainfall (2016), and Still Life (2022). With Kimberly Johnson, he edited Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (2013). The recipient of Lannan, Whiting, and Rome Prize fellowships, he was Professor of English at University of South Florida, where he won the Florida Book Award in 2016.
Joanne Durham
Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022), and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay 2023). She has written poems with titles like “Discussing the Anthropocene with a Jellyfish" (Feral) and “To Phoebe and Anna, Who Threw the Can of Tomato Soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers” (Snapdragon), and teaches ecopoetry workshops, in the hope that poetry can still help save the planet. https://www.joannedurham.com.
Jona Whipple
Jona Whipple is a writer, librarian, and archivist in St. Louis, Missouri. Her writing has recently appeared in HerStry, CRAFT Literary, Chestnut Review, and Hawai'i Pacific Review. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Missouri-Saint Louis. Read more of her work at jonawhipple.com.
Joshua Weiner
Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish, and the editor of At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn (all from University of Chicago Press). Berlin Notebook, reporting about the refugee situation in Germany, was published by Los Angeles Review of Books in 2016. His translation of Nelly Sachs’s Flight & Metamorphosis was published by Farrar Straus Giroux in 2022. The recipient of Whiting, Rome Prize, and Guggenheim fellowships, he teaches at University of Maryland and lives in Washington D.C.
Julie Esther Fisher
Julie Esther Fisher’s poetry and stories appear or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, New World Writing, Prime Number Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Bridge Eight, On the Seawall, Sky Island Journal, Radar Poetry, The Citron Review, Litmosphere, Leon Literary Review, and elsewhere. Winner of several awards, including Grand Prize Recipient of the Stories That Need to be Told Anthology, and Sunspot Lit’s Rigel Award, she has received multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations. Her collection of linked stories, Love is a Crooked Stick, is about to go out on submission. Raised in London, she holds degrees in fiction writing and counseling psychology. Today, she lives on conserved land in Massachusetts. Visit her website at julieestherfisher.com.
Kathleen McGookey
Kathleen McGookey’s most recent book is Paper Sky (Press 53). Her work has appeared in journals including Copper Nickel, December, Epoch, Field, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, On the Seawall, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Willow Springs. It has also been featured on American Life in Poetry, Poetry Daily, SWWIM Every Day, and Verse Daily. She lives in Middleville, Michigan.
Lauren Camp
Lauren Camp serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024). A former Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park, she has won a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, Big Other Book Award, and Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. Find more at www.laurencamp.com.
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat and the author of Fablemaker (Gaudy Boy, 2025). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks, Monsoon Daughter and Unsprung, were published by Thirty West Publishing House (2022) and Newfound (2023) respectively. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is from Yangon, Myanmar.
Martha Silano
Martha Silano’s forthcoming poetry collections include Terminal Surreal (Acre Books, 2025) and Last Train to Paradise: New and Selected Poems (Saturnalia Books, 2025). Her current release is This One We Call Ours, Winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize (Lynx House Press, 2024). She is also the author of Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019), Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books, 2014), and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (Saturnalia Books, 2011), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award finalist. Martha is co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and in many anthologies, including Cascadia: A Field Guide Through Art, Ecology, and Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023), Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (Trinity University Press, 2019), and the Best American Poetry series (Norton, 2009). Awards include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize.
Martin Luther
Martin Luther (1483-1546), who was a central figure in the Protestant Reformation, is one of the towering figures of German history, having had a seismic influence on the direction of European culture, not to mention Christian theology. His “Ninety-five Theses” of October 1517 shook the Christian world. His influence is still felt, not only through the Church, but through his ideas of individual faith as a basis for a just life before divine judgment.
Matthew Tuckner
Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and is currently a PhD student in English/Creative Writing at University of Utah. His debut collection of poems, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. His chapbook, Extinction Studies, is the winner of 2023 Sixth Finch Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Adroit Journal, and Best New Poets 2023, among others.
Paola Bruni
Paola Bruni is originally from San Francisco and now lives in Aptos, California, by the sea. She began writing poetry in 2016 after a long marketing career. Pushcart nominated, her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, The Birmingham Review, Rattle, Adroit, SWWIM, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize and the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke (d. 1926), born in Prague (1875), was one of the great German language poets of the 20th century, and remains one of its most popular. In addition to The Book of Hours (1905), many of his most famous individual lyric poems appear in two volumes of New Poems (1907; 1908), and his two book-length sequences, Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus (both published in 1922), are considered crowning achievements in European poetry prior to World War II.
R.C. Ungar
R.C. Ungar lives in a 380 square foot apartment on the Upper East Side with procreating pigeons on her windowsill. She holds an M.F.A from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches Writing at Fordham and Pace University. She is currently pursuing an M.S. in Mental Health Counseling because, well, the economy.
Saba Keramati
Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from California. She is the author of Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press, 2024), selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. A winner of the Discovery Poetry Prize, her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Lit Hub, Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, AGNI, and other publications. She is the poetry editor at Sundog Lit and serves as a board member for RAWI.
Samuel Rafael Barber
Samuel Rafael Barber is 0.0000000122226% of the population, a Chicano from South Texas, and the author of the chapbook Thousands of Shredded Scraps of Paper Located across Five Landfills, That if Pieced Together Form a Message. He holds a PhD in English & Literary Arts from the University of Denver and his fiction has appeared in DIAGRAM, Normal School, Passages North, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. According to life expectancy tables, he will live another 49.8 years.
Sibelan Forrester
Sibelan Forrester is an American scholar and poet who has published translations of fiction, poetry, and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian. Her publications emphasize translation theory and practice, folklore, and Silver Age Russian poetry. She is the co-editor of Engendering Slavic Literatures (Indiana UP, 1996), Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures in an East-West Gaze (Indiana UP, 2004), Russian Silver Age Poetry: Texts and Contexts (Academic Studies Press, 2015), A Companion to Marina Tsvetaeva: Approaches to a Major Russian Poet (Brill, 2016), and Times of Mobility: Transnational Literature and Gender in Translation (Central European University Press, 2019). In her day job she teaches Russian language and literature at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
Taylor Franson-Thiel
Taylor Franson-Thiel is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet from Utah, now based in Fairfax, Virginia. She received her Master’s in creative writing from USU and is pursuing an MFA at George Mason University. Her debut collection, Bone Valley Hymnal, is forthcoming in 2025 from ELJ Editions. She is an editorial reader for Poetry Daily, the Assistant Poetry Editor for phoebe, and the EIC of BRAWL. She can be found on Twitter @TaylorFranson and at taylorfranson-thiel.com.
Thomas Renjilian
Thomas Renjilian is a queer writer from Scranton, Pennsylvania. His fiction and poetry appear in The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Electric Literature, and other publications. A graduate of Vassar College, he received his MFA from Oregon State University and is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. He edits fiction for Joyland and lives in Los Angeles.
Umberto Saba
Umberto Saba was born Umberto Poli in Trieste, in 1883, when Trieste was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was raised in an Italian Jewish community there and later owned an antiquarian bookshop called the Libreria Antica e Moderna. His major work is Il Canzoniere (The Songbook), a collection of autobiographical poems compiled over more than half a century. His various prose works include the posthumous novel Ernesto, a classic of gay Italian literature. He died in 1957.
