Contributors to Issue XXXV
B.A. Van Sise FRGS
B.A. Van Sise FRGS is a curator, author and photographic artist with three monographs: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass with Mary-Louise Parker, Invited to Life with Mayim Bialik, and On the National Language with DeLanna Studi. He is a two-time winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal, a two-time Prix de la Photographie Paris winner, an Anthem Award winner, a finalist for the Rattle and Kenyon Poetry Prizes, and a winner of the the INDIES Book of the Year and Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction.
Alex Minagar
Alex Minagar was born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana. He currently studies psychology at Tufts University and almost always writes about school.
Amulya Tadimety
Amulya Tadimety is a writer and editor living in New York City. She is an MA candidate in NYU’s Interdisciplinary Studies graduate program and edits academic books. Her most recent work can be found in the Connecticut River Review and the Journal of Experimental Practice. She has always lived very close to rivers.
Brett Biebel
Brett Biebel is the author of three collections of flash fiction, 48 Blitz, Winter Dance Party, and Gridlock; and A Mason & Dixon Companion. His work has appeared in many magazines and been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. He lives, writes, and teaches in Illinois.
eliza lambert
eliza lambert is a queer Chicago-based writer. they used to believe the word love looked like a falling body. but now they know it’s just the shape of someone asleep, sitting up.
Emma Bolden
Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis (Soft Skull), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma, medi(t)ations, and Maleficae. Her work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, the New England Review, The Seneca Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Shenandoah. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an editor of Screen Door Review.
Francisco Márquez
Francisco Márquez is a poet from Maracaibo, Venezuela, born in Miami, Florida. His work has been featured in Poetry London, Narrative, the Yale Review, The Slowdown podcast, and Best American Poetry, among other publications. His work has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Tin House, MacDowell, the UCross Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among other institutions. He works and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Gabriela Valencia
Gabriela Valencia is a poet and essayist. Her work appears in Image Journal and The Los Angeles Review among others. She has twice been named a finalist for the Orison Books Best Spiritual Literature Award in Nonfiction in 2025 and 2024, among other recognitions. She received her MFA in Poetry from Boston University, where she was awarded a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. She currently lives in Nebraska with her husband Josh and their two herding dogs, Rainer and Zola. For more, visit gabrielavalencia.net.
grace (ge) gilbert
grace (ge) gilbert (they/them) is a poet, writer and collage artist. they received their MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022, where they now teach. they are the author of Holly (YesYes Books, 2026), a hybrid image and text book about the 1976 murder of their paternal grandmother, as well as three chapbooks: the closeted diaries: essays (Porkbelly Press, 2022), NOTIFICATIONS IN THE DARK (Antenna Books, 2023), and today is an unholy suite (Barrelhouse, 2024). their work can be found in 2023’s Best of the Net Anthology, the Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Adroit, and elsewhere. They teach hybrid collage and poetics courses at Brooklyn Poets, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and other institutions.
Jade Ferrante
Jade Ferrante is a writer, student at Ithaca College, and diarist based in Long Island, New York. Her work has appeared in The Oakland Arts Review and Stillwater and she is the inaugural winner of the Louise Cannon Poetry Prize. Jade believes in ghosts, but not aliens.
Jessie Petrow-Cohen
Jessie Petrow-Cohen is a Pushcart Prize winning writer. She was selected by Melissa Febos as the winner of The Kenyon Review’s Short Nonfiction Contest and by Brian Turner as the winner of the Indiana Review’s Half K Prize. She was also the finalist for the 2025 Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction and the American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Brevity, Bellingham Review, The Common, Fugue, Lumina, and elsewhere. She is an amateur flying trapeze artist and cares deeply about her friends.
John Paul Martinez
John Paul Martinez is a Filipino poet writing out of the Midwest. His debut chapbook, Alternatives for Succulents, is forthcoming from Bull City Press in 2026. Their work has appeared in Nashville Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, The Margins, The Slowdown podcast, and elsewhere. He earned a degree in Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Liane Tyrrel
Liane Tyrrel is a visual artist and poet. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Image Journal, and Four Way Review, among others. She lives in a small house on a dirt road in New Hampshire with her partner and rescue dog.
Lizzy Ke Polishan
Lizzy Ke Polishan is a poet and novelist. Her recent poems appear in or are forthcoming from Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, Salt Hill, New Orleans Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Epoch, The Banshee, Black Warrior Review, The Shore, SWWIM, and others. She is the current Managing Editor of River & South Review. She serves as a poetry reader for Psaltery & Lyre and as a Guest Editor at Palette Poetry. Her first collection of poetry, A Little Book of Blooms, was published in 2020. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband.
Mary Zhou
Mary Zhou is a multimedia artist from Orange County, California, exploring Chinese ancestral spirituality and queer diasporic identity. They are the author of chapbook cave mouth tongue loose (The Head & The Hand Press, 2024) and their work is forthcoming or published in Michigan Quarterly Review, swamp pink, The Offing, and Fence. Mary has received fellowships and support from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Tin House, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and VONA/Voices.
Matt Donovan
Matt Donovan is the author most recently of We Are Not Where We Are (Bull City Press, 2025) which was co-authored with Jenny George, and The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA 2022). He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Donovan serves as the director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.
Meg Thompson
Meg Thompson lives and writes in Ohio. She teaches humor writing and poetry workshops for the non-profit organization Literary Cleveland. Her work is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal and The Atticus Review, and has appeared in Best of the Net, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and The Sun. Her most recent book of poems is Eruption Sequence (Another New Calligraphy). When it comes to prestigious literary awards, she has applied to them. Find her on Instagram @wry_breads.
Nathan Erwin
Nathan Erwin is a poet and land-based organizer from the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. He currently operates with the Pocasset Wampanoag tribe as they fight for land, food, and seed sovereignty. His writing has recently appeared in the North American Review, Boulevard, The Journal, Gulf Coast, and Ninth Letter. His organizing and his poetry are conversant, and so he writes about foodways, myths, medicine, and wanting.
Nicky Beer
Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Her other books, The Octopus Game (2015) and The Diminishing House (2010) both received the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, Ragdale, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.
Rachel Morgan
Rachel Morgan is the author of the chapbook, Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey (Final Thursday Press), and her work recently appears in Best New Poets 2024, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Shenandoah. She is the winner of the 2020 Fineline contest, and her work has been supported by the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Currently she teaches at the University of Northern Iowa, is an Editor for the North American Review, and a 2024-2025 Iowa Artist Fellow.
Rodrigo Toscano
Rodrigo Toscano is a poet living in New Orleans. He is the author of twelve books of poetry. His latest three books are WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA (Omnidawn, 2025, a National Poetry Series finalist), The Cut Point (Counterpath, 2023), The Charm & The Dread (Fence, 2022). Forthcoming is Salvage Nation: 100 sonnets (Winter Editions, Fall 2026). His other books include In Range, Explosion Rocks Springfield, Deck of Deeds, Collapsible Poetics Theater, To Leveling Swerve, Platform, Partisans, and The Disparities. His poetry has appeared in over 20 anthologies, including Best American Poetry (2023, 2004), and Best American Experimental Poetry (BAX). His Collapsible Poetics Theater was a National Poetry Series selection. His poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Poetry Magazine, The Bennington Review, The Kenyon Review, The Harvard Advocate, Georgia Review, Yale Review, Conduit, and Fence. rodrigotoscano.com.
Sara Ryan
Sara Ryan is the author of I Thought There Would Be More Wolves (University of Alaska Press) and the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press) and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (The Cupboard Pamphlet). Her work has been published in Brevity, The Kenyon Review, The Common, and elsewhere. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Wesleyan University.
Senka Milutinović
Senka Milutinović was born in 1999 in Belgrade, Serbia, and is a writer, researcher, and designer based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The format of their work varies anywhere from organizing nomadic reading clubs and experimental radio shows, to interactive printed and digital matter. They’re concerned with queering narrative forms to imagine alternatives to the oppressive forces we are living under. No matter which storytelling medium they are immersed in, they always aim to bridge the gap between the personal and political. Their research-focused work has been published in the Amsterdam Museum Journal and featured in Research for People (Who Think) They Would Rather Create. While their flash fiction stories My Father, the Fiction and I am here but were published with Sarmad Magazine. Currently they are preoccupied with analyzing their dreams, worrying about immigration policies and marveling at the gift that is friendship.
Shivani Mutneja
Shivani Mutneja is a writer from Ghaziabad, though she feels most at home at Istanbul airport. During her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, she made her way back to poetry from prose with a poem about a red cardinal amongst bluejays. Her work has appeared in Nether Magazine, Two Serious Ladies, Jellyfish Review, and decomp Journal, among others. She is also the Assistant Non-fiction Editor at The Bombay Literary Magazine. She continues to be in transit between cities, continents, and genres.
Stephanie Choi
Stephanie Choi’s poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Electric Literature, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, The Lengest Neoi, was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2023 Iowa Poetry Prize and published in 2024. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University.
Victoria María Castells
Victoria María Castells is a Cuban American writer and middle school English teacher from Miami, Florida. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese University and a B.A. in English from Duke University. Her first collection of poetry, The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes, was published through the University of Notre Dame Press. Her work has also appeared in The Florida Review, West Branch, Notre Dame Review, The Journal, and elsewhere.
Winslow Schmelling
Winslow Schmelling is a writer and educator from the Sonoran Desert. As an ex-professional-pizza-maker and current content marketer, she feels lucky to teach creative writing to undergraduates in the desert where she grew up. Her creative work is published or forthcoming in Blue Mesa Review, LitHub, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. Get in touch at winslowschmelling.com.
Wolf Baker
Wolf Baker is a junior at Stanford University with roots in lower Manhattan. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in The Offing, The Pinch, Pleiades, Tar River Poetry, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere, and her prose has been published in Hobart.
Zoë Brigley
Zoë Brigley is a Welsh-American writer, editor, and educator. All of her three poetry collections have been UK Poetry Book Society Recommendations, most recently Hand & Skull (2019). She received an Eric Gregory Award for outstanding British poets under 30, was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize for the best international writers under 40, and was commended in the Forward Prize. She is the Editor of Poetry Wales, Poetry Co-editor at Seren Books, and a Founding Editor of Modron Magazine. She teaches at the Ohio State University. In 2024, she was selected for the Hay Festival’s Writers at Work fellowship to develop her fiction. She is partially deaf and identifies as neurodivergent.
