Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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Alixen Pham

Alixen Pham is a Best New Poets 2022 finalist and a Best of the Net–nominated poet, writer, and artist published in Tahoma Literary Review, Cultural Daily, Apogee Journal, Rust & Moth, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. She facilitates poetry workshops with The Poetry Salon, co-organizes the city of Long Beach’s Festival of Asian American & Pacific Islander Books, and is a coeditor of the 2024 Periplus Collective anthology. Pham is a 2022 City of West Hollywood Artist Grantee, a 2023 Periplus Fellow, a 2022 alumna of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program, and a recipient of a 2016 PEN Center/City of West Hollywood Fiction & Nonfiction Scholarship. She is currently working on her first collection of hybrid artwork and visual poems.

Forough Farrokhzad Folio

Summer 2025

I Dream of a White House

By Alixen Pham

For Forough Farrokhzad and my fatherIn my dream, her camera follows me through a house that is black.The hallway is narrow and long; the walls refuse to speakeven when I […]

Forough Farrokhzad Folio

Summer 2025

Old as the Bible

By Alixen Pham

Inspired by Forough Farrokhzad’s “The House Is Black”Once we lived in a black house,the blackness known only to usand not the people around us. Despitethe light inside the house, we […]