Fall 2023

In the Issue

Cover Image

Joanna Anos

Cedar (2022)

Mosaic-collage, hand-printed paper

16 in. x 12 in.

© 2022 Joanna Anos

Contributors’ Notes

Rasha Abbas is a Syrian writer and journalist based in Berlin, where she is culture editor at prominent Syrian opposition media outlet Aljumhuriya.net. Her debut short story collection, Adam Hates TV [in Arabic] (al-Amana al-ʿamma li-htifaliyyat Dimashq ʿasimat al-thaqafa, 2008), was awarded a prize for emerging writers at the Damascus Capital of Arab Culture festival, and her collections The Invention of German [in Arabic] (10/11 Publishing Group, 2016) and The Gist of It [in Arabic] (Dar al-Mutawassit, 2017) have both been translated into German to critical acclaim.

Rebecca Ackermann is a writer, designer, and artist living in San Francisco. Her short fiction has appeared in Catapult, Pithead Chapel, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for The Best American Short Stories, Best of the Net, and The Best Small Fictions. Her essays have been published by MIT Technology Review, Electric Lit, and The New York Times, among other outlets. Ackermann is an alum of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the In Cahoots Residency, and she reads fiction for Split Lip and Okay Donkey magazines.

Joanna Anos is a visual artist, poet, and teacher. She earned a BA from Northwestern University in 1985 and subsequently taught undergraduate poetry writing courses as a part-time lecturer at the university. Her poems have appeared in various literary journals, including Full Circle, Luna, Denver Quarterly, TriQuarterly, and Southwest Review. Since 1992, she has been adjunct faculty in the liberal arts department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned an MFA in writing in 2001. 

Born in Bosnia, Elvis Bego fled the war there at age twelve and now lives in Copenhagen. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, The Best American Essays, Granta, New England Review, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is at work on a novel and also a story collection, which is almost complete.

Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of the memoir The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood (Counterpoint Press, 2021) and the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2018). His essays about queer and trans family life have been featured in Granta, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Belc is the memoir editor of Split Lip Magazine. He is the 2023–25 Edelstein-Keller Writer in Residence at the University of Minnesota. He considers Kensington, Philadelphia, home.

Zoë Bossiere (she/they) is a nonfiction writer and the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. She is the coeditor of The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020) and The Lyric Essay As Resistance: Truth from the Margins (Wayne State University Press, 2023). Bossiere’s debut memoir, Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir, is forthcoming from Abrams Books.

Martina Botti is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Columbia University. They write short fiction and poetry.

Jean-Luc Bouchard’s work has appeared in Catapult, Wigleaf, Vox, Epiphany, PANK, The Paris Review’s “The Daily,” and other publications. Bouchard is the winner of Split Lip Magazine’s 2019 flash fiction contest and Epiphany’s 2016 annual spring writing contest in the category of writers under thirty, was included on Wigleaf’s 2018 short-fiction longlist and was a finalist for both the 2021 and 2022 James Hurst Prize for Fiction. Bouchard is a contributor to The Onion and a graduate of Vassar College; he received his MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His work can be found at jeanlucbouchard.com.

KB Brookins is a writer, cultural worker, and artist from Texas. They are the author of How to Identify Yourself with a Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022) and Freedom House (Deep Vellum, 2023). They are a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts fellow. Follow them online at @earthtokb.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Persea Books, 2005); Apocalyptic Swing (Persea Books, 2009), a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; and Rocket Fantastic (Persea Books, 2017), winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas, the Bernard F. Conners Prize for Poetry from The Paris Review, and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation.  Calvocoressi’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals, including The Baffler, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker.

Frances Cannon is a writer, editor, educator, and artist. She is the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellow at Kenyon College. She also teaches at Burlington City Arts, edits for Green Writers Press, Onion River Press, and Maple Tree Press, and she recently served as the managing director of the Sundog Poetry Center in Vermont. Cannon has taught at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Champlain College, the Vermont Commons School, and the University of Iowa. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter Benjamin Reimagined (MIT Press, 2019), The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank (Gold Wake Press, 2017), Tropicalia (Vagabond Press, 2016), Uranian Fruit (Honeybee Press, 2016), Sagittaria, (Bottlecap Press, 2022), Predator/Play (Ethel Zine, 2020), and Fling Diction (Green Writers Press, forthcoming).

Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, critic, and educator currently based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in ARTS.BLACK, Frieze, BOMB, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. Her book Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art will be published by the Feminist Press in March 2024. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Andrew Collard is the author of Sprawl (Ohio University Press, 2023), winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He currently lives with his son in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he teaches writing at Grand Valley State University.

S. Brook Corfman is the author of the poetry collections My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites (Fordham, 2020), one of The New York Times Best Poetry Books of 2020, finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award, and winner of the Fordham University Press POL Prize chosen by Cathy Park Hong; and Luxury, Blue Lace (Autumn House, 2019), chosen by Richard Siken for the Rising Writer Prize. Read more at @sbrookcorfman and sbrookcorfman.com.

Katie Culligan is a nonfiction writer whose recent work appears in Nimrod International Journal, The Los Angeles Review, Ruminate, and others. She lives and works in East Tennessee and can be reached at katieculliganwriting.com.

Melissa Faliveno is the author of the debut essay collection Tomboyland (TOPPLE Books, 2020), named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Electric Literature and recipient of a 2021 Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Bitch, Literary Hub, Ms., Brooklyn Rail, and Prairie Schooner, among others, and in the anthology Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic (Harper Perennial, 2022).

Emily Franklin is the author of more than twenty novels and a poetry collection, Tell Me How You Got Here (Terrapin Books, 2021). Her award-winning work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Threepenny Review, and JAMA, as well as featured and read aloud on NPR and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her most recent novel, The Lioness of Boston (Godine, 2023), is based on the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner.

Erica Funkhouser’s most recent book of poetry, Post & Rail (2018), was published by Lost Horse Press. She teaches poetry writing at MIT and lives in Essex, Massachusetts.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is cherished by a wide range of communities as an oracle and a vessel of love. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of experience as a writer and facilitator, her inclusive practice finds us and brings us into the ceremonies we have always needed. Her books include Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020), Dub: Finding Ceremony (Duke University Press, 2020), M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2018), Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016) and Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016). Gumbs recently won the 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize in poetry. She was honored with a Whiting Award in nonfiction in 2022 and lauded for creating “modern fables that offer new methods of feeling.” She was also a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. In 2020–21 she was awarded a National Humanities Center Fellowship to work on her forthcoming biography, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Farrar Strauss, and Giroux, 2024). Gumbs lives in Durham, North Carolina, where she nurtures and is nurtured by a visionary creative community while scheming toward her dream of being your favorite cousin.

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Haytham El-Wardany’s Things That Can’t Be Fixed. Her translation of Ahmed Naji’s prison memoir, Rotten Evidence, will appear in McSweeney’s in October 2023, and her translation of Shady Lewis’s On the Greenwich Line will be published by Peirene in 2024.

Lydia Janbay is a multidisciplinary artist based in Southern California. She studied filmmaking at UCLA with an emphasis on cinematography. Her work explores identity, memory, and transformation.

Ever Jones (they/them), is a queer/trans writer and artist, and the author of nightsong (Sundress Publications, 2020) and the forthcoming essay collection Transanything (Northwestern University Press, 2025).  Their work can be found in North American Review, Poetry, Terrain.org, and many other outlets. Visit everjones.com to see artwork in conversation with their essay,“Transanything.”

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kelly is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. She currently lives in Iowa City, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.

Catherine Kim is a physician who started writing fiction during the pandemic. Her account of the invention of the Pap smear won the Ploughshares Emerging Fiction Writer contest this past year. She has written other fiction involving medical encounters.

Urvi Kumbhat is a PhD student in English at Princeton University. Her work has appeared in Lit Hub, The Margins, The Common, and other publications. She grew up in Calcutta.

Sandra Lim is the author of The Curious Thing (W. W. Norton, 2021), The Wilderness (W. W. Norton, 2014), and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). Her honors include the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, and the Levis Reading Prize. A professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lim lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Naomi Ling is a student-poet whose pieces often weave girlhood, heritage, and growing pains between each line. A 2023 YoungArts Finalist in Poetry and a National Student Poet Semifinalist, she has been recognized by Rattle, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and Best of the Net, among others. When Ling isn’t writing, you can find her taking nature walks, grooving to Studio Ghibli, or searching for the best boba in the area.

Cate Marvin has published four books of poems, most recently Event Horizon (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). She teaches at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and lives in Southern Maine.

Aamina Mughal is a high school student, writer, and bookseller from Seattle. She is a member of the 2022–23 TeenTix editorial staff for the TeenTix art blog and a 2022–23 Seattle Youth Poetry Fellow. Her arts writing can be found on the TeenTix blog and Encore Spotlight, and her poetry can be read in Blue Marble Review. She is a lover of Seattle and Taylor Swift.

Isabel Starr Murray is a Venezuelan American writer whose essays and short fiction have appeared in Salt Hill, The Awl, and Columbia Journal, among others. She is currently at work on a novel. To say hello or check out more of her work, visit isabelstarrmurray.com.

Namkyu Oh is a poet based in New York City. His work is featured in Midway Journal, HOBART, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow, and is currently working on his first manuscript. He hopes you write something for your friends today.

Meg Reynolds is a poet, artist, and teacher from New England. Her work has been published in a number of literary journals including Mid-American Review, RHINO, The Offing, Iterant, Prairie Schooner, and New England Review. Her second book, Does the Earth, was published in May 2023 by Harpoon Books.

Zak Salih is the author of the novel Let’s Get Back to the Party (Algonquin Books, 2021). His fiction has appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Epiphany, The Florida Review, Foglifter, and other publications. He lives in Washington, DC.

Evan Sandifer is a young queer writer from the coast of South Carolina. They are a junior high school student at Charleston School of the Arts majoring in creative writing. Their senior thesis will be published in book form in spring 2024. 

sam sax is a queer, jewish writer and educator. They’re the author of Madness (Penguin Books, 2017), winner of The National Poetry Series, and Bury It (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They’re the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry, Granta, and elsewhere. sax has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, Lambda Literary Foundation, and MacDowell, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University.

Inga Lea Schmidt lives in Pittsburgh, where she works for the city’s public library. Her poems can be found in Forklift, Ohio, Black Warrior Review, HOBART, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. Find more at ingaleaschmidt.com. 

Sreshtha Sen is a poet from Delhi. They studied Literatures in English at Delhi University, and completed their MFA at Sarah Lawrence College and their PhD at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Apogee, bitch media, Hyperallergic, Hyphen Magazine, The Margins, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Sen has previously worked at Poets & Writers, The Believer, and UNLV, and is currently an assistant professor in expository writing at NYU.

Carter Sickels is the author of the novels The Prettiest Star (Hub City Press, 2021) and The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury USA, 2012). His writing appears in various outlets, including The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Guernica, and Joyland. Sickels is an assistant professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University.

Douglas Silver’s fiction has appeared in The Sun, The Cincinnati Review, New England Review, the Chicago Tribune Printers Row Journal, Crazyhorse, Callaloo, and elsewhere. An Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient and former writer-in-residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Silver serves as executive director of Gotham Food Pantry, a nonprofit that works to make food justice a way of life throughout New York City.

Erin Elizabeth Smith (she/her) is Executive Director of Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently Down (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2020), and the Poet Laureate of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Ecotone, Crab Orchard Review, and Mid-American Review and has received support from the Academy of American Poets.

Gregory Spatz’s most recently published books are the novel Inukshuk (Bellevue Literary Press, 2012) and the collection of interconnected novellas and stories What Could Be Saved (Tupelo Press, 2019). His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Santa Monica Review, The Iowa Review, and many other journals as well as in Glimmer Train Stories. Spatz is the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship and a Washington State Book Award. He directs the MFA program for creative writing at Eastern Washington University.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, most recently Skirted: Poems (The Word Works, 2021) and the book-length lyric essay Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press, 2020). A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach, Florida. In September 2023, Autumn House Press will release her newest collection, Otherwise: Essays, selected by Lia Purpura as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Book Prize.

Madeleine Wattenberg is the author of I/O (University of Arkansas Press, 2021). Her poems also appear in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Daily, Salamander, The Rumpus, and DIAGRAM, among others. She holds a PhD in poetry from the University of Cincinnati and is an assistant professor of writing at Lakeland University.

Michael M. Weinstein’s poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, The LARB Quarterly, Narrative Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Poets.org, and elsewhere. Prior to receiving his MFA at the University of Michigan, Weinstein earned a PhD in English Literature at Harvard and served as a Fulbright scholar in Siberia. He teaches at Earlham College, in Indiana.

Dare Williams is a Queer HIV-positive poet and literary worker rooted in Southern California. A 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, he has received support and fellowships for his work from the Ashbery Home School, the Frost Place, Brooklyn Poets, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. His work has been featured in Foglifter, Frontier Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Williams is an associate poetry editor at Hooligan Magazine and an MFA student at Warren Wilson College, in North Carolina.

Theodore Worozbyt is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and the Georgia Council for the Arts. His most recent books are The Rhino Narrative (Cyberwit Press, 2023), Echo’s Recipe (Cyberwit Press, 2022), and Tuesday Marriage Death (Unsolicited Press, 2022). Worozbyt teaches at Georgia State University.

Work by Alison Zheng (she/her) has been published in or is forthcoming from Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, Copper Nickel, and The Georgia Review. Zheng is an MFA candidate in poetry and Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco.

Holly Zhou was raised in the California desert and currently resides in Brooklyn. Their collaborative poetry and art zines have been showcased at the Bluestockings Comic Fest and at the San Francisco Zine Fest. When not writing, they can be found exploring rocks by the ocean or in the mountains.