Fall 2025

In the Issue

Cover Image

Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers

Stimulus Picture (Are the Lights On in This Room?)

Digital drawing

8.5 x 11 in.

© 2024 Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers

Contributors’ Notes

Lilith Acadia is an assistant professor of literary studies at National Taiwan University and a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Rhetoric PhD program. She has published poetry and prose in New Orleans Review, Strange Horizons, trampset, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife and dog in Taipei’s “literature mountain” district. Find more at acadiaink.com.

janan alexandra is the author of come from (BOA Editions, 2025). A Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry and recent winner of the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, alexandra currently teaches at Indiana University and in the Monroe County Correctional Center, edits poetry at The Rumpus, and helps curate the writing-exercise Substack Mondays Are Free. janan is currently working on a book project that explores siblinghood, estrangement, and mythic family houses. 

Aishvarya Arora is the author of Mr. Time (Gold Line Press, 2026). As a poet, teaching artist, and cultural organizer, Arora has received support from the Fulbright Program, Tupelo Press’s Merrill Family Scholarship, Brew & Forge, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where they were a Poetry Coalition Fellow. Their writing is featured in or forthcoming from Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Hopkins Review, Foglifter, The Offing, and elsewhere. Originally from Queens, they currently live in Ithaca, where they teach creative writing at Cornell University and create poetry ephemera through Lavender Codex, their micro-press. Find them online at coolslug.wordpress.com.

Anna Barr is a writer from Michigan living in Houston. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Houston, where she was winner of the Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing. She is at work on her first novel.

Jill Bialosky is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Asylum (Knopf, 2020), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her new volume, Reasons for Surviving the Night: New & Selected Poems, will be published by Knopf in fall 2026. She has published critically acclaimed novels, including The Deceptions (Counterpoint, 2022), a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize, and three works of nonfiction, The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother (Washington Square Press, 2025), Poetry Will Save Your Life (Atria Books, 2017), and History of a Suicide (Atria Books, 2011), a New York Times bestseller. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, and The Best American Poetry. In 2014, Bialosky was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry. She is an executive editor and vice president at W. W. Norton & Company.

Elaine Bleakney is a poet and writer living in the mountains of Western North Carolina. A collection of her poems, Take the Exit Then Exit, is forthcoming from Understory Books in spring 2026. Her books include For Another Writing Back (Sidebrow Books, 2014), an avant-memoir in lyric prose; the chapbook 20 Paintings by Laura Owens (Poor Claudia, 2013), an ekphrastic conversation; and the tear-apart anthology Poem in Your Pocket (Abrams, 2009), which she edited.

Arthur Brown’s poems have been published in The New Criterion, Plume, Janus Head, Poetry, Agni, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, and other journals. He has published two poetry books, and his poems have won the Morton Marr and the American Literary Review poetry prizes.

Sasha Burshteyn is a poet. Her writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Paris Review Daily, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in New York City. Combining text, imagery, and installation, Chambers examines an absurdist desire to define and quantify healing, a frantic need for (and failing of) structure in times of personal crisis, and the language constructed around that need. Chambers’s public art projects Eastern Aphasia Caress (EAC) commissioned by High Line Art in partnership with New York Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, was on view November 2024 through November 2025. Chambers is a 2024 recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award. She was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2024 and a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. Chambers received her MFA in 2022 from Columbia University.

Su Cho is the author of The Symmetry of Fish (Penguin, 2022), which was selected for the 2021 National Poetry Series by Paige Lewis and featured in The New York Times Book Review and on NPR. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and anthologized in The Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, and They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets. Her most recent editorial work includes serving as guest editor at Poetry. Born in South Korea and raised in Indiana, she currently resides in Nashville, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Vanderbilt University. She is working on her second poetry collection as well as an essay collection about religion, ghosts, and growing up in the Midwest.

Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Sewanee, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, Hedgebrook, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow (Catapult, 2022), was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance (Catapult, 2025), was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Isabelle Cox-Garleanu speaks four languages: Japanese, French, English, and her favorite, Poetry. Her writing has been recognized by the Bridport Prize, the Cambridge Centre for International Research, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, YoungArts, the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest, the French American Cultural Society, and the Wednesday Club of Saint Louis, among other organizations. She is the founder of Pen Power Poetry (penpowerpoetry.org), where she organizes and leads free, fun poetry workshops to boost literacy rates in Saint Louis.

Nayereh Doosti is a storyteller and translator from Shiraz, Bushehr, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2025 Steinbeck Fellowship, the Epiphany Magazine Breakout 8 Writers Prize, the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award, a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, a GrubStreet Literary Grant, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, Bread Loaf Participant Scholarships for her fiction and translations, and a PEN Presents x International Booker Prize Foundation Grant. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Epiphany Magazine, The Common, The Massachusetts Review, and Nowruz Journal, among others. Her Persian translation of Aleksander Hemon’s The Book of My Lives was published by Goman Press in Tehran in spring 2024. Doosti holds an MFA in fiction from Boston University and is currently working on a PhD in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley.

Bryce Emley is the author of four chapbooks, including Future Elegies (winner of the 2024 Orison Chapbook Prize), Terminating Physics [a reference guide] (Alternating Current Press, 2024), and A Brief Family History of Drowning (Sonder Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Sonder Press Chapbook Prize. A 2017 Narrative 30 Below 30 poet and a recipient of awards and residencies from Aspen Autumn Words, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Glen Workshop, the Wesleyan Writers Conference, Sixfold, and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, Emley works as a content writer in New Mexico. 

Lily Felsenthal is a writer in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from UC Riverside and has received fellowships and residencies from The Bergman Estate on Fårö, Monson Arts, Community of Writers, and others. She is at work on a collection of short stories.

Julia Fiedorczuk (b. 1975) is winner of the 2018 Wisława Szymborska prize for her collection Psalms. She was nominated for the Nike Literary Award in 2016 for her novel Weightless as well as for the Silesius Wrocław Poetry Award (and several other awards, including two nominations fo the Julian Tuwim Literary Award for lifetime achievement). In 2005, she received the Hubert Burda Prize for Young Poets for her poems, which were published in the Austrian magazine manuskripte. One of her poems has appeared on the Tube in London as part of the Poems on the Underground project. Two volumes of her poetry — Oxygen and Psalms — are available in English (published by Zephyr, 2017, and University of Wisconsin Press, 2023, respectively). The House of Orion is her third novel, following Under the Sun, both set in eastern Poland. Fiedorczuk lives in Warsaw, where she teaches American poetry and environmental humanities at the University of Warsaw. She is the creator of the experimental School of Ecopoetics at Warsaw’s Institute of Reportage.

Jennifer Galvão is a writer from New York State. She was a recipient of the Kenyon Review Fellowship in Fiction and now serves as the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her short fiction has been published in The Rumpus, The Cincinnati Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and her first novel, Maria, Maria, is forthcoming from Random House in 2027. 

C. S. Giscombe lives in Berkeley. His most recent books are Negro Mountain (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and — in collaboration with the book artist Judith Margolis — Train Music (Omnidawn, 2021). His work has won for him an American Book Award and the Carl Sandburg Prize. His books in progress include Railroad Sense and Medicine Book / The Book of Monsters. Giscombe is a long-distance cyclist.

Joshua Henkin is the author of four novels, most recently Morningside Heights (Pantheon Books, 2021). He is at work on a collection of linked stories that take place in different neighborhoods in and around New York City. He directs and teaches in the MFA Program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College.

Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award for poetry. She teaches at Marshall University.

Xinyue Huang is a bilingual poet who writes in English and Chinese and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at New York University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2023 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize.

Lesley Jenike’s first collection of essays, The City of Toys, will be published as part of The Ohio State University Press’s 21st Century Essays series in March 2026. Her individual essays have been published in West Branch, Image, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, and many other journals, and her essay “The Souls of Song,” originally published in the Bennington Review, was named a Notable Essay in 2023’s Best American Essays. Jenike has been awarded Individual Excellence Awards by the Ohio Arts Council in poetry, creative nonfiction, and criticism, as well as fellowships and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. She is Professor of Writing, Literature, and Philosophy at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and their two children.

Aboutorab Khosravi (بارتوبا یورسخ in Persian) is an award-winning Iranian writer known for his surrealist short stories and novels, including The Book of Scribes (2000). A prominent member of Houshang Gol-shiri’s Jong-e Isfahan Circle, Khosravi is the recipient of the Jalal Al-e Ahmad Literary Award, the Houshang Golshiri Award, and the Iranian National Book Award. He lives in Shiraz.

Lynne Jensen Lampe’s poetry appears in Stone Circle Review, Okay Donkey, One, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, THRUSH, and other journals, as well as anthologies in the US, UK, and Germany. Lampe’s debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), an Eric Hoffer Book Award winner and finalist for the Phillip H. McMath Award and the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, is concerned with motherhood, mental illness, and antisemitism.

Małgorzata Lebda is a Polish poet, fiction writer, mountaineer, ultramarathon runner, and photographer. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including the award-winning volumes Queen Cells (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) and Dreams of the Uckermärkers (2018). Her volume Mer de Glace (forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026), from which the poems in this issue were selected, received the prestigious Wisława Szymborska Award. Her prose debut, Voracious (Linden Editions, 2025), won the Empik Discovery Award and the Wielkopolska Readers’ Choice Award (the literary award of Greater Poland). Translation rights to the novel were sold in numerous countries shortly after its release, and work on a film adaptation is underway. Lebda holds a PhD in literary theory and audiovisual arts and teaches in the creative writing department at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including Czech, Danish, English, Italian, Spanish, and Ukrainian. She lives in a small town in the Beskid Mountains, where she grew up.

Ryan Li is a student based in New York City. Their work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and is forthcoming in Vellichor Literary. When they’re not writing, they can be found playing volleyball or roaming the CVS candy section.

Daisy Elizeth Magallanes (she/they) is the proud Chicana daughter of migrant parents, Emerita and Ramiro Magallanes, from the sacred Caxcan land of Tlaltenango, Zacatecas. She is a Pushcart-nominated writer, translator, and educator whose work has been featured in Acid Verse, Brevity, Black Warrior Review, Brooklyn & Boyle, Huizache, and Hypertext Review. Their poetry has been internationally exhibited in CDMX. They are the managing editor at Huizache.

Arro Mandell grew up in and lives in New York City. Their work is published in Southeast Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Georgia Review, Sixth Finch, and The Missouri Review.

Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Believer, Harper’s, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is the author of The Age of Loneliness, published by Graywolf in 2024. She teaches creative writing at the University at Buffalo.

Dara T. Mathis is an essayist and journalist who has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Women’s National Basketball Association, and other media outlets. In 2024, she was awarded the American Mosaic Journalism Prize. Her writing has also received support from MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Cameron McGill is a poet and songwriter from Champaign, Illinois, and the author of Meridians (Willow Springs Books, 2020) and In the Night Field (Augury Books, 2021). In 2022, he released his seventh studio album, The Widow Cameron. McGill teaches in the MFA program at Western Colorado University and at Washington State University, where he codirects the Visiting Writers Series. “Loaner” is from a new manuscript titled VIRGA. McGill’s work is forthcoming in Blackbird and Poetry Ireland Review.

Leah Mensch is an Arab Jewish writer based in Tucson, where they received an MFA from the University of Arizona. They are at work on a book about ghost archives and the late writer Kate Braverman. Find Mensch and their work at leahmensch.com.

Chloe Yelena Miller is the author of Perforated (2026) and Viable (2021), both published by Lily Poetry Review Books. Together with Shasta Grant, she cofounded Brown Bag Lit, an online writing community. Miller writes and teaches writing in Washington, DC. Learn more at chloeyelenamiller.com.

Dan O’Brien is a poet, playwright, and nonfiction writer. His most recent poetry collections are Flying on Easter and Other Poems (Poetry London Editions, 2024) and Survivor’s Notebook (Acre Books, 2023). His playwriting has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and two PEN America Literary Awards. He lives in Los Angeles.

ZZ Packer is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Hutchins Center Fellowship for African and African American Research at Harvard. She teaches at Vanderbilt University.

Donald Platt’s ninth book of poetry, Tender Voyeur, was published by Grid Books in fall 2025. His poems have appeared recently in The Atlantic, Barrow Street, The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, Fence, Rattle, Five Points, The Adroit Journal, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Lana Turner, The New Criterion, The Nation, and The Yale Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2025. Platt teaches poetry writing at Purdue University.

Mira Rosenthal is an American poet and translator of Polish-language writers such as Tomasz Różycki, Małgorzata Lebda, and Krystyna Dąbrowska. Her work has been nominated twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize as well as for the Derek Walcott Prize, the National Translation Award, and the Oxford–Weidenfeld Prize. Her translation of Różycki’s To the Letter won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Found in Translation Award for the best book translation from Polish into English in 2024. She is the author of Territorial (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), a Pitt Poetry Series selection and finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year award, and The Local World (The Kent State University Press, 2011), winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. Rosenthal’s honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Northern California Book Award, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Jan Michalski Foundation.

Sam Simas (he/him) is a queer Luso-American writer and translator. His work has been published in New England Review, Southern Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, and other literary magazines. A PhD student in fiction at the University of Cincinnati, Simas is hard at work on a novel.

Jane Yeh is the author of three poetry collections, Discipline (2019), The Ninjas (2012), and Marabou (2005), all published by Carcanet Press in the UK.

Anna Zaranko is a translator of Polish fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent work includes Władysław Reymont’s epic The Peasants (Penguin Books, 2024) for which she received the Found in Translation Award. She translated Kornel Filipowicz’s novella, The Memoir of an Anti-Hero (Penguin Modern Classics, 2020) for which she also received the FIT Award, and is currently working on his short stories, as well as on Julia Fiedorczuk’s novel The House of Orion.

Qiaorui (Sherry) Zhang is a first-generation immigrant living in Massachusetts. She is a Scholastic Art and Writing Awards medalist, and her work has been recognized by The New York Times. When she is not writing, Zhang plays the flute and enjoys eating ramen.