Spring 2024

In this Issue

Cover Image

Detail of City Inside Her from the Architects of the Future portfolio (2014). 

Woodblock and screenprint. 

28.5 x 37 in.

Collection of The Gund at Kenyon College

Gift of David Horvitz ‘74 and Francie Bishop Good

Contributors’ Notes

Nick Almeida’s stories and essays have appeared in Pleiades, Southeast Review, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Almeida, a PhD candidate at the University of Houston, holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where he edited Bat City Review. His chapbook, Masterplans, was selected by Steve Almond as grand prize winner of the inaugural Masters Review Chapbook Open in fiction, and is available now. 

Beth Bachmann is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and author of three books in the Pitt Poetry Series: Temper, winner of the Association of Writers & Writing Program’s Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and Claremont Graduate University’s Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Do Not Rise, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; and CEASE, winner of the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry (fall 2018). She lives in New York City.

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017), which received the William Carlos Williams Award in 2018. Her work has recently appeared in The Best American Poetry 2022, The American Poetry Review, A Public Space, The Yale Review, and Poetry, and she has been awarded the Levinson Prize by the Poetry Foundation and fellowships by MacDowell and Hewnoaks Artist Residency. She is the poetry editor of New England Review and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. Her new book, An Authentic Life, is forthcoming this fall from Copper Canyon Press.

Lauren Cassani Davis is a writer and teacher based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, No Contact, and Monkeybicycle.

JD Debris is the author of The Scorpion’s Question Mark (Autumn House Press, 2023) selected by Cornelius Eady for the 2022 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from New York University, DISQUIET, and Mass Poetry, as well as awards from Narrative and Ploughshares. He is currently at work on a novel.

Reid Dempsey is a literary translator from Tucson, Arizona. He holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa, where he was coeditor of Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation.

Emily Doyle’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares (spring 2024), The Sun (winter 2023), Epiphany (winter 2023), and elsewhere. Doyle was a finalist in the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest and for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize and has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Foundation Participation Scholarship and the Abraham Lincoln Polonsky Endowed Award. She earned her MFA from UC Riverside and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their bearded dragon.

Lindsey Drager is the author of four books of prose, all published by Dzanc (The Sorrow Proper, 2015; The Lost Daughter Collective, 2017; The Archive of Alternate Endings, 2019; and The Avian Hourglass, forthcoming in 2024). These books have variously won a Shirley Jackson Award, been finalists for two Lambda Literary Awards, and are currently being translated into Spanish and Italian. A 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient in prose and winner of the 2022 Bard Fiction Prize, Drager is currently an assistant professor at the University of Utah.

Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer from California. The author of the chapbook I could die today and live again (Game Over Books, 2024), she organizes with the Radius of Arab American Writers and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She is calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day.

Eliza Gilbert is an undergraduate at Vassar College. Her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, and others. She received the 2023 Iowa Review Award for Poetry as well as LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction (2023). She was born and raised in New York City.

Sylee Gore won the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in fiction. The Centre for Print Research commissioned the hybrid work “Four-Channel Memory” for World Book Night. She was a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship finalist in 2023.

Kimberly Grey is author of three books, most recently A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing: Essays (Persea Books, 2023). She teaches at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Chengru He / 부琤흇 is the author of a hybrid memoir, I Would Vanish into Its Stronger Existence (Wet Cement Press, forthcoming) and a book of poetry, MO墩N (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, forthcoming); and the translator of two books from the Chinese. Her writing, translation, and multimedia work appear or are forthcoming in Alchemy: A Journal of Translation, Ancient Exchanges, Defunct, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, Speculative Nonfiction, Tint Journal, Unlikely Stories Mark V, Watershed Review, and elsewhere. A former ESL teacher in Shanghai, she is currently a PhD student in poetry at the University of Utah. Find out more at chengruhe.net.

Christine Imperial is a poet and writer based in Oakland, California. She is currently a PhD student in cultural studies at UC Davis, where she was the recipient of a Deans’ Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Her debut book, Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues (Mad Creek Books, 2023), was awarded the 2021 Gournay Prize. She holds an MFA from CalArts, where she was a 2020–21 REEF Fellow. Her work has been published in Poets & Writers, Inverted Syntax, TLDTD, and Poetry, among others.

Fatima Jafar is a Pakistani writer based in New York City. She received her MFA in poetry from Emerson College. Her writing has appeared in The Cortland Review, Wasafiri, The Drift, and more.

Peter M. Kazon is a writer who, along with his husband and their golden retriever, divides his time between Provincetown and Boston. Kazon retired from practicing law in 2017 so he could pursue writing full time—one of the best decisions of his life. He is currently finishing a group of interconnected short stories that focus on how the changes in American life over the last fifty years affected the lives and relationships of a single family. Kazon’s work has been published in the Beloit Fiction Journal (2022), Catamaran Literary Reader (2023), and Boston Review (2023). In 2022, he was selected to attend Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Charlotte Keathley is a writer living in Chicago. Her work will appear in upcoming editions of Back to the Lake: A Reader & Guide for Writers (W. W. Norton, 2024) and The Norton Sampler: Short Essays for Composition (W. W. Norton, 2024).

Mary Kuryla’s collection Freak Weather Stories (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017) received the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared and are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, The Baffler, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere. They have received the Pushcart Prize and the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award. Her 2022 novel, Away to Stay (Regal House Publishing), was called “a delightfully quirky debut” by Publishers Weekly. Kuryla is currently at work on a collection of short stories.

Phoebe Peter Oathout is a post-MFA fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Her stories have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, Apogee, Bayou Magazine, and Southeast Review. Prior to moving to Baltimore, she worked in financial aid at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. You can reach her at phoebeoathout.com.

Tega Oghenechovwen is a Nigerian writer. His work has appeared in Joyland, Ruminate Magazine, The Rumpus, Longreads, and elsewhere. He is currently in the MFA program at the University of Maryland, studying fiction.

Maya C. Popa is the author of Wound Is the Origin of Wonder (W. W. Norton, 2022) and American Faith (Sarabande Books, 2019), which won the North American Book Award. She is the Poetry Reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at New York University and elsewhere. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, and was previously a Clarendon scholar at Oxford University. Her weekly newsletter, Poetry Today, is a Substack Featured Publication.

Saša Stanišic is a Bosnian German writer and recipient of the German Book Prize. His best-selling novels have been translated into more than thirty languages; in 2022, he appeared on the longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty books of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman, 2023) and Art in Time (Nightboat, 2021). Previous volumes have won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series and have been finalists for the National Book Award and twice for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A translator of French poetry, prose, and art criticism, she divides her time between France and the US.

Alex Tretbar’s manuscript “Kansas City Gothic” was selected as a finalist for the 2023 Wolfson Poetry Chapbook Prize, and his work appears or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Full Stop, Iterant, Meridian, phoebe, Pithead Chapel, Poetry Northwest, SAND, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. As a Writers for Readers Fellow with the Kansas City Public Library, Tretbar teaches free writing classes to the community. 

珙鴦 / Evan Wang is the inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and a 2024 National YoungArts Winner in poetry. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal, RHINO, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere, and has been featured at and recognized by Button Poetry, the Miami Book Fair, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Contemporary, and Wawa Welcome America. He is working on a chapbook manuscript titled “Slow Burn.”

Marcus Wicker is the author of Silencer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) — winner of the Society of Midland Authors award — and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), selected by D. A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. A 2023–24 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, his honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Cave Canem. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and Poetry.

Drew Zeiba’s criticism, fiction, and journalism have appeared recently in New York Magazine, Interview, Art Papers, Spike, and Fence. Zeiba has led creative workshops and has exhibited solo and collaborative installations and videos across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Currently, he is executive editor of Document Journal and a contributing editor to the architecture publication PIN–UP. His first novel — on sex, death, and maps — is forthcoming. 

Emily Ziffer is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut, whose work has appeared in Indiana Review and Hobart. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures at Yale University.