Spring 2025

In the Issue

Cover Image

Alia Ali	

Jade of Jaipur, JADE series (2024)

Pigment print on French-produced Canson Baryta Photographique Baryta Matte Paper, 310 gram, with UV laminate, mounted on aluminum Dibond in custom-built wooden frame hand upholstered by the artist in Rajasthani chandhiri silk hand printed with 24 karat gold using traditional wood block methods and embroidered with gold zari thread.	
	
93.5 x 58 x 5 in.		

© 2024 Alia Ali

Contributors’ Notes

Hussain Ahmed is the author of Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile (Black Ocean Press, 2022) and Blue Exodus (Orison Books, 2024). He won the 2024 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize and the 2024 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest. Ahmed’s poems have been featured in Poetry magazine, The Nation, American Poetry Review, A Public Space, and elsewhere. A Nigerian poet and environmentalist, Ahmed holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and is completing a doctoral degree at the University of Cincinnati.

Alia Ali (b. 1985, Austria) is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multimedia artist whose work explores cultural binaries and confronts conflicted notions surrounding gender, politics, media, and citizenship. Working between language, photography, sculpture, video, and installation, Alia’s art addresses the politicization of the body, histories of colonization, imperialism, sexism, and racism, through projects that take pattern as their primary motif. Ali is a graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in political science and studio art, and the California Institute of the Arts, where she studied photography and media, and she is a Nikon Ambassador. Her work has integrated the permanent collections of The British Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (MoCP), the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), and the Princeton University Art Museum, among others. Her monument al-Falak was funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and now sits at the Arab American National Museum. Her work has been featured in publications including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Architectural Digest, and the Financial Times. Ali works and lives in and between New Orleans, Paris, Marrakech, and Jaipur. 

Lisa Ampleman is the author of three full-length books of poetry—most recently Mom in Space (2024) and Romances (2020), both published by LSU Press—and a chapbook in the Wick Poetry Center series. Her work has appeared in journals including 32 Poems, Colorado Review, Cortland Review, Ecotone, Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, and Southern Review. She lives in Cincinnati and is managing editor of The Cincinnati Review and poetry series editor at Acre Books.

A writer and translator of French and Italian, Katie Shireen Assef grew up in Minnesota and lives in Marseille. Her translation of Valérie Mréjen’s novel Black Forest (Deep Vellum, 2019) was a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year. Assef’s short translations and writing have appeared in publications such as 3:AM Magazine, Blue Arrangements, Asymptote, The Dial, SARKA Journal, and elsewhere. 

Irene Bakola is a critic and essayist based in Athens. Informed by her studies in theater and oriented toward postcolonial and queer readings, she writes about performance and film not through an individuated lens but as the synthesis of cultural, historical, and philosophical discourse. Bakola’s aim is to thread together texts and images that prove themselves assemblages of art in praxis. She holds a BA in theater studies, frequently participates in film festivals, and is cohost of the forthcoming podcast This Film Exists. Find more of her work at irenebakola.com.

Michael Bazzett is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Echo Chamber (Milkweed Editions, 2021) and Cloudwatcher (Copper Canyon), winner of the Stern Prize from the American Poetry Review, forthcoming in spring 2026. His verse translation of the creation epic of the Maya, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed, 2018), was named by The New York Times as one of the best poetry books of 2018. His work has recently appeared in in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Granta, The Nation, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, The Poetry Review, and The Sun.

Les Bohem is a songwriter whose work has been recorded by Emmylou Harris, Randy Travis, Johnette Napolitano, and Alvin and the Chipmunks, among others. He is the writer of screenplays for such films as Dante’s Peak and the television miniseries Steven Spielberg Presents Taken, as well as the author of novels Junk, a New York Times Notable Book (Audible, 2019), and Jive (Audible, 2021). He has won Emmy, Television Critics, and Saturn awards and has been nominated for both Golden Globe and Writers Guild awards. His short stories and poetry have appeared in print and online in such places as Fabula Argentea, BigCityLit, and Catamaran. Bohem lives in Los Angeles with his wife, their son, and their cats. 

Winner of the 2023 Tenth Gate Prize and a 2023 Alma Book Award, Nicole Callihan has two recent poetry collections: chigger ridge (The Word Works, 2024) and SLIP (Saturnalia, 2025). Her other books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin, 2023), the 2019 novella The Couples (Mason Jar Press), and a forthcoming chapbook, griefbeing, from Lily Poetry Review Books. Find more at nicolecallihan.com.

DeeSoul Carson is a poet and educator from San Diego, currently residing in Brooklyn. His work is featured in Muzzle Magazine, AGNI, The Offing, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Running from Streetlights (2020), is a meditation on Blackness in America during the Summer of Racial Reckoning. A Stanford University alum, Carson has received fellowships from the New York University MFA program, the Watering Hole, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His debut full-length poetry collection, The Laughing Barrel, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in spring 2027. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com. 

Wah-Ming Chang is a writer and bookmaker based in Brooklyn. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from Ucross Foundation, Art Omi, and the Saltonstall Foundation, and has received support three times from the New York Foundation for the Arts for her fiction. Her writing has appeared in Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, and Works & Days, among other publications. Hand, Held, Chang’s artist book about her father’s art practice, is forthcoming from Bored Wolves (2025). An iteration of Hand, Held was on view in the 39 Footnotes group exhibition at Accent Sisters (New York, 2025). Eclipse, excerpted here, is her work in progress. 

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian American poet and the author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and four chapbooks. She is the winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize and the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry and was longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Her second full-length collection, Wildness Before Something Sublime, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in fall 2025. Chatti’s honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere. She is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program.

Anna Chung is a writer from northern Virginia living in Brooklyn. She is a graduate of Princeton University, where she studied English and creative writing. “TV Buddha” is her first published story.

Corinne Cordasco-Pak (she/her) holds an MFA from Randolph College. Most recently, her work has appeared in Quarter Notes, Oyster River Pages, and Identity Theory, and she has received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. Codasco-Pak is a former fiction editor of Revolute, a member of the Wildcat Writing Group, and an interview contributor to Write or Die Magazine. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, their toddler, and two rescue dogs. Find her online @CECordasco. 

Sophia Dahlin is a poet in Berkeley. She leads generative poetry workshops and teaches youth creative writing, and is one of several curators of the Friday-night poetry readings at Tamarack, a community space in Oakland. With Jacob Kahn, she edits a small chapbook press called Eyelet. Her first book, Natch, was released in 2020 by City Lights Books; her second book, Glove Money, is forthcoming from Nightboat in fall 2025.

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw (UGA Press, 2017), won the National Poetry Series. Her second book, through a small ghost (UGA Press, 2020), won the Georgia Poetry Prize and her third collection is I, Divided (LSU Press, 2023). Dingman is a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta, and her current work draws on research supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist, and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review, among other publications. A Pushcart Prize winner, Elkamel was also awarded Southeast Review’s 2023 Gearhart Poetry Prize, the Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2022 Laurence Goldstein Prize in Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and Redivider’s 2021 Blurred Genre Contest. She is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

Claire Foster is a writer, bookseller, and literary translator from French. Her writing and translations have appeared in The Hopkins Review, Public Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her translation of Valérie Manteau’s novel The Furrow (winner of the 2018 Prix Renaudot) is forthcoming from Invisible in 2026. Born and raised in Ohio, Foster lives and works in Toronto. 

Adam Giannelli is the author of Tremulous Hinge (University of Iowa Press, 2017), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the translator of a selection of prose poems by Marosa di Giorgio, Diadem (BOA Editions, 2012). His writing has appeared in the New England Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He is a person who stutters.

Haesong Kwon, originally from Incheon, Korea, lives in Tsaile, Arizona. He works at Diné College, a tribal college of the Navajo Nation, and is the author of the poetry collection The People’s Field (Bull City Press, 2019). His writing has recently appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Prairie Schooner, and Poem-a-Day.

Victoria Winter Hill was raised in Mississippi and lives in New York City. “Cousin Hayden” is her first published work.

Peter LaBerge is the author of the chapbooks Makeshift Cathedral (YesYes Books, 2017) and Hook (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). His poetry has received a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, and New England Review. LaBerge received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his MFA from New York University, where he studied as a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow. He is the founder and editor in chief of The Adroit Journal and the founder of Ellipsis Writing. For more, visit peterlaberge.com. 

Carl Landauer taught history at Yale, Stanford, and McGill universities. He is currently a contributing editor for Poetry Flash and a visiting scholar with UC Berkeley’s Institute for South Asia Studies. Landauer’s poetry has appeared in Poetry Flash and Exacting Clam, and his writing on the history of culture has appeared in Beat Scene, Salmagundi, Confrontation, The American Scholar, German Studies Review, and Renaissance Quarterly.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Mothersalt (Alice James Books, 2025) and Isako Isako (Alice James Books, 2018), a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, the gold Nautilus Book Award for Poetry, the National Indie Excellence Award, and the Maine Literary Award. She is also the author of the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year (Bateau Press, 2022). Her work has received the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Contest prize, and she is a Kundiman Fellow and founding member of The Ruby SF, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists. Malhotra lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches poetry and writes about sacred music and the interior life.

Clint Martin’s creative work has appeared in various places such as The Talon Review, Motherwell, The Write Launch, and Sycamore Review. Two of his essays have earned honorable mention in contests held by Writer’s Digest. Martin earned his MFA from the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University, and he teaches in the writing department at Maharishi International University. Besides writing and walking the dog, Martin enjoys identifying the birds in the backyard and Transcendental Meditation. 

Jenny Molberg’s third poetry collection, The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. A National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Molberg is Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares at Emerson College. 

Ellene Glenn Moore is an American writer living in Zürich. She is the author of How Blood Works (Kent State University Press, 2021), winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and Passage: An Essay (Orison Books, 2025), winner of the Orison Chapbook Prize. Ellene’s poetry, prose, and translation work have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Find her at elleneglennmoore.com.

Simone Muench is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship and the author of seven full-length books, including Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande, 2005; winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize), Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014), and The Under Hum (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), cowritten with Jackie K. White. Her recent collaborative poems are forthcoming in North American Review, Missouri Review, swamp pink, Pleiades, Phoebe, and elsewhere. 

Tamar Nachmany is a fiction writer and technologist from New York City. Her writing has appeared in X-R-A-Y and Electric Literature. Nachmany is currently a fiction MFA student and Truman Capote Fellow at Brooklyn College. Find her on X at @tamarnachmany and at tamarnachmany.com.

Idra Novey’s most recent novel, Take What You Need (Viking, 2023), was selected as one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023. Her first novel, Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2017), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, and her second novel, Those Who Knew (Viking, 2018), was a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages, and she has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Novey teaches fiction at Princeton University. 

Sevindj Nurkiyazova is a writer and documentary photographer from Kyrgyzstan. She holds an MFA in long-form journalism from New York University.

Torrey Paquette is a writer and documentary film producer. His work has appeared in The Drift, The Columbia Review, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and on PBS. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their daughter.

Jake Phillips is a queer poet based in Rhode Island. He is a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal and was awarded a 2024 Make Art Grant by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. His poetry has been published and is forthcoming in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, The Penn Review, Salt Hill, swamp pink, and elsewhere.

Til Punto is a writer from Mexico City and New York City who likes circles.

Manasa Reddy is a writer living in Chicago. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She is a recipient of the Susan Bernard Prize in Fiction, the Jack Galef Fellowship, the Deena Davidson Friedman Scholarship, and a 2024 Tin House Scholarship.

Jasmine Reid is a trans: Atlantic poet for the people. She is the author of Interlocutor Goddess (forthcoming from Autumn House Press, 2025), winner of the 2024 CAAPP Book Prize selected by Aracelis Girmay, and Deus ex Nigrum (Honeysuckle Press, 2020). An MFA graduate of Cornell University and recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Jerome Foundation, and Poets House, Reid was born and raised in Baltimore and is currently based in Brooklyn. She is an assistant professor at New York University.

Ed Roberson is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Aquarium Works (Nion Editions, 2022), MPH and Other Road Poems (Verge Books, 2021), and Asked What Has Changed (Wesleyan University Press, 2021), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His varied career has included work in Pittsburgh steel mills, in an advertising graphics agency, as a limnologist’s assistant, and as a Rutgers University administrator. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the recipient of many honors, Roberson lives in Chicago, where he has taught at Northwestern University, Columbia College Chicago, and the University of Chicago.

Kelsey Ronan grew up in Flint, Michigan, and lives in Metro Detroit. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, Michigan Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is the author of the novel Chevy in the Hole (Holt, 2022), which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Michigan Notable Book.

Bertrand Schefer was born in 1972 in Paris and is the author of seven books, including Francesca Woodman (2023) and Disparitions (2020, in which “Avec Sans Soleil” originally appeared), both published by Éditions P.O.L. Schefer is also the translator of Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone into French (Éditions Allia, 2003). 

Nathalie Schmid is an award-winning Swiss writer. She is author of several books, including Gletscherstück (Wolfbach Verlag, 2019), from which “News” and “Juniper” are excerpted, and Ein anderes Wort für einverstanden (Gans Verlag, 2025). After graduating from high school, Schmid traveled through North and Central America, attended a mountain farm school, studied at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig, and trained as an adult educator and secondary-school teacher. Today, she writes poetry and prose, teaches German as a foreign language, and leads writing courses. Schmid lives in Baden, Switzerland.

Jen Silverman (they/them) is a poet, playwright, and novelist whose books include the novels There’s Going to Be Trouble (Random House, 2024) and We Play Ourselves (Random House, 2022) and the chapbook Bath (Driftwood Press, 2022, selected by Traci Brimhall). Her play The Roommate recently made its Broadway debut with Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone. Silverman’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Easton Smith’s work has been published in The Rumpus, Pinch, Columbia Journal, the Sonora Review, KR Online, and elsewhere.  Smith lives in Western Massachusetts with his partner, his friends, and three beautiful chickens.

Selena Spier is a graduate of Columbia University’s MA/EdM program in counseling psychology. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in EPOCH, Palette Poetry, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City, where she works at the nonprofit Brooklyn Poets and cocurates the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series.

Jackie K. White is the coauthor, with Simone Muench, of Hex & Howl (Black Lawrence Press, 2021; Society of Midland Authors Honoree) and The Under Hum (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Her collaborations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Ecotone, Salamander, Pleiades, The Journal, Hopkins Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, and others.

Felicia Zamora’s eight books of poetry include Murmuration Archives (Akrilica Series, Noemi Press, 2026), Interstitial Archaeology (University of Wisconsin Press Wisconsin Poetry Series, 2025), I Always Carry My Bones (winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and Ohioana Book Award in Poetry), and Body of Render (winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award). Zamora has won the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the C.P. Cavafy Prize, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and the Wabash Prize, and has received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale, and Tin House. Her poems appear in Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, Ecotone, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Orion, Poetry magazine, West Branch, and others. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and a poetry editor for Colorado Review.

Winniebell Xinyu Zong is a Chinese poet and the 2024–25 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, swamp pink, and The Southern Review, among others. Zong has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, Best of Net, and AWP’s Intro Journals Project. Winner of the Meridians Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award and the Urban Justice Labs Mellon Fellowship, Zong taught creative writing as a lecturer at Cornell University, where she received her MFA.