Summer 2023

In the Issue

Cover Image

Tawny Chatmon

The Awakening / Covered (2017)

Photography, Photo-Manipulation, Montage

36 x 24 in.

© 2017 Tawny Chatmon

Contributors’ Notes

Rachel Abramowitz is the author of The Birthday of the Dead, winner of the 2021 Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize from Conduit Books, the chapbooks The Puzzle Monster (Factory Hollow Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and Gut Lust (Burnside Review Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Burnside Review Press Book Contest.

David Baker is the author or editor of many books of poetry and criticism. His latest collection of poems, Whale Fall, was published by W. W. Norton in July 2022. Baker taught at Kenyon 1983–84 and began a long association with The Kenyon Review then, including service for more than twenty-five years as poetry editor. He continues to curate the magazine’s annual environmental feature, “Nature’s Nature.” Baker is emeritus professor of English at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, where he offers two classes each spring semester.

Kimrey Anna Batts is originally from East Tennessee. Following graduation from the University of Michigan, she moved to Ecuador, where she lived for many years. She currently resides in Mexico, where she works as a freelance translator and dutiful servant to five cats and two dogs. Her translations of Latin American poetry and fiction have appeared in a variety of literary journals, and her full-length publications include translations of works by Santiago Vizcaíno, Antonio Ramos Revillas, and César Eduardo Carrión.

Emma Binder received their MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and they were the 2020–21 Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. In 2022, they received the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction and the Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Narrative, The Texas Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Originally from Wisconsin, Binder lives in Western Massachusetts, where they are working on a collection of short stories about queerness, rural life, and survival.

Fleda Brown’s tenth collection of poems, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (Ohio University Press, 2021) won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize from Ohio University Press and is a Foreword INDIES finalist. Brown’s earlier poems can be found in The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, chosen by Ted Kooser for his University of Nebraska series, 2017. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award for Poetry. Brown has also twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series Competition. Her latest book is Mortality, with Friends (Wayne State University Press, 2021), a Midwest Book Award winner in memoir from the Midwest Independent Publishers Association.

Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she volunteers at several animal sanctuaries. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of poems about these animals, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and Brown’s essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, coauthored with Jessica Jacobs, with whom Brown teaches generative writing sessions as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative. She is also on the faculty of the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program.

Cecily Carver was born in the small mountain town of Rossland, British Columbia. Her theater writing has appeared most recently in VAN magazine. She is a founding member of Against the Grain Theatre, an award-winning experimental opera company based in Toronto. She writes essays on books, culture, and music for her newsletter, The Amateur, and is also working on a novel. Carver lives in Seattle.

Victoria Chang’s forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World, will be published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her latest book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022) and her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

Tawny Chatmon (b. 1979, Tokyo, Japan) is a photography-based artist residing in Maryland. A Black woman and mother of three Black children, she is motivated by “leaving something important behind” to the world her children will grow up in while creating imagery that celebrates and honors the beauty of Black childhood and familial bonds while at times addressing the absence and exclusion of the Black body in Western art. Chatmon was among the eight African American artists featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined, curated by Myrtis Bedolla of Galerie Myrtis presented in the Personal Structures art fair.

Charlie Decker works as an arborist in Denver.

Carlina Duan is the author of two poetry collections, I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017) and Alien Miss (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021). Her poems have been published in POETRY, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, Narrative Magazine, and The Rumpus among other places. She is currently a PhD candidate in the University of Michigan’s Joint Program in English and Education, and serves as the poetry editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.

Liza Katz Duncan is the author of Given (Autumn House Press, 2023), which won the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize. Her poems have appeared in About Place Journal, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, National Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She has received support for her work from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, Poets & Writers, and the Tucson Festival of Books.

Bernard Ferguson is a Bahamian poet, essayist, and NEA fellow. Their work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, VICE News, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. They are working on a book, The Climate Sirens (Graywolf, 2024), about the centuries of far-flung injustices and inequalities at local and global scales that have come to cause the climate crisis.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Maybe-Bird (The Song Cave, 2022), and served as the associate editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2020). She is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, she lives in San Francisco.

Kabi Hartman is Senior Teaching Professor of English and Director of the Academic Advising Program at Franklin & Marshall College. Her writing has appeared in The Millions (2011), The Point (2016), Carve (2020), Porter House Review (2021), Fourth Genre (2023), and other literary journals. She lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Terrance Hayes is the author of several collections of poetry. He is a professor at NYU.

Lisa Hosokawa is a game writer, narrative designer, and editor based in Osaka. They’ve edited the publications of internationally beloved artists, universities, and indie and AAA game studios. An International Game Developers Association Foundation grantee and an artist-in-residence at Socially Distant Art, they write about belonging and resistance in hostile worlds.

fahima ife creates with an ensemble of alien species and contributes to studies of (black) sound and light. She is a poet, producer, performer, mystic, essayist, and editor. She is associate professor of black studies and performance studies in the department of Creative/CRES at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Joanna Klink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.

Margaret LaFleur lives, teaches, and writes in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Find more of her work at margaretlafleur.com.

Melanie Lefkowitz is an award-winning journalist whose writing has appeared in Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the New York Post, among other publications. In 2014 she won first prize in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers contest; her winning story, “The Mango,” appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of that magazine. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books in various genres, most recently  The Necropastoral, a critical work on Decadent ecopoetics, in the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series, and Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat, 2020), a poetry collection for which she won an Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a founding editor of the international press Action Books and teaches at Notre Dame.

Tyler Mills (she/her) is the author of City Scattered (Tupelo Press, 2022), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award; Hawk Parable (University of Akron Press, 2019), winner of the Akron Poetry Prize; Tongue Lyre (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award; and coauthor with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions, 2021), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. Her memoir, The Bomb Cloud, received a literature grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC and is forthcoming from Unbound Edition Press in 2024. Mills lived and taught in New Mexico four years, most recently serving as the Jim and Linda Burke Visiting Scholar for the Doel Reed Center in Taos, and now teaches for the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She lives in Brooklyn.

Jordan Nakamura is a writer and photographer born and raised on Oahu, Hawaii. His work and interviews have appeared in New England Review, Gulf Coast, The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere. He lives in South Central Los Angeles.

Vi Khi Nao is the author of seven poetry collections and of the short story collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (University of Alabama Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest, and the novel Swimming with Dead Stars (University of Alabama Press, 2022). Her poetry collection The Old Philosopher (Nightboat Books, 2016) won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her book Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche was published by 11:11 Press in spring 2023. Nao was the fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. Find her at www.vikhinao.com.

Susannah Nevison is the author of Teratology (Persea Books, 2015) and Lethal Theater (Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press, 2019). With Molly McCully Brown, she is coauthor of In the Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020). She has received the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize from Persea Books and The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize from OSU/The Journal, among other awards and fellowships. Her essays and poems have appeared in Tin House, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Currently she teaches at Sweet Briar College, where she is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing.

Cindy Juyoung Ok teaches undergraduate creative writing. Her forthcoming poetry collection Ward Toward (Yale University Press, 2024) won the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

Leslie Jill Patterson teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University, where she serves as editor of Iron Horse Literary Review. Her prose has appeared in Texas Monthly, Gulf Coast, River Teeth, Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Rumpus, Hotel Amerika, and Hunger Mountain, among others. Her awards include an Embrey Human Rights Fellowship, a Soros Justice Fellowship granted by the Open Society Foundations, the Richard J. Margolis Award for Nonfiction Writers of Social Justice Journalism, and a Pushcart Prize. Since 2009, Patterson has worked as the case storyteller for public defenders representing indigent men and women charged with capital murder and facing the death penalty across the American South.

Maggie Queeney is the author In Kind, winner of the 2022 Iowa Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the 2019 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, the Ruth Stone Scholarship, and Individual Artists Program Grants from the City of Chicago in 2019 and 2022. Her most recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Guernica, The Missouri Review, and The American Poetry Review. She reads and writes in Chicago.

Emily Schulten is the author of The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Rest in Black Haw (New Plains Press, 2022). Her work appears in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Tin House, among others. Currently, she is a professor of English and creative writing at The College of the Florida Keys.

Jennifer Steil is the author of Exile Music (Viking, 2020), winner of the Grand Prize for a published book in the Eyelands Book Awards 2020 and of the International Book Awards in the Multicultural and Historical novel categories. Exile Music also was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Lesbian Fiction Award and the 2020 Bisexual Book Award. Steil’s previous books include The Ambassador’s Wife (Doubleday, 2015), which won the 2013 William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Best Novel award and the 2016 Phillip H. McMath Post Publication Book Award, and the memoir The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (Broadway Books, 2010). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New Orleans Review, Saranac Review, World Policy Journal, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Mystery Weekly Magazine, The Week, Time, Life, Peauxdunque Review, The Washington Times, British Vogue, Die Welt, the New York Post, The Rumpus, and Mystery Weekly and has been broadcast on Raidió Teilifís Éireann, France 24 (English), and CBS News Radio.

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include A Wake with Nine Shades (Texas Review Press, 2019) and Her Read, A Graphic Poem (Texas Review Press, 2021), recipient of Foreword Review’s Best of the Indie Press bronze prize in poetry. Recent work appears in The Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Plume, RHINO, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. An interdisciplinary artist and independent scholar, she lectures at the University of Michigan in the Department of English and in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design. She is a 2023–24 Beinecke Fellow at Yale and at work on a biography of C. D. Wright.

A bicultural writer from Vienna, Sophie Strohmeier has published one novel in German, Küss mich, Libussa (edition a, 2013). Her English-language essays and fiction have appeared in Apofenie and the Missouri Review, and on WQXR.org. She lives in New York City.

Arthur Sze’s latest book is The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). He is the recipient of a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation and also of the 2021 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. His expanded edition of translations of Chinese poetry, The Silk Dragon II, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in the spring of 2024.

Meredith Talusan (she/they) has published a memoir, contributed to ten books, and published stories and essays in more than twenty publications. She received a Creative Capital Award and a MacDowell Fellowship for fiction in 2023, and has previously received awards from GLAAD, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association. For more about her work, visit mtalusan.com.

Sydney Tammarine’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, B O D Y, LIT Magazine, and other journals. Her “Blue Hour” was selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2021. She received her MFA in creative writing from Hollins University and is Associate Professor of English at New Mexico Military Institute. She is currently at work on her first collection of essays.

A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and six critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary awards. His seventh book, Poem Bitten by a Man, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in fall 2023. After more than a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, Teare is now an associate professor of poetry at the University of Virginia. He lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Lynne Thompson was the 2021–22 Los Angeles Poet Laureate and received a Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets in 2022. She is the author of three collections of poetry; her latest collection, Blue on a Blue Palette, will be published by BOA Editions in spring 2024. Thompson sits on the boards of Scripps College, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her recent work appears in The Common and Copper Nickel, among other publications.

Heather Treseler is the author of Parturition (Southword, 2020), which received the Munster Literature Centre’s chapbook award in Ireland and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems appear in The Irish Times, Harvard Review, The American Scholar, The Cincinnati Review, PN Review, and The Iowa Review, and her essays about poetry appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, and eight books about contemporary and modernist poetry. In 2019 she received the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize from The Missouri Review for “The Lucie Odes,” and in 2021, Spencer Reece chose her poem “Wildlife” for the Yeats Poetry Prize. Treseler is professor of English at Worcester State University and a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center.

Santiago Vizcaíno is an Ecuadorian writer who has published poetry, short stories, novels, and essays. He currently directs the Publications Center at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador. In 2020 and 2021 he curated the Quito International Book Fair, and in 2022 he served as juror for the Casa de las Américas Award in Cuba. These translations are taken from his most recent publication, a poetry collection titled El viento a contrapelo de mi sombra (The wind against my shadow).

Cynthia R. Wallace is Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. Her creative and critical writing has appeared in African American Review, Arizona Quarterly, Commonweal, Contemporary Literature, Literature and Theology, the Ploughshares blog, Psaltery & Lyre, Religion & Literature, Sojourners, The Windhover, and elsewhere. Her book Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering was published in 2016 by Columbia University Press.

Wang Jiaxin is one of the leading poets of China. He is the author of seven books of poetry, and ten books of critical essays, and is the leading translator of Paul Celan into Chinese. He recently received the first Ai Qing Poetry Award (2022). His book of poetry in English translation is Darkening Mirror: New and Selected Poems, translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell, with a foreword by Robert Hass (Tebot Bach, 2016).

Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry, including Quotient (Tinderbox Editions, 2022); I Always Carry My Bones (University of Iowa Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; Body of Render (Red Hen Press, 2020), Benjamin Saltman Award winner; and Of Form & Gather (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner. She has received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. She won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review, the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Guernica, The Missouri Review, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, West Branch, and others. Zamora is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.