Summer 2024

VOL. XLVI, No. 3

In this Issue

Cover Image

Camille Seaman	
Bergy Bits Jammed Up in	
Errera Channel (V), Antarctic 	
Peninsula (December 2007)

Contributors’ Notes

Jessica Abughattas is the author of Strip (University of Arkansas, 2020), winner of the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Her short poetry film, Dinner Party, premiered at Mizna’s Twin Cities Arab Film Festival in 2021. Her poems appear in Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. 

Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016). His next collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2026.

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.

Taneum Bambrick is a skunk enthusiast and the author of Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press, 2022) and Vantage (American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, 2019). Their work can be found in The New Yorker, The Nation, and American Poetry Review, and their essay “Sturgeon” was selected for the 2017 Booth Nonfiction Prize. Bambrick lives in Los Angeles and is a Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she studies poetry and nonfiction. She is currently working on a memoir. 

Susan Barba is the editor of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide (Abrams Books, 2022), winner of the 2023 American Horticultural Society Book Award, and the author of Fair Sun (Godine, 2017) and geode (Black Sparrow Press, 2020), a finalist for the New England Book Awards and the Massachusetts Book Awards. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and her poems have been translated into Armenian, German, Romanian, and Swedish. She works as a senior editor for the New York Review Books.

Ariana Benson is a Southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize. Benson is a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. Her poems appear in Poetry, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Through her writing, Benson strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.

Sumita Chakraborty is a poet and a scholar. She is the author of the poetry collection Arrow (Alice James Books/Carcanet Press, 2020) her current projects are a scholarly monograph titled Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene (under advance contract with University of Minnesota Press) and a second poetry collection, titled The B-Sides of the Golden Record. Chakraborty is assistant professor of English and creative writing at North Carolina State University.

Kathy Chao is a writer and data scientist based in Queens, New York. Her fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Strange Horizons, and The Georgia Review. She was awarded second prize in the 2023 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition. Chao is currently working on a novel about globalization and political intrigue in the fifteenth-century Timurid Empire.

Lee Conell is the author of a novel, The Party Upstairs (Penguin Press, 2020), which received the Wallant Award, and a story collection, Subcortical (Johns Hopkins, 2017), which received the Story Prize Spotlight Award. She is currently a Mandel Institute of Cultural Leadership fellow, and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in prose and a U.S.-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship. Conell’s work has been supported by Yaddo, Millay Arts, Willapa Bay AiR, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Charles Douthat’s first book of poems, Blue for Oceans (New Haven Review Books, 2010), won the 2011 PEN New England Award. His new book of poems, Again, is forthcoming from Unbound Edition Press. Born, raised, and educated in California, Douthat has lived in Connecticut for many years.

Saddiq Dzukogi is a Nigerian poet and assistant professor of English at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), selected by Carolyn Forché as winner of the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the 2022 Julie Suk Award. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, PEN America, and Ebedi International Residency. His poetry is featured in various magazines including Poetry, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Poetry London, Guernica, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and Prairie Schooner. Dzukogi lives and writes in Starkville, Mississippi.

Martín Espada’s latest book of poems is Floaters (W. W. Norton, 2021), a winner of the 2021 National Book Award. His next collection, Jailbreak of Sparrows, is forthcoming from Knopf in spring 2025. Espada has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Courtney Flerlage received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia. Her work has appeared in Narrative, Image, The Adroit Journal, Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Jacksonville, Florida.

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of four collections of poems, including Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2021) and Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon Poetry, 2012), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Frank’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.

Alexander Fredman is a writer from Miami. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Post Road, Heavy Feather Review, and X-R-A-Y. He lives in New York, where he teaches at The City College of New York.

Forrest Gander, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. A translator /writer with degrees in geology and literature, he has received the Pulitzer Prize, Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, Guggenheim, and US Artists Foundations. His book Twice Alive (New Directions, 2021)focuses on human and ecological intimacies. In October 2024, New Directions will bring out Gander’s long poem on the desert, Mojave Ghost.

Wes Holtermann’s fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Holtermann has received fellowships and support from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. He is a gardener, living and working in Berkeley, California.

Kelly Houle’s poetry has appeared in CALYX, Connecticut River Review, Crab Orchard Review, Radar Poetry, Sequestrum, and other publications. In 2023 Houle was a finalist for the Arts & Letters Unclassifiable Contest and a winner of the Vivian Shipley Award from the Connecticut Poetry Society. In 2019 she received a Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She is also a painter.

Vida James is Puerto Rican by way of New York City, a social worker by trade. She is a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and a 2023–24 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her writing has been supported by Periplus, Storyknife, Tin House, Bread Loaf, MASS MoCA, the St. Botolph Club Foundation, and VONA. James’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Witness, Story, New England Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, where she is at work on her novel-in-stories, a polyphonic exploration of the carceral state.

Farah Kader is based in New York City. She received the 2017 Palestinian Youth Movement’s Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship and a 2019 Hopwood Graduate Award for poetry. Farah’s work has been published in Mizna, Orion, Electric Literature, and Narrative. Her most recent published work is in the anthology We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage (Persea Books, 2023), edited by Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck.

Jimin Kang is a Seoul-born, Hong Kong–raised, Oxford-based writer. Her fiction has been published in Joyland, The London Magazine, The Oxonian Review, and Wasafiri, where she was shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. A contributing editor at The Oxonian Review, where she edits a column on Hong Kong writing, Kang is completing her first novel.

Tobi Kassim was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and has lived in the United States since 2003. His poems have been published in The Volta, The Brooklyn Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere. His chapbook Dear Sly Stone (2023) was published by Spiral Editions. Kassim is an Undocupoets fellow, the recipient of a Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and an assistant poetry editor for West Branch. He works at New Haven Free Public Library.

noam keim is a trauma worker, medicine maker, and flâneur freak living in Philadelphia. Their nonfiction writing weaves themes close to their heart: reverence for the land, healing, queerness, colonialism, plants, and abolition. They are a 2022 Lambda Fellow, a 2023 Roots. Wounds. Words. Fellow, a 2023 Tin House Fellow, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Contributor in 2023, and a 2023 Periplus Fellow. Their first essay collection, The Land Is Holy, won the Megaphone Prize, judged by Hanif Abdurraqib, and came out via Radix Media in May 2024. Connect with keim on X and Instagram @thelandisholy or at the landisholy.com.

Sabrina Helen Li is a writer from New Jersey. Her short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, The Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among others. Her writing and research have received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, The Center for Fiction, and Princeton University. Li is currently writing a short story collection and a novel.

James McCorkle is the author of three collections of poetry: Evidences (American Poetry Review–Honickman First Book Prize, 2004), The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press, 2014), and In Time (Etruscan Press, 2020). He lives in Western New York and codirects the Africana Studies Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Philip Metres has written twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and Sand Opera (Alice James Books, 2015). Winner of Guggenheim and Lannan fellowships and three Arab American Book Awards, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University. He believes a just peace for Palestine and Israel is possible and requires our participation.

Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya is the author of The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos (Two Dollar Radio, 2023). His work has appeared in The Offing, Electric Literature, Triangle House Review, Sonora Review, DIAGRAM, and Joyland. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route (Alice James Books, 2022) and two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013) and Contradictions in the Design (Alice James Books, 2016). He is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Wilfredo Pascual’s personal essays in English and Filipino have won the Philippines’ Palanca Award multiple times. His essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and listed as Notable in The Best American Essays 2016. Born in the Philippines in 1967, Pascual, in his mid-twenties, moved to Thailand, where he lived for twelve years. Later he moved to the United States, where he was based while he continued to work abroad for international nonprofits in Asia and Africa. While living in Thailand, Pascual traveled to the US and attended writing workshops at New York University and the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley. He was also a Bread Loaf Fellow in nonfiction. Pascual’s essays and poems have appeared in Salt Hill Journal, Your Impossible Voice, Fourth Genre, december, Queer Southeast Asia, Philippines Free Press, Philippine Studies, and Likhaan. He lives with his husband, Jack, in San Francisco. Find more at http://www.personalwilli.com. 

Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (University of Georgia Press, 2011), Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James Books, 2018), and the forthcoming All the Possible Bodies (Alice James Books, September 2025). Pollock has received several honors for his work, including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the Bin Ramke Prize for Poetry, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. He directs the MFA program in creative writing at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.

Jasmine Reid is a twice-trans poet of flowers. She is the author of Deus Ex Nigrum, winner of the 2018 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest, selected by Danez Smith. An MFA graduate of Cornell University and recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and Poets House, Reid is the author of work that has been published or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Indiana Review, and TriQuarterly, among others. She was born and raised in Baltimore, and is currently based in Brooklyn, where she is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute. Find her at reidjasmine.com.

Lee Ann Roripaugh (she/they) is a bi-racial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which was named a Best Book of 2019 by the New York Public Library, selected as a poetry finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, cited as a Society of Midland Authors 2020 Honoree in Poetry, and named one of the 50 Must-Read Poetry Collections in 2019 by Book Riot. Her collection of fiction, Reveal Codes, was selected as winner of the Moon City Short Fiction Award and was published by Moon City Press in late 2023, and their chapbook, #stringofbeads, a winner in the Diode Editions Chapbook Contest, was released by Diode Press in 2023. She was named winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and she was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The South Dakota State poet laureate from 2015 to 2019, Roripaugh is a professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where they serve as editor in chief of South Dakota Review.

Peter Schmidt teaches literature at Swarthmore College. Several of his courses are cross-listed with Environmental Studies or Black Studies. He has published books and articles on William Carlos Williams, Southern US fiction, and other topics. He is currently working on a book on contemporary ecopoetry, which seeks to diversify the canon of essential poets and poems, broaden the ways we read them, and deepen ecopoetry’s roots in the burgeoning field of environmental humanities.

Camille Seaman’s photographs have been published in National Geographic Magazine, TIME, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and Outside, among many other outlets, and received awards including a National Geographic Award and the Critical Mass Top Monograph Award. A TED Senior Fellow, Stanford Knight Fellow, and Cinereach Filmmaker in Residence Fellow, Seaman strongly believes in using photography to convey that humans are not separate from nature.

Simon Shieh is the author of Master (Sarabande Books, 2023), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His poems and essays are published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Guernica, and The Yale Review, among others, and have been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Evie Shockley is the author, most recently, of suddenly we (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has received the Shelley Memorial Award and the Lannan Literary Award in recognition of the body of her work. She teaches in Black literary and cultural studies, Black feminist thought, and contemporary poetry and poetics at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English.

Mohan Sikka is a writer and artist based part-time in New York City. He daylights as a management consultant and coach for NGOs globally. Sikka’s fiction, articles, and essays have been published in The O. Henry Prize Stories and Delhi Noir, as well as in One Story,  National Geographic Traveller India, Nonprofit Quarterly, and Open. His story “The Railway Aunty” was adapted into the film B.A. Pass and won Best Story at the 2014 Bollywood Screen Awards. Follow Sikka on Instagram @mo_brooklyn.

Mary Szybist is the author of Incarnadine (Graywolf Press, 2013), winner of the 2013 National Book Award. She teaches at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

A recipient of support from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Leah Tieger (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the University of Southern California’s literature and creative writing program. While Tieger was a 2023 Wrigley Institute fellow, her ecopoetic practice led her to a qualitative study of communities surrounding the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Related work by Tieger appears in Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, Blackbird, and Tupelo Quarterly.

Anthony Tognazzini’s recent fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, StoryQuarterly, Guernica, and TriQuarterly, among other journals, as well as on NPR’s Selected Shorts. His collection of short fiction and hybrid works, I Carry a Hammer in My Pocket for Occasions Such As These (2007), is available from BOA Editions. Tognazzini has received fellowships from Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and he was the winner of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. He currently lives in Ohio, where he teaches in Kent State University’s undergraduate and Northeast Ohio MFA creative writing programs.

MaKshya Tolbert (she/they) recently found her way back to Virginia, where she chairs the Charlottesville Tree Commission, serves as guest curator for the 2024 New City Arts Fellowship season, and is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Virginia. Her recent poems can be found in West Branch magazine’s fall 2023 “Slow Violence” folio and the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, with prose and poetry forthcoming from Campfire Stories and Nightboat Books. In her free time, MaKshya is elsewhere—a place Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls “that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.”

Vincent Tolentino’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, AAWW’s The Margins, and elsewhere. Tolentino holds degrees from Yale University and New York University, and he has received fellowships from the Disquiet International Literary Program and Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU, among others. He was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York City.

Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in creative writing at NYU and is currently a PhD candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Utah. His debut collection of poems, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2025.

Franke Varca received his MFA in poetry from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and cofounded the University of Houston’s undergraduate literary journal Glass Mountain and its conference for emerging writers, Boldface. Some recognitions include a Discovery/92Y Poetry Prize and a finalist designation from the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Among other places, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Poet Lore, and Southern Humanities Review.

Analía Villagra’s short fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Ecotone, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Villagra is a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipient. Her writing has also been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (where she was a Tennessee Williams Scholar), the Tin House Workshop, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. An assistant fiction editor at Split Lip Magazine, she lives in Oakland.

Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters John A. Robert Johnson Award for First Book of Poetry and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Guernica, and AGNI, among others.

Paige Webb is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati. Their work can be found in Blackbird, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review Online, Poets.org, Poetry Northwest, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, and West Branch, and in their chapbook Tussle (dancing girl press, 2019).

Phillip B. Williams is author of the novel Ours (Viking, 2024) and the full-length poetry collections Mutiny (Penguin Poets, 2021), winner of the 2022 American Book Award, and Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Whiting Award, and a Lambda Literary Award, all in 2017. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. A nominee for an NAACP Image Award in poetry, Williams is the recipient of fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. He serves as a faculty member in the MFA programs of New York University and Randolph College.

Alicia Wright has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Denver, where she is a PhD candidate in English and literary arts. Her poetry appears in The Paris Review, Peripheries, and jubilat, among others. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, and is the editor of Annulet.