Summer 2025

In the Issue

Cover Image

Krista Franklin

Library of Love (Cabinet) (2022)

© 2022 Krista Franklin

Contributors’ Notes

George Abraham (they/ هو ) is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, critic, and performance artist. Their debut poetry collection, Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are the executive editor of Mizna and coeditor of HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket Books, 2025). They are a graduate of Northwestern’s Litowitz MFA+MA program and teach at Amherst College as a writer-in-residence.

Saima Afreen is a poet, journalist, teaching artist, essayist, and abstract Expressionist. Her works have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Indian Literature, HCE Review, Barely South Review, Bellingham Review, Roanoke Review, The Stillwater Review, The McNeese Review, The Nassau Review, The Oklahoma Review, Stag Hill Literary Journal, Notre Dame Review, Honest Ulsterman, and Existere, among others. She received the 2016 Writer Award from Nassau Community College. Afreen has presented her work at Sahitya Akademi Poets’ Meet, Paisley Book Festival, Craigmillar and Niddrie Community Festival, Betty June Silconas Poetry Festival, Helsinki Poetry Jam, Pulse Radio Glasgow, the University of Stirling, the University of Westminster, Waterstones bookstore Canterbury, Poetry with Prakriti Festival, and elsewhere. Afreen received a Villa Sarkia writer’s residency in Finland, where she edited Sin of Semantics (Copper Coin, 2019), her debut poetry collection. Afreen was the 2019 Charles Wallace fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Kent, UK. Afreen is pursuing a PhD in creative writing from Illinois State University and was awarded a Sutherland Fellowship to work in the editorial department of the university’s publications unit. Her poetry chapbook, Winter Biomythography, was published by Press 254 as part of the Sutherland Series.

Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Acolyte of the Exquisite and an Iranian American poet and medium. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Passages North, Annulet, The Hopkins Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Hailing from the Northeast, she currently haunts the Midwest.

Souri Ahmadlou is an Iranian poet whose work has been published widely in Iran. She is currently a staff writer for Jahan-e Ketab — a national magazine that publishes book reviews — and continues to contribute to literary magazines. Ahmadlou’s first collection of poems, The Cherry Ladder Does Not Turn the Moon Red, was published in 2007 by Ahang-e Digar Press. Her second collection, A Stone for a Game of Seven-Stones, was published by the Morvārid Press in 2020.

Kaitlyn Airy is a Korean American poet, essayist, and adoptee, currently residing in Charlottesville, where she graduated with an MFA from the University of Virginia. Her work may be found and is forthcoming in Fence, Post Road, Chestnut Review, Poets.org, A Dozen Nothing, and elsewhere. Airy serves as an essays and reviews editor for Poetry Northwest.

António Lobo Antunes, who has been called “one of Portugal’s preeminent writers” by The New York Times, was born in Lisbon in 1942. The son of a physician, he too became a doctor and then spent four years in the Portuguese Army during the Angolan War. His book on that war, South of Nowhere (Random House, 1983, trans. Elizabeth Lowe), was internationally praised and followed by other widely translated and much-honored novels, including An Explanation of the Birds (Grove, 1995, trans. Richard Zenith), Act of the Damned (Grove, 1996, trans. Richard Zenith), and The Natural Order of Things (Grove, 2001, translated by Richard Zenith).

Ann Aspell’s fiction has appeared in One Story, Story magazine, and Chautauqua and her poems in many journals, including Spillway, Poetry International, and Hunger Mountain. She received an MA in English from the University of Vermont and is working on a collection of linked stories.

Darius Atefat-Peckham is the author of Book of Kin (Autumn House Press, 2024), winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize, and editor of the posthumous collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us (CavanKerry Press, 2023) by his mother, Susan Atefat-Peckham. His work has recently appeared in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, Shenandoah, Rattle, The Journal, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Atefat-Peckham grew up in Huntington, West Virginia, and is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.

Madison Bakalar is an Austin-based writer and freelance editor. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Emerson College, has been published in Redivider and Cellar Door, and was the winner of the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition in 2020. When she’s not writing, you can find her baking, making pottery, playing violin, or swimming at Barton Springs.

Kaveh Bassiri is an Iranian American writer and translator. He is the author of 99 Names of Exile, winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and Elementary English, winner of the Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. His translations have appeared in the Chicago Review, The Common, Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Two Lines, Colorado Review, and Guernica. Bassiri is the recipient of a 2022–2023 Tulsa Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Arkansas Arts Council Fellowship, and a 2019 translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Pritha Bhattacharyya is a fiction writer who received her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston and her MFA from Boston University. Her work appears in The Southern Review and Ecotone and has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Key West Literary Seminar, Willapa Bay AiR, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Inprint, the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and elsewhere. Bhattacharyya is a 2024–25 postdoctoral fellow and Inprint Writer-in-Residence at the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics in Houston.

Alex Boeden is the recipient of a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Boeden’s work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review and Best Debut Short Stories 2024.

Aaron Carico is a writer and editor in Brooklyn.

Angela Chen is a writer and editor.

Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande Books, 2020), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. His work has recenty appeared in AGNI, The Best American Poetry, New Letters, Smartish Pace, and ZYZZYVA. The recipient of awards from the New Literary Project, Poetry International, and the Poetry Society of America, Davis lives in San Diego, where he teaches English literature at The Bishop’s School.

Armen Davoudian is the author of The Palace of Forty Pillars, published in 2024 by Tin House (US) and Corsair (UK). His poems and translations from the Persian appear in Poetry, The Hopkins Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Davoudian grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.

Morteza Dehghani is a poet and literary translator writing in English and Persian. He currently lives in Ontario, Canada, and teaches at the University of Waterloo. Dehghani is the author of Send My Roots Rain (North Waterloo Academic Press, 2014), The Whale Who Breaks the Skin of Morning (in Farsi, the Maya Press, Tehran, 2016), and After Rumi and the Flute Concerto (in Farsi, Fasl-e Panojm, Tehran, 2019).

Sahar Delijani is the author of Children of the Jacaranda Tree (Washington Square Press, 2014), an internationally acclaimed novel that has been translated into thirty-two languages and published in more than seventy-five countries. She is the recipient of a de Groot Foundation Courage to Write Grant and a Society of Authors Author’s Foundation Grant, and of fellowships at Hedgebrook and Art Omi: Writers. Her work has been long-listed for the Granum Foundation Prize and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best American Essays series. Delijani’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Literary Hub, Kweli Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, Slice Magazine, and more. Born in Iran in 1983, Delijani grew up in California and lived for many years in Turin, Italy. She currently lives in New York City, where she is writing her second novel.

Forough Farrokhzad (1934–67), is known in Iran as one of the most influential female poets of the twentieth century. Challenging the traditional limits of Iranian literature and social norms, her work is celebrated for its unique blend of social commentary and personal reflection. Farrokhzad’s contributions to the world of cinema, particularly the documentary The House Is Black, highlight her legacy as a pioneering voice for change in Iran.

Farnaz Fatemi is an Iranian American poet and writer as well as the Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate. Her book, Sister Tongue زبان خواهر (The Kent State University Press, 2022), won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, selected by Tracy K. Smith. She is a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems and lyric essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Academy of American Poets (poets.org), No Tokens Journal, Nowruz Journal, Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. Find more at farnazfatemi.com.

Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Nation, and Prairie Schooner. Gbolahan received a 2015 Best of the Net Honorable Mention for his poem “Elegy,” published in One. In 2017, Rattle and Poet Lore nominated his poems for the Pushcart Prize. He was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2017 and was a finalist for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets in 2018.

Torsa Ghosal is author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative (The Ohio State University Press, 2021), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, 2017). She has won fiction contests held by Berkeley Fiction Review and The Brooklyn Review, and her essays and translation can be found in The Massachusetts Review, Literary Hub, Bustle, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. A writer and professor of English based in California, Ghosal grew up in Bengal, India. You can follow her on X @TorsaG and on Instagram @torsa_ghosal.

Jordan Hamel is a writer from New Zealand. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. His debut poetry collection Everyone is Everyone Except You was published by Dead Bird Books in NZ and by Broken Sleep in the UK. He is the winner of the 2023 Sonora Review MERCY Contest and the 2023 New Writers UK Poetry Competition. Recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Electric Literature, The Adroit Journal, Fence, and elsewhere.

Nik Chang Hoon (nikchanghoon.com) is a Korean adoptee, memoirist, and poet based in Minneapolis. He is the winner of the 2024 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction and was named as a finalist for the 2024 Iowa Review Award in nonfiction. He has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is an alum of The Kenyon Review and Tin House residential writers workshops.

Daniel Hornsby is the author of the novels Via Negativa (Knopf, 2020) and Sucker (Anchor, 2023). He plays in the Minneapolis-based band True Green (their debut album, My Lost Decade, came out on Spacecase Records in 2024).

David Huebert is the author of two award-winning short story collections, Peninsula Sinking (Biblioasis, 2017) and Chemical Valley (Biblioasis, 2021). In 2024, he published his debut novel, Oil People (McClelland & Stewart), which was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Huebert teaches in the MFA program at the University of King’s College in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia, where he lives with his partner and their two children.

Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian American poet, literary translator, filmmaker, and human rights advocate whose work has garnered international recognition, including a humanitarian award from the United Nations and grants from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a nominee for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, she is the author of the full-length poetry collection Echoes in Exile (P.R.A. Publishing, 2006) which is included on Stony Brook University’s Women’s and Gender Studies reading list. Her poetry and translations have been adapted into short films, taught in classrooms, and set to music, with one such composition presented at the Smithsonian National Museum.

Saba Keramati is a Chinese Iranian writer from California. She is the author of Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press, 2024), an MFA graduate of UC Davis, and a winner of the Discovery Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Adroit Journal, AGNI, The Margins, and other publications.

Jahan Khajavi (b. Fresno, 1986) is “the best kind of pervert” (Farid Matuk) who composes “wildly amusing and explicit queer poetry” (Hamish Bowles, Vogue) “with elements of swagger and sex” (Rob McLennan) that “luxuriates in the labor of the real” (PJ Lombardo, Tripwire) and “juggles truly absurd comedy and frank body talk with overwhelming tenderness and genuine corporeal joy” (Louis Fratino, Mousse). Khajavi’s “wickedly amorous debut” (Charlie Stuip, Grotto), Feast of the Ass (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), is “one of the most unique books of recent memory” (Johannes G.ransson), which “at once flourishes and makes a flourish of classical Persian forms” (Joyelle McSweeney).

Jeremy Klemin’s writing and literary translations have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, AGNI, The Common, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Klemin has attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, and his work has been supported by grants from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Disquiet International Literary Program, where he was a Luso-American Fellow. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Oregon State University.

Dong LI is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. His debut poetry collection, The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press, 2023), was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and a finalist for Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize.

Sydney Mayes is a poet from Denver, Colorado. She is the inaugural ONLY POEMS Poet of the Year, and her work can be found in The Atlantic, Prairie Schooner, and Poets.org, among other publications. In 2024 Mayes was a finalist for the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. She currently serves as the executive editor of Nashville Review.

Tori McCandless is a poet and educator living in Berkeley. They are completing a PhD at the University of California, Davis, where their research explores how feminist ecopoetics utilizes and transcribes the body in order to index ever-widening definitions of environmental catastrophe in the mid-twentieth century. Their work is forthcoming from Public Books and can be found in ASAP/Journal, Annulet, Denver Quarterly, Wildness, Bruiser, and more. 

Roz Shayan Naimi is a poet, translator, and dramaturge based in New York City. She received an MFA from Columbia University’s creative writing program in poetry and literary translation. She is currently translating the work of Iranian modernist poet Mina Asadi.

Nader Nazmi’s poems and poetry chapbook have appeared in the International Poetry Review, Tusitala, and Troika. Born in Tehran, Nazmi has spent his adult life in Chicago, Washington, DC, New York City, and Boston, where he currently resides. He enjoys reading and translating poetry in English, Farsi, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Evgenia Nekrasova is a Russian writer, playwright, and poet, and the cofounder of the School of Modern Literature Practices in Moscow. Her plays have been staged in the main experimental theaters in Moscow and other cities. Her novel Kalechina-Malechina (AST/Elena Shubina, 2018) was short-listed for the most prestigious Russian literary awards (Big Book, NOS, the National Bestseller). She has authored five collections of short stories, also on AST/Elena Shubina: Unhappy Moscow (2017), Sistermom (2019), Home Love (2021), She-Bear (2023), and Baba Yaga’s Lawyer (2025); her newest novel, Kholodov Street, was published by Polyandria Publishing House in 2025. Nekrasova writes about women in today’s Russia; her work explores themes of corporeality, power, violence, magic, and folklore. According to some critics, she is the founder of magical pessimism in contemporary Russian literature. Despite her vocal anti-war position, Nekrasova remains in Russia.

Robert Norman is from San Jose, California, and currently lives in New York City with his wife and their two daughters. His plays have been developed and performed at venues including La MaMa and the Corkscrew Theater Festival. His short fiction has appeared in publications including Strange Pulp, Food&, and Sinking City. Norman is a graduate of New York University’s dramatic writing program.

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward and the translator of The Hell of That Star by Kim Hyesoon. A former high school physics teacher, Ok is now an assistant English professor. 

vivian panah-izadi is a writer currently based in Paris. As the daughter of an Iranian immigrant, panah-izadi feels compelled to explore matters of freedom and womanhood. She has a master’s degree in history and literature from Columbia University; her MA thesis, on Forough Farrokzad’s poetry, is entitled Finding One’s Voice in Pre-revolutionary Iran as Part of the Jungian Process of Individuation. Also holding a degree in neuroscience, panah-izadi has worked in the field of biotechnology. She is in the process of publishing her first novel, Persian Girl, inspired by the life of her grandmother, a bold and emancipated woman in 1960s Iran. 

Alixen Pham is a Best New Poets 2022 finalist and a Best of the Net–nominated poet, writer, and artist published in Tahoma Literary Review, Cultural Daily, Apogee Journal, Rust & Moth, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. She facilitates poetry workshops with The Poetry Salon, co-organizes the city of Long Beach’s Festival of Asian American & Pacific Islander Books, and is a co-editor of the 2024 Periplus Collective anthology. Pham is a 2022 City of West Hollywood Artist Grantee, a 2023 Periplus Fellow, a 2022 alumna of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program, and a recipient of a 2016 PEN Center/City of West Hollywood Fiction & Nonfiction Scholarship. She is currently working on her first collection of hybrid artwork and visual poems. 

Shabnam Piryaei is a poet, filmmaker, and artist. Her fourth book, all children, was published by Diode Editions in 2024. She meditates and does jujitsu, and when a spider comes into her house, she tries to take it outside safely rather than kill it, which is what she used to do.

Michelle Quay is a lecturer in Persian at Brown University, focusing on translating both modern Persian fiction and medieval Persian texts. Her literary translation work has appeared in such publications as Words Without Borders, Asymptote Journal, and World Literature Today, among others. She recently won the inaugural Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature to translate Reza Ghassemi’s 1996 prize-winning novel, Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime; her translation is forthcoming from Deep Vellum in 2025.

Mahta Riazi is a poet, community worker, and educator living in Tkaronto (Toronto). She is the winner of the 2022 Briarpatch Writing in the Margins contest, and her poetry and short fiction have been shortlisted for the Vallum Poetry Award. Riazi is inspired by and indebted to the poetry of Solmaz Sharif, Forough Farrokhzad, Hala Alyan, and Hieu Minh Nguyen, among others. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in Plenitude Magazine, Acta Victoriana, Yolk, Bahr, and Brickplight. Her chapbook, Parastoo, was published in June 2022 by Cactus Press.

Yadollah Royai (1932–2022), a seminal figure in modern and experimental Iranian poetry, was the author of eight books of poetry and four books of essays and interviews. His writing is the subject of several works of criticism. Royai was named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Samaneh Sadaghiani is an Iranian Canadian writer and poet. After exiting her design agency in 2019, she has been pursuing her love of writing. She has self-published a poetry collection, I wrote some things; don’t worry, they’re short (2020), and a chapbook, Nude vARcation (2021), and has translated Forough Farrokhzad’s iconic book Another Birth. Sadaghiani is currently working on a screenplay.

Born in Isfahan and raised in Los Angeles, Arash Saedinia is a writer, filmmaker, photographer, curator, archivist, and educator. At MacDowell in 2023, he translated Forough Farrokhzad’s Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season from Persian into English. At present he is at work on a book of his own poems.

Crystal AC Salas is the author of the bilingual poetry chapbook Grief Logic, which was cowinner of the inaugural Alta California Prize from Gunpowder Press (2022). She has work in Alta Journal, Omnium Gatherum Quarterly, Northwest Review, and other publications. She holds an MFA from University of California, Riverside and is the recipient of a 2021–22 California Arts Council Established Individual Artist Fellowship.

Edward Salem is the author of Monk Fruit (Nightboat, 2025) and Intifadas (Sarabande, 2026), which was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, selected by Hanif Abdurraqib. Salem’s poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Drift, and elsewhere. His fiction can be found in Granta and BOMB. He is the founding co-director of City of Asylum/Detroit, a nonprofit that provides safe-haven fellowships to writers and artists in exile who have been persecuted for their work.

Marin Sardy is the author of the memoir The Edge of Every Day (Pantheon, 2019) and cocreator of the Substack Psychic Telephone (marinsardy.substack.com). Sardy’s essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Guernica, and many other journals, as well as in two award-winning books of photography. She is the winner of the 2025 Mathiasen Prose Award, and her work has been nominated for both Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, as well as twice listed as Notable in The Best American Essays (2015 and 2017). Sardy teaches memoir and personal essay writing for Authors Publish and Writing Workshops.

Dr. Fatemeh Shams is a Persian poet, literary scholar, and translator. She currently teaches Persian literature and history at the University of Pennsylvania and is a core faculty member of the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her work focuses on the intersection of literature, politics, and society. Shams is interested in the evolution of poetry and patronage in the Persian literary tradition and the representation and transformation of this relationship in modern Iran. She previously taught poetry at Oxford University and SOAS University of London. She has published three award-winning poetry collections in Persian and English. Her book Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-Option Under Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2021), explores the role of poetry and poetics in the political ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Shahilla Shariff’s first poetry collection, Life Lines (2012), was published by Proverse Hong Kong. Her work is featured in numerous anthologies and journals, including Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, World Literature Today, Literary Review of Canada, Wasafiri, Mslexia, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Born in Kenya, Sharrif is Canadian and lives in Hong Kong.

Marianna Suleymanova is a literary translator from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, living in Philadelphia. She is a contributing translator to ROAR: Resistance and Opposition Arts Review, an anti-war publication founded by the writer Linor Goralik. She enjoys rendering the voices of contemporary feminist and queer Russian-language writers in English and is committed to amplifying suppressed narratives and dissident voices. She is the winner of the 2024 Words Without Borders Momentum Grant. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Words Without Borders, The Offing, and khōréō.

Zahra Feizbakhsh Tavana is currently a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Houston, where her research focuses on empire studies, global anglophone writing, immigration studies, and human rights. Her critical work explores the complex intersections of immigration and human rights, with a focus on the liminal experience of waiting, the struggle for dignity, and the shifting nature of identity. Tavana delves into the challenges of living as an immigrant and undocumented individual, where survival often means adapting like a chameleon — constantly alert, concealed, and ever changing.

Clara Trippe (she/they) is a Midwest poet who grew up on occupied Ojibwe land. They received their MFA from the University of Oregon, and they are currently a grant writer for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. You can find her work featured in The Rumpus, Terrain.org, Heavy Feather Review, Crab Creek Review, and more. Wherever they are, they would like to go home. You can find her as @mid_west_dad on Instagram.

Othuke Umukoro is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His debut poetry collection, Fenestration, was selected by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Diane Seuss as the winner of the 2024 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Fenestration will be published on September 15, 2025, by Texas Review Press.

Daniel Uncapher is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah, with an MFA from Notre Dame, where he was a Nicholas Sparks Fellow. Uncapher is a queer and disabled Mississippian; his work has appeared in The Sun, The Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, West Branch, Chicago Review, and Ninth Letter, from which he received the 2024 Ninth Letter Literary Award for creative nonfiction.

Ben Walter is a Walkley Award–winning essayist, the author of the short story collection What Fear Was (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022), and a past fiction editor at Island. His writing has recently appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Cimarron Review, 3:AM Magazine, and On This Ground: Best Australian Nature Writing. Walter’s debut poetry collection, Lithosphere, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann in 2025.

Andalyn Young is a writer and dancer based in Philadelphia. Her writing has appeared in Seneca Review and on Montez Press Radio, and has been supported by Granta Writers’ Workshops and the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship Program. She is at work on her first book.

Zohreh Zadbood is an Iranian writer, poet, and photographer who writes in both English and Persian. She is currently working on her debut poetry collection as well as her first novel. Through her evocative style, she explores themes of love, healing, attachment, homesickness, self-love, and solidarity, with a significant focus on love in her prose and poetry. In addition to her literary pursuits, Zadbood is a visual storyteller whose artistic style seamlessly blends poetry and imagery. Her work has been featured in renowned publications and showcased in exhibitions in New York and London. Her name, Zohreh, holds a special place in classic Persian poetry, where it symbolizes the planet Venus — an iconic representation of the lover. This profound connection, discovered after she began writing about love as a teenager, continues to inspire her work to this day.