Winter 2025

XLVII, No. 1

In the Issue

Cover Image

Krista Franklin	
Constellations (High Fashion) (2019)	
Vintage Magazine Pages and Deconstructed Album Covers in Handmade Paper	
29.5” x 22”	
© Krista Franklin 2019

Contributors’ Notes

Stine An is a poet, literary translator, and performer based in New York City whose translations and poems have appeared in Best Literary Translations 2024, Poem-a-Day, The Southern Review, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and is the recipient of fellowships and grants from The Poetry Project, PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her full-length translations include Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press, 2025), and her debut poetry collection, B-Dragon Suite, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. 

James Appleby (b. 1993) is a poet, editor, and translator. His original poetry is published in The London Magazine in the UK and the Best American Poetry blog in the USA. His translations have been featured at individual events at the French Institute of Scotland and the Sofia Literature and Translation House. His upcoming debut, Spurious Language, was commended in the 2024 International Book & Pamphlet Competition, and he is the editor of Interpret, a new magazine of international writing. www.jamesapplebywriting.co.uk. 

Atefe Asadi (b. 1994, Tehran) is a contemporary Iranian poet, author, translator, editor, and lyricist. Her work focuses on women’s rights, minorities, migration, discrimination, and freedom. She was awarded the Hannah Arendt Fellowship in 2022. While living in Iran, Asadi collaborated with various literary magazines and websites, including Sayeh-ha, Konsefr, Ketabchi, and Morva. However, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance banned all three of her short story collections. In exile in Germany, she has been an outspoken critic of the Iranian regime, advocating for international support for the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

Robin Babb is an MFA student in creative nonfiction at the University of New Mexico. Her work has appeared in phoebe, New Mexico Magazine, Conceptions Southwest, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a collection of essays.

Michele Bantz is an American translator of Spanish and Portuguese. She attended the Middlebury’s Portuguese School as a Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace and earned her MA in translation from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. A Bread Loaf alumna and recipient of the inaugural Granum Foundation Translation Prize in 2021, Bantz has been awarded funding, fellowships, and writing residencies from the American Literary Translators Association, the New York Circle of Translators, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones, published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. 

Sam Bodrojan is a cultural critic and writer. Her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, MUBI Notebook, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Chicago, and her work can be found at sambodrojan.com. 

Matthew Buxton is a queer writer from Salt Lake City and is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He was a finalist for the 2024 YesYes Books Vinyl 45 Chapbook Prize and the Diagram Chapbook Contest, a semifinalist for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and a winner of the Hopwood Theodore Roethke Prize judged by Sumita Chakraborty. His recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Spectacle, & Change, Court Green, and Frozen Sea, which nominated him for the 2024 Pushcart Prize. 

Nuno Camarneiro is an award-winning novelist from Figueira da Foz, Portugal. He earned his undergraduate degree in physical engineering from the University of Coimbra and a PhD in cultural heritage science from the University of Florence. A winner of the prestigious Prémio LeYa literary prize, Camarneiro has published three novels to date: No meu peito não cabem pássaros (My Breast Can Hold No Birds, Publicações Dom Quixote, 2011), Debaixo de algum céu (Under the Far Heavens, Leya, 2013), and O fogo será a tua casa (Fire Shall Be Your Home, Publicações Dom Quixote, 2018). 

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US and Corsair/Little, Brown in the UK. It received the Forward Prize for Poetry for Best Collection. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and director of Poetry@Tech.

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017), Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021), and It’s Important I Remember (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, forthcoming). Winner of a Pushcart Prize, he was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared in POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Granta, and elsewhere.

Rebecca Clouse lives in Iowa City, where she completed her education after Chicago and New Haven. “A Patient” comes from Under Canine, a novel in progress; two excerpts appeared in On the Seawall (October 2022, November 2023) and a third in The Woven Tale Press (October 2023). Clouse’s previous writings, some pseudonymous (as Zed Ander and  Zaarcluz), as well as her visual art, have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Prose Poem, Mystics Quarterly, and Essays in Medieval Studies. 

Averill Curdy is the author of Song & Error (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). Her recent work has appeared in The Yale Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.

Melissa Faliveno is the author of the essay collection TOMBOYLAND (Little A/TOPPLE Books, 2020), named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, The New York Public Library, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Electric Literature, and the recipient of a 2021 Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her work has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Literary Hub, Bitch, Brevity, Prairie Schooner, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others, and in the anthology Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic (Harper Perennial, 2022); it has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and named a Notable Selection in Best American Essays 2016. Faliveno is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her debut novel, Hemlock, is forthcoming in 2026 from Little, Brown. Find more at www.melissafaliveno.com. 

Krista Franklin is a writer and visual artist whose work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Poetry, Transition Magazine, Black Camera, and several anthologies. She is the author of the artist book Under the Knife (Candor Arts), Too Much Midnight (Haymarket Books), and the chapbooks, Killing Floor (Amparan) and Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books). 

Rebecca Ruth Gould is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics at SOAS University of London. Her most recent book is Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2023). Her next book is Sex and the State: Marriage and the Origins of Gender Inequality (Stanford University Press). Her writing has been featured by Al Jazeera and published by London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Arab, Jacobin, and Middle East Eye. Gould is the editor, author, and publisher of The Textual Materialist: rgould.substack.com. 

Originally from San Francisco, Benjamin Gucciardi had his first book, West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021), selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Poetry, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and elsewhere.

N.C. Happe is an emerging memoirist currently residing in Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Guernica, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. 

Patrick Martin Holian (he/him/his) is a Mexican American writer from San Francisco. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California and a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill Journal, Arkansas Review, The Acentos Review, and PRISM international. Holian was a finalist for Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2021 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, was a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee, and was selected as a 2025 Creative Writing fellow in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Chris Hoshnic is a Navajo poet, playwright, and filmmaker, who has been honored with the 2023 Hayden’s Ferry Review Indigenous Poets Prize and as a finalist for the Poetry Northwest James Welch Prize. His fellowships include the Native American Media Alliance’s Writers Seminar, UC Berkeley Arts Research Center, and the Diné Artisan and Authors Capacity Building Institute, with support from Indigenous Nations Poets, Playwrights Realm, Tin House, and others.

E. E. Hussey was born in the Philippines,  was raised in Japan and Italy, and has lived in several cities in the US. She has received support from Tin House, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Her debut novel, Hafa Adai, is forthcoming from Curbstone Books. Find her online at eehussey.com and @eehussey.

Lucy Ives is the author of Life Is Everywhere: A Novel (2022) and An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays (2024), both published by Graywolf Press. Her writing has appeared in Aperture, Artforum, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, and Vogue. She teaches at Brown University. 

Betsy Johnson’s poetry manuscripts have been finalists in the National Poetry Series Competition, the University of Wisconsin Poetry Prizes, and the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in the Iowa Review (online), Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She lives in Minnesota. 

Former poet laureate of Utah Lance Larsen grew up in the West, mowing lawns, delivering newspapers, and dreaming of catching Bigfoot on film. His sixth poetry collection, Making a Kingdom of It, will appear in fall 2025 from the University of Tampa Press. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, the Sewanee Review Prize, and the Swamp Pink Prize, as well as fellowships from Ragdale, the Anderson Center at Tower View, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Larsen teaches at Brigham Young University and likes to fool around with aphorisms: “When climbing a new mountain, wear old shoes.” Sometimes he juggles.

Edmée Lepercq is a writer and critic based in London. Her essays have appeared in Orion and The Ilanot Review. In 2024 she was a developmental editing fellow at The Kenyon Review. She is at work on an essay collection titled Germination Protocol.

Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky is Associate Editor of The Kenyon Review.

Éireann Lorsung works in a field of images, objects, movement, and texts. She is a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and her collections include The Century (Milkweed, 2020), Pattern-book (Carcanet, 2025), and the forthcoming Pink Theory!, which Milkweed Editions will publish in 2026. Find out more at ohbara.com. 

Samantha Jade Macpherson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work can be found in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, and elsewhere. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Journey Prize. 

Carole Maso is the author of ten books, including the novels The Art Lover (New Directions, 2017), Ava (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), and Mother & Child (Counterpoint, 2013); a collection of essays, Break Every Rule (Counterpoint, 2010); two collections of poems in prose, Aureole (Ecco, 1996) and Beauty Is Convulsive (Counterpoint, 2020); and a memoir, The Room Lit by Roses (Counterpoint, 2002). She has recently completed a novel, Why So Soon Asleep? Eternity and the Dreamer is her novel-in-progress. Maso is professor emerita at Brown University.

Malia Maxwell (Kanaka Maoli) is a writer from Seattle, Washington. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, No Tokens, Frozen Sea, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Visit her at maliamaxwell.com. 

Cullen McAndrews’s writing has previously appeared in NOON. He lives and works in New York City.

Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetry, Requeening (HarperCollins/ECCO, 2021), was selected for the National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Moore’s poems, essays, and translations have appeared in journals and anthologies including Best New Poets, ZYZZYVA, Ploughshares, and Literary Hub. An editor and reader for Bull City Press, Moore runs writing workshops and community poetry classes and teaches high school English. She lives by the beach in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco.

Will Morningstar is a book editor and translator whose work has appeared in journals such as the New England Review, ANMLY, Two Lines, Latin American Literature Today, and Strange Horizons. His translation of Martha Riva Palacio Obón’s essay “How to Draw a Lichen (with Help from the Spirits)” appears in the 2025 edition of Deep Vellum’s Best Literary Translations anthology. His translation, with Samantha Schnee, of Argentine writer Mariana Travacio’s novel All That Dies in April (Quebrada, Tusquets, 2022) is forthcoming from World Editions in fall 2025. In 2024, Morningstar founded Boston-based Diptych Press, a new publisher of literature from around the world. 

Iheoma Nwachukwu played professional chess in Nigeria for a decade. He has won fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers, the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College, and the Mississippi Arts Commission. Nwachukwu’s writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Oxford American, Electric Literature, The Southern Review, and other venues. He is the winner of a Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and his debut collection, Japa and Other Stories, was published in 2024 by the University of Georgia Press. 

Martha Riva Palacio Obón is a Mexican sound artist and author of novels, poetry, and stories for children and adults. She won the 2014 Premio Hispanoamericano de Poesía para Niños for her illustrated book of poems Lunática (Fonda de Cultura Económica, 2015) and the 2011 El Premio de Literature Infantil El Barco de Vapor for her middle-grade novel Las sirenas sueñan con trilobites (Ediciones SM, 2011), published in English as Secrets We Tell the Sea (Bloomsbury, 2023). Her short prose has been published in the New England Review, ANMLY, and Strange Horizons, and she is currently working on a collection of personal essays. Obón is a member of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. 

James O’Leary is a trans poet from Arizona. Their work has been nominated for the Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Pushcart Prize anthologies and has appeared in such journals as Frontier Poetry, Protean Magazine, Booth, and Foglifter. O’Leary holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, serves as a poetry reader for ANMLY, and is currently working on their first full-length poetry manuscript. For a time, they tried the name Willow James Claire. They live in Southern California.

Shizuka Omori was born in Okayama City in 1989. She is the author of three tanka collections: Burning the Palm of a Hand (2013), Camille (2018), and most recently, Hectare (2022), which won the Tsukamoto Kunio Award. Omori has received numerous awards and is recognized as one of the leading tanka poets of her generation. She lives in Kyoto and serves as an editor for Tō, a longstanding tanka journal.

Abigail Parry is a British poet and translator. Her first collection, Jinx (2018), deals in trickery, gameplay, masks, and costume; her second collection, I Think We’re Alone Now (2023), investigates intimacy and estrangement. I Think We’re Alone Now was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and for the Wales Book of the Year award; it was commended for its “knottiness of thought and emotion, as well as its refusal of easy answers” (Mary Jean Chan). Both are published by Bloodaxe Books. 

Jessica Petrow-Cohen is a Pushcart Prize–nominated writer of creative nonfiction and the winner of the 2024 Kenyon Review Nonfiction Contest. Her senate testimony on behalf of same-sex marriage was published in The New York Times and in former New Jersey State Senator Raymond J. Lesniak’s book, What’s Love Got to Do with It? Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Brevity, The Washington Post, The Common, Fugue, and her Substack, Claiming Writerhood. Her work has been supported by The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center.

Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson is a writer, editor, and bookseller whose writing has received multiple Pushcart nominations and has been published in Gulf Coast, Electric Literature, Off Assignment, Terrain.org, Oh Reader, and elsewhere. She has been accepted to the Bread Loaf Environmental Writer’s Conference. She is currently at work on a novel, I Would Know You Anywhere.  Plumlee-Watson lives with her wife in Cleveland, Ohio. Find her on Instagram @eplumleewatson.

Song Seung Eon, born in 1986 in Wonju, Gangwon Province, studied creative writing at Chung-Ang University and debuted as a poet in 2011 in the prestigious South Korean literary monthly Hyundae Munhak (Contemporary Literature). Song is the author of four collections of poetry and prose, including Occupational Front (Spring Days Books, 2022), Love and Education (Minumsa, 2019), and Iron and Oak (Moonji Books, 2015), and won the Park In-hwan Literary Award in 2016. He is a member of the poetry collective jaknan.

Yuki Tanaka’s debut poetry collection, Chronicle of Drifting, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in April 2025. He has cotranslated, with Mary Jo Bang, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, published by Princeton University Press. He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University.

Jane Wang is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been featured in The College Hill Independent. She recently received her BA in literary arts and applied mathematics from Brown University and is ideating her first novel.

Xabier Usabiaga (b. 1996) is an award-winning Chilean poet, actor, and musician. His work has previously appeared in James Appleby’s English translation in Interpret. He was born in San Fernando and completed his master’s in creative writing at the University of Edinburgh. 

Elaine van der Geld’s writing appears regularly in both online and print publications, including The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Ploughshares blog, Grain, The Normal School, Contemporary Verse II, and others. She has received notable mentions in The Best American Essays and Best Canadian Poetry, and is the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant. She holds an MA in English and an MFA, both from the University of British Columbia. 

Christian Wessels is a poet and critic. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Cortland Review, and Harvard Review Online, among other journals. His criticism has appeared in Literary Imagination, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Cleveland Review of Books. He received his PhD in English from the University of Rochester, where he currently teaches, and his MFA from Boston University. He splits his time between New York and the Black Forest, Germany. 

V. H. Wildman is a writer, critic, teacher, and editor. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Brown University and an MA in philosophy, with a concentration in aesthetics, from the University of Miami. His writing has appeared in the Encyclopedia Project, volume 2, coedited by Tisa Bryant, and Hyperallergic. The recipient of the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, he is the author of “Shrine”: A Little Book About Paul Thek, and is currently working on his second novel, People Who Died Alone, as well as several other projects, including a long essay about art and habitation. Wildman’s interests include modern and contemporary visual art, modernist literature, music and film, critical theory, feminism, and African American abstraction as a critical mode of resistance. Find him at his blog, marginalamericannotes.com.

Milena Williamson has an MA and PhD in poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. Her debut pamphlet is Charm for Catching a Train (Green Bottle Press, 2022) and her debut poetry collection is Into the Night that Flies So Fast (Dedalus Press, 2024). She is a recipient of the Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in the UK.

Mason Wray is  a poet from Georgia. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, RHINO, New Ohio Review, Willow Springs, and others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi and has received support from organizations including Bread Loaf, the Hambidge Center, and the Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home. He serves as a poetry editor at Bear Review and lives in Atlanta. 

Mario Alberto Zambrano published his debut novel, Lotería, in 2013 with Harper. He was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts in 1994 and was the recipient of the Princess Grace Award in 1995, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in 2016, and the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction in 2019. He has participated in multiple residencies across the globe, including that of the Hawthornden Foundation at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. Zambrano has served as lecturer in the Theater, Dance & Media concentration at Harvard University and is currently Associate Director of Dance at The Juilliard School and artistic liaison for Orsolina28, in Moncalvo, Italy.

Kelleen Zubick is a poet living in Denver whose work has been published in numerous journals, including december, Clackamas Literary Review, and Michigan State University Libraries Short Edition: Water. She earned her MFA from Arizona State University and has been awarded residencies by the Anderson Center and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her full-length poetry manuscript Travelogue was a 2020 National Poetry Series finalist.