Contributors' Notes
Stine Su Yon An (안수연) is a Korean American poet, performer, and stand-up comedian. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Black Warrior Review, BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Stine pursued a BA in Literature at Harvard College, studied Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and completed an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University. She is a Vermont Studio Center fellowship recipient and was selected as the 2020 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program mentee for Korean poetry. You can find her online @gregorspamsa and at www.gregorspamsa.com.
Mary-Kim Arnold is the author of Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018) and The Fish & The Dove (Noemi Press, 2020). Other writing has appeared in such publications as Conjunctions, Hyperallergic, Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, The Denver Quarterly, and The Rumpus, among others. She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University and at The Newport MFA.
Sarah Audsley has received support for her work from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre's Writing Studio. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and served as the Staff Artist and Writing Program Coordinator at the Vermont Studio Center from 2019-2020.
Emma Aylor's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Barrow Street, Yemassee, Poet Lore, and Salt Hill, among other journals, and she is the recipient of Shenandoah's 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. Raised in Bedford County, Virginia, she currently lives in Lubbock, Texas.
Colleen Baran is a Canadian artist, designer, and writer. Baran's artwork has exhibited in museums and galleries in eleven countries and been published in a few more. Her poems and visual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review, Always Crashing, New Delta Review, Prism, Midterm, Room, and the anthology Best Canadian Poetry 2019. She is the winner of Prism magazine's 2019 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize.
Jan Beatty's new book, The Body Wars, will be published in Fall, 2020 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She won the 2019 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Award for her book, American Bastard, which will be released in 2021. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University, where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and is Distinguished Writer in Residence in the MFA program.
Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things, a poetic biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020), and three chapbooks. Her poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Ruminate, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her fiction and nonfiction have been featured at The Boiler, Entropy, and Pithead Chapel, and her reviews have appeared [End Page 288] in AGNI, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, Literary Mama, Tinderbox, and many other journals. She is an assistant professor of English Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers' Conference.
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of Travesty Generator, How Narrow My Escapes, Personal Science, a slice from the cake made of air, and But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise.
Ellie Black is an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi. Her poetry, reviews, and interviews can be found in Best New Poets 2018, DIAGRAM, Booth, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is an associate editor at Sibling Rivalry Press.
Noah Bogdonoff is a social worker and writer based out of St. Louis, Missouri. His work has appeared in New England Review, Passages North, Catapult, and Carve Magazine.
Emma Bolden is the author of House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t) ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Indiana Review, Shenandoah, and other publications. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly.
Anthony Borruso has an MFA in creative writing from Butler University and has been a reader for Booth: A Journal. Currently, he teaches composition at Tallahassee Community College. Next fall he will begin pursuing his Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida State University. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Pleiades, Spillway, The Journal, THRUSH, Moon City Review, decomP, Frontier, and elsewhere.
Bryan Byrdlong is a Haitian/African-American writer from Chicago, Illinois. He was co-recipient of the Merrill Moore Award for Poetry at Vanderbilt University, and his work has been published in the Vanderbilt Review and the Nashville Review. He is currently a Helen Zell Creative Writing Fellow and a 2019 recipient of The Meader Family Award from Hopwood Program at the University of Michigan.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Florida Book Award and Milt Kessler Award. A transracial adoptee, she has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, among others. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Best Small Fictions, The New York Times, and more. She serves as poetry editor for Hyphen magazine and as a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair. www.marcicalabretta.com
Lauren K. Carlson is a poet and writer, mother and wife living in Dawson, Minnesota with her husband and three young sons. Her chapbook Animals I Have Killed won the 2018 Comstock Writers [End Page 289] Group Chapbook Prize. She works for COMPAS, Minnesota's largest teaching artist organization. You can find her work in The Windhover, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and 3288 Review among others. For more go to www.laurenkcarlson.com.
E Yeon Chang 장이연 is a current MFA candidate and Goldwater Fellow at New York University. A former Editor-in-Chief of West 10th, she was awarded the 2019 Contemporary Literature Prize by the NYU English Department for her thesis on transnational feminist remembrance in Comfort Women Literature. She has also received recognition from the Tory Dent Research Scholarship and the Academy of American Poets. E Yeon's poetry has appeared in Hobart Pulp, Pacifica Literary Review, Nat. Brut and elsewhere. She is developing her first manuscript, which centers on 웅녀 [Ungnyeo], the Bear Woman from Korea's origin myth. Find her online at changeyeon.com
Rita Chang-Eppig received her MFA from NYU. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Kenyon Review Online, Clarkesworld, Santa Monica Review, and Conjunctions. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Writers Grotto.
Franny Choi is the author of Soft Science (Alice James Books) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing). She is a Kundiman Fellow a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Helen Zell Writers Program. She co-hosts the podcast VS alongside fellow poet Danez, and is a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in English at Williams College.
Helena Chung recently received her MFA in poetry from University of Virginia. Her poems have been previously published in CutBank, The Journal, Booth, and elsewhere.
Charlie Clark studied poetry at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in New England Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and other journals. A 2019 NEA fellow, his book, The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin, will be published by Four Way Books in fall 2020. He lives in Austin, TX.
Maija Rhee Devine's (이매자's) autobiographical novel about Korea, The Voices of Heaven, won four awards. Her TEDx Talk on how the Korean-war-era stories told in the book relate to today's South Korean society is at: http://youtu.be/GFD-6JFLF5A. Her stories and poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, North American Review, her chapbook, Long Walks on Short Days, and anthologies. Her short stories received Pushcart Prize nominations. Her nonfiction and fiction works-in-progress deal with 'comfort women' of WWII. Her full-volume poetry manuscript, Comfort Women And Pockmarked Moon, is being submitted for publication.
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is the author of Paper Pavilion (2007), recipient of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club's Sheila Motton Book Award; Interrogation Room (White Pine Press 2018), mentioned in The New York Times and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry; Song of a Mirror (Fo Books, Bulgarian edition, forthcoming 2020); and [End Page 290] the chapbooks Notes from a Missing Person (Essay Press 2015) and Necro Citizens (hochroth Verlag, German/English edition, 2019). A poetry editor at AGNI, she teaches creative writing and directs Race and Ethnic Studies at St. Olaf College.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of seven poetry collections, including American Samizdat (Diode Editions) and Dots & Dashes (SIUP), winner of the Crab Orchard Series Open Competition Award. Her book of nonfiction is throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers). An eighth poetry collection, Simple Machines, won the Richard Wilbur Award. Her work appears in Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, New England Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas.
Seanse Lynch Ducken received her MFA in Poetry through Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her work has appeared in the 2nd edition of the online anthology, A Sense of Place: The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology, Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, Mudfisth 19, New Limstone Review, and Ecotone. She currently teaches English at Central Washington University.
Barbara Edelman's poetry collections include Dream of the Gone-From City (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2017) and the chapbooks Exposure and A Girl in Water. Some journals in which her poems and short prose have appeared include Prairie Schooner, Spillway, Cimarron, and Poet Lore. She teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh where she co-coordinates the Writers' Café.
Natalie Eilbert is the author of Indictus, winner of Noemi Press's 2016 Poetry Prize, as well as the poetry collection, Swan Feast (Bloof Books, 2015). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from POETRY, Granta, The Jewish Current, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2016 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at University of Wisconsin–Madison and is the founding editor of The Atlas Review. She lives and teaches in Madison, Wisconsin.
Kathy Fagan's fifth book is Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017), a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Ingram Merrill and the Ohio Arts Council. Recent work has appeared in POETRY, Tin House and The Nation. Fagan directs the MFA Program at Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio, where she also serves as series co-editor for the OSU Press/Wheeler Poetry Prize.
Gabrielle Frahm-Claffey's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Harvard Review Online, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, New American Writing, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Columbia University and lives in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.
Rebecca Morgan Frank's fourth collection of poems, Oh You Robot Saints!, is forthcoming in 2021. She is the author of Sometimes We're All Living in a Foreign Country, The Spokes of Venus, and Little Murders Everywhere, finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have recently appeared in [End Page 291] The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and The Kenyon Review. She is co-founder and editor of the online magazine Memorious.org.
John Gallaher's most recent book is Brand New Spacesuit (BOA 2020) He lives in Rural Missouri and co-edits The Laurel Review.
Vince Granata is a nonfiction writer living in Denton, Texas. His recent work has appeared in Fourth Genre, The Massachusetts Review, and The Chattahoochee Review. His memoir, Everything Is Fine, will be published in January 2021 by Atria Books.
Alyssa C. Greene's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, Hotel Amerika, North American Review, and elsewhere. She has served as a prose editor for Quarterly West and as an editorial assistant for the Lambda Literary Review. She also created and runs Lambda's "Spotlight on New Queer Literature" interview series. She received an M.F.A. from the University of Utah and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She currently lives and teaches in Boston.
Becky Hagenston is the author of three story collections, and her work has been chosen for the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She is a professor of English at Mississippi State University.
James Allen Hall's first book of poems, Now You're the Enemy, won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Recent poems have appeared in New England Review, A Public Space, and Ploughshares. He is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Hall is also the author of a collection of lyric essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, which won Cleveland State University Press's Essay Collection Award, judged by Chris Kraus. Essays appeared in Story Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cutbank, Redivider, Bellingham Review, and Bennington Review. He teaches creative writing and literature at Washington College, where he serves as an associate professor of English and directs the Rose O'Neill Literary House.
Joseph Han was born in Seoul, South Korea. His writing has appeared in Platypus Press Shorts, Joyland Magazine, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Little Fiction. A recipient of a Kundiman fellowship, he has a Ph.D. in English & Creative Writing from the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa.
Rachel Han is a poet, singer-songwriter, and instrumentalist. She graduated from the University of Florida with a BA in Political Science and worked in juvenile justice policy as a research fellow. She is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry and jazz studies at Rutgers University-Newark where she also teaches English Composition.
Leslie Harrison's second book, The Book of Endings (Akron 2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first book, Displacement, (Mariner 2009) won the Bakeless Prize in poetry. Recent poems [End Page 292] have appeared or are forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Bennington Review, Waxwing, The New Republic and elsewhere. She lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.
Nicole Higgins is a PhD candidate in English at Duke University. She has received fellowships from Callaloo and Cave Canem. Her work has appeared in Storyscape, Bear Review, Sink Review, and elsewhere.
In a past century, Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. He's a retired math professor and has won two poetry chapbook prizes and published two collections. Another collection is in press.
Su Hwang is a poet, activist, and the author of Bodega (Milkweed Editions 2019). Born in Seoul, Korea, she was raised in New York, then called the Bay Area home before transplanting to the Midwest. A recipient of the inaugural Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, she teaches creative writing with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and is the cofounder, with poet and educator Sun Yung Shin, of Poetry Asylum. She currently lives in Minneapolis.
Anna Maria Hong is the author of the novella H & G (Sidebrow Books), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation's Clarissa Dalloway Prize, and Age of Glass, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's First Book Poetry Competition and the Poetry Society of America's 2019 Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press's Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in September 2020. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published poetry and fiction in many journals and anthologies including The Nation, The Iowa Review, Green Mountains Review, Ecotone, ENTROPY, Poetry Daily, and The Best American Poetry. She is an Assistant Professor at Mount Holyoke College.
Melissa Fite Johnson's first collection, While the Kettle's On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and is a Kansas Notable Book. She is also the author of A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, Sidereal, Whale Road Review, Rise Up Review, and elsewhere. Melissa is a high school English teacher who loves introducing her students to new poets. She and her husband live with their three dogs in Lawrence, Kansas. Find her online at melissafitejohnson.com.
Janine Joseph is a poet, librettist, and essayist born in the Philippines. She is the author of Driving Without a License, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize and da Vinci Eye award. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, Orion Magazine, Copper Nickel, World Literature Today, The Poem's Country: Place & Poetic Practice, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, Kundiman, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bethany Arts Community, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell Colony. A co-organizer for Undocupoets, Janine is an assistant professor of poetry at Oklahoma State University. [End Page 293]
Andrea Jurjević is the author of Small Crimes, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Poetry Prize, and a translator whose book-length translations from Croatian include Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) and Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020). A native of Croatia, Andrea teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Mia Kang is the author of City Poems (2020), a poetry pamphlet from ignition press. Mia was named the 2017 winner of Boston Review's Annual Poetry Contest by Mónica de la Torre, and her writing has appeared in journals including POETRY, Washington Square Review, Narrative Magazine, and PEN America. She is a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, runner-up for the 2019 and 2017 Discovery Poetry Contests, and finalist for the 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Mil-lay Colony for the Arts. Mia is a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University, where she studies the contested rise of U.S. multiculturalism and its failures. Find her online at www.miaadrikang.com.
Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collections Late in the Empire of Men and, most recently, What Though the Field Be Lost, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, he is currently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Chicago.
Annie Kim is a poet, ex-lawyer, and violinist. Her books are Eros, Unbroken (2020), winner of the 2019 Washington Prize, and Into the Cyclorama, winner of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize (2016), a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Best Poetry Book of the Year. Kim's poems have appeared in journals such as Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Four Way Review, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, and Plume. A graduate of Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers and the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Hambidge Center, Kim works at the University of Virginia School of Law as the Assistant Dean for Public Service, where she teaches in the Program for Law and Public Service.
Caroline Kim was born in Busan, South Korea, but moved to America at a young age. Her collection of short stories, The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories, won the 2020 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and will be published in October 2020. Her poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Porter House Review, MANOA, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Meridian, Jellyfish Review, Faultline, and elsewhere. Find her at carolinekim.net and @carolinewriting.
Joey S. Kim is a scholar, creative writer, and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo. She researches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature with a focus on Romantic literature, global Anglophone literature, postcolonial theory, and poetics. "Plunder" is part of her longer chapbook, Body Facts. She has published work in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Burningword Literary Journal, The Keats-Shelley Review, The Keats-Shelley Journal, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter: @Joeykim [End Page 294]
Hyejung Kook's poetry has recently appeared in The World I Leave you: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books, 2020), Half Mystic Radio, The Massachusetts Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and previously in Pleiades. A Kundiman fellow, Hyejung was born in Seoul, grew up in Pennsylvania, and now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two young children. As a Fulbright grantee, she spent a year teaching English at Bongmyeong Middle School in Cheongju, Korea. You can find her at hyejungkook.tumblr.com.
Robin Kozak's writing has appeared or is upcoming in Arkansas Review, Field, The Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, The Rappahannock Review, Sequestrum, and Witness, among others, and her awards include two Creative Artist Program grants from the city of Houston and the 2016 Sandy Crimmins Prize for Poetry. An authority on antique and estate jewelry, she currently is finishing Berkowitz, a collection of short fiction.
Mary Kuryla is the author of Freak Weather Stories, recipient of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction (University of Massachusetts Press). Her novel Away to Stay is forthcoming with Regal House Press. Kuryla's stories have received The Pushcart Prize and the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Prize and are forthcoming or appeared in Conjunctions: The Monster Issue, Agni, Epoch, New Orleans Review, Witness, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. "Wind Bitches" is part of a new collection of stories.
Ted Lardner's writing has recently appeared in DIAGRAM, Blue Fifth Review, One, Cleaver, Watershed Review, and other journals. He teaches creative writing and literature at Cleveland State University.
Michael Lavers is the author of After Earth, published by the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, 32 Poems, The Hudson Review, Best New Poets 2015, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He has been awarded the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize, and the Michigan Quarterly Review Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets. Together with his wife, the writer and artist Claire Åkebrand, and their two children, he lives in Provo, Utah, and teaches poetry at Brigham Young University.
Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Bools, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books 2018). She was selected by Marylin Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea's inaugural sonnet competition in 2019. She has recent poems in AGNI, Poet Lore, and West Branch. She can be found at Jennalewriting.com.
Diana Keren Lee is the daughter of Korean immigrants. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, and Day One. She has received support from The MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center, and New York University. A Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship finalist, Lee has lived in Austin, New York, and Los Angeles.
Janice Lee is a Korean-American writer, editor, publisher, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry, most recently: The Sky Isn't Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), [End Page 295] Imagine a Death (The Operating System, 2021), and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022). She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. She can be found online at janicel.com and Twitter/Instagram @diddioz.
Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up 3 miles from the CIA and currently lives in Denver, CO where she works as the Program Director at Chinook Fund, a social justice foundation. A former Pew Fellow in the Arts for Literature, she also makes video and installation arts. Her next book, Aerial Concave Without Cloud, is forthcoming with Nightboat Books in 2021. Find her at silentbroadcast.com.
Whitney Lee is Maternal Fetal Medicine physician and veteran. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Booth, Type-house, Lunch Ticket, The Rumpus, Crack the Spine, Gravel, Numéro Cinq, Huffington Post, and Women's eNews. She is a winner of the Illinois Arts Council Agency Literary Award. She lives in Chicago with her husband and four children. Currently, she is working on a memoir about a physician's experience with death.
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books), winner of the 2015 Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry and a finalist for both the Yale Series of Younger Poets and the National Poetry Series. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications including Ploughshares, North American Review, The Rumpus, the Best New Poets 2010 anthology, and the 2017 Best of the Net Anthology. The recipient of fellowships and awards from Poets & Writers Magazine, Kundiman, Rattle, The Frost Place, and elsewhere, Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
Sandra Lim is the author of two poetry collections, Loveliest Grotesque and The Wilderness. She is the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Levis Reading Prize, and a Getty Foundation grant. She was born in Seoul, Korea, grew up in California, and now lives in Cambridge, MA. She is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Rachel Inez Marshall's work has appeared in the Ploughshares, The Adroit Journal, Mississippi Review, Best New Poets, Quarterly West, and The Normal School. She currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Sarah Matthes is a poet from central New Jersey. Her debut collection of poetry Town Crier (Persea, 2021) won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Selected poems have appeared or are forthcoming with The Iowa Review, jubilat, American Literary Review, The Journal, Black Warrior Review, poets.org, Midst, and elsewhere. She has received support for her work from the Yiddish Book Center, and is the recipient of the 2019 Tor House Prize from the Robinson Jeffers Foundation. The managing editor of Bat City Review, she lives in Austin, TX. Find her online at sarahmatthes.com [End Page 296]
Kristi Maxwell is the author of seven books of poems, including My My (Saturnalia Books, 2020) and Bright and Hurtless (Ahsahta Press, 2018). She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville.
John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which won the Jake Adam York Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2015, Copper Nickel, Hayden's Ferry Review, TriQuarterly, and Zone 3, among others. Additionally, he is the 2016 winner of The Pinch Literary Award in Poetry. John received his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He currently lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he serves as an Associate Editor of RHINO magazine.
Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System, (Ecco/Harper Collins) winner of the National Poetry Series. She is also the author of June in Eden (Ohio State University Press). She earned her MFA in poetry at Purdue University. She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, the "Discovery"/Boston Review prize, and scholarships from the Tin House and Bread Loaf writing workshops. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Believer, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines. She is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Indiana.
Sara Mumolo is the author of Day Counter and Mortar, both from Omnidawn. She serves as the Associate Director for the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary's College of CA. Poems have appeared in 1913: a journal of forms, Lana Turner, PEN Poetry Series, San Francisco Chronicle, and Zyzzyva, among others. She has received residencies to Vermont Studio Center, Caldera Center for the Arts, and has served as a curatorial resident at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, CA.
Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill and Dirty Bomb, both from Oberlin College Press. His awards include an NEA Poetry Fellowship, an Indiana Individual Artist Grant, and the FIELD Poetry Prize. He is a professor of English at Ball State University and a Senior Editor at River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.
Steve Nickman's poetry has appeared in such venues as Mid-American Review, RHINO, and Antigonish Review, and has been a guest speaker on NPR. He lives in the greater Boston area where he works as a psychiatrist, specializing in the dilemmas of adopted children and teens.
Tiana Nobile lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Kundiman fellow, and a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and the Texas Review, among others. Her full-length poetry debut, Cleave, is forthcoming in Spring 2021 by Hub City Press. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin holds an LL. B degree from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His poems are recently published or forthcoming in Palette, Poet Lore, Guernica, North Dakota Quarterly, Cordite, [End Page 297] The Malahat Review, RATTLE, South Dakota Review, The South Carolina Review, West Branch, Poetry Northwest, Notre Dame Review, among others. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and was a finalist for the 2020 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He has served as editor/reader for Africa in Dialogue, PANK Magazine, and Jalada Africa.
Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Salvage: Poems (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). Recent work appears in Tupelo Quarterly, Scoundrel Time, Zocalo Public Square, Hyperallergic, wildness journal, and Academy of American Poets. Originally from Bali, Indonesia, she is currently based in South Jersey and teaches creative writing at Bryn Mawr College.
Madeleine Owen-Dunow is a writer and a student at The New School in New York City.
Diana Park lives in Baltimore and continues to be obsessed with folk tales. She is a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, Fulbright South Korea, and the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. Her work has appeared in such journals as Tin House and Indiana Review.
Hannah Sanghee Park is the author of The Same-Different, the 2014 winner of the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award. "Plague" was originally written in 2016.
Jianna Jihyun Park was born and raised in Seoul. She received an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute, where she interrogated her relationship with language and home in the context of collective grief, migration, and familial love that blooms amidst inevitable disappointment. Her works have appeared in The Adirondack Review, The Felt, Notre Dame Magazine and others. Her first poetry book on mental illness, Contusions, was published by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in May 2019. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Catherine Pierce is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Tornado Is the World (Saturnalia 2016); her new book, Danger Days, is forthcoming in October. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere, and has won a Pushcart Prize. A 2019 NEA Fellow, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.
Marko Pogačar was born in 1984 in Split, Yugoslavia. His publications include four poetry collections, four books of essays, and a short story collection. He edited the Young Croatian Lyric anthology (2014). His work has received Croatian and international praise, and has been translated in over thirty languages.
Colin Pope grew up in the Adirondacks. His debut collection, Why I Didn't Go to Your Funeral (Tolsun Books) was a finalist for the Press 53 Award for Poetry and was released in 2019, and his manuscript Prayer Book for an American God was a finalist for the 2018 Louise Bogan Award, the 2018 Unicorn [End Page 298] Press First Book Competition, and the 2019 St. Lawrence Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slate, Rattle, Third Coast, West Branch, Willow Springs, Ninth Letter, Best New Poets, and others. Colin works on the editorial staffs of Cimarron Review and Nimrod International.
Gretchen Steele Pratt is the author of One Island (Anhinga Press). Her work has recently appeared in Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Gettysburg Review, Fairy Tale Review, Poetry Daily and Ecotone. She lives in Matthews, North Carolina, with her husband and three children and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from AWP. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019, among others. Priest is the winner of the 2019 Gearhart Poetry Prize from The Southeast Review, and has received support from the Houston/Wright Foundation, The Frost Place, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the University of Houston, where she will be a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing beginning fall 2020.
Angela F. Qian has published writing in Witness, The Common, Hyphen, Lit Hub, Gay and other outlets. She co-curated the Sweet & Sour Readings in New York City, and is currently at work on a short story collection, as well as other projects. Her website can be found at angelafqian.com and she tweets @anqchan.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of seven poetry collections and one collection of short stories. One recent book, Black Flowers, is published by LSU Press. Other books include Distant Fires, winner of the Grayson Books Poetry Prize, The Owl That Carries Us Away, winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, and Original Bodies, selected for the Michael Waters Poetry Prize and published by Southern Indiana Review Press. Individual poems and stories have appeared in journals that include The Kenyon Review, Slate, The Georgia Review, and The Southern Review. Ramspeck is a three-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. His author website can be found at dougramspeck.com.
Sarah Richards Graba is a writer, teacher, editor, and artist. She had lived in Colorado her whole life, though her DNA comes from all over the world. She has been published for creative work, critical theory, book reviews, and interviews in Morning/Mourning, Bombay Gin, Something on Paper, Semicolon, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Naropa University for writing, research, and literature for writers, and multicultural foundations for future therapists. As a member of collective.aporia, an international arts collective, she organizes online writing and arts workshops for the global artist community.
Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut is a poet, scholar and teacher who lives in Los Angeles. Her original play about the first Korean pop singers, The Fantastic Kim Sisters, was commissioned by East/West Players and will be performed in the fall of 2020. She has a Ph.D. degree in Literature & Creative Writing [End Page 299] from the University of Southern California (2012) and an M.F.A. degree in poetry from the University of Florida (2002). Her first book of poetry, Magnetic Refrain, was published in February 2013 by Kaya Press and she is currently completing a second book entitled Until Qualified For Pearl.
Aimee Seu is a third-year Poe-Faulkner Fellow in the University of Virginia's Creative Writing MFA Program for Poetry. She was recipient of the 2019 University of Virginia Academy of American Poets Prize, the 2016 Temple University Academy of American Poets Prize, the 2020 University of Virginia Henfield Prize for Fiction and recipient of the Mills College Undergraduate Poetry Award. Her work has appeared or is fortchoming in Ninth Letter, BOAAT, Redivider, Raleigh Review, Minnesota Review, Blacklist, Wildness Journal, Harpur Palate, and Runestone Magazine. She is a Philadelphia native.
Samyak Shertok's poems appear or are forthcoming in Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Shenandoah, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from Aspen Words, the Virginia G. Piper Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he has performed his poetry at TEDxUniveristyOfMississippi. His poems have been nominated for Best New Poets and The Best Small Fictions and received an AWP Intro Journals Award this year.
신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin is a poet, writer, artist, and independent curator. She is the author of poetry/ essay collections Unbearable Splendor (Minnesota Book Award); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (Asian American Literary Award) (all published by Coffee House Press). She is the editor of A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota and co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption. Her bilingual (Korean/English) illustrated children's book is Cooper's Lesson. She is the co-director with Su Hwang of the literary organization Poetry Asylum, which recognizes poetry as a human right. She lives in Minneapolis.
ire'ne lara silva is the author of three poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, and CUICACALLI/ House of Song, and a short story collection, flesh to bone which won the Premio Aztlán. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, a collection of poetry and essays. ire'ne is the recipient of a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Fiction Finalist for AROHO's 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldúa Milagro Award. ire'ne is currently working on her first novel, Naci.
Leah Silvieus is the author most recently of the poetry collection Arabilis (Sundress Publications) and is the co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami and has awards and fellowships from The National Book Critics Circle, Fulbright, and Kundiman. Her criticism has appeared in The Harvard Review, The Believer, and elsewhere. She is currently based in New Haven where she studies literature and religion at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. [End Page 300]
Jessica Q. Stark is a mixed-race, Vietnamese poet originally from California. She is a doctoral candidate in English at Duke University where she writes on the intersections of American poetry and comic books. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, the latest titled Vasilisa the Wise (Ethel Press, 2018). Her chapbook, The Liminal Parade, was selected by Dorothea Lasky for Heavy Feather's Double Take Poetry Prize in 2016. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Potluck, Glass Poetry Journal, and others. Her first full-length poetry collection, Savage Pageant, is forthcoming with Birds, LLC. She writes an ongoing poetry zine called INNANET and is an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI.
Born in Seoul and raised in the US, Kim Stoker spent most of her adulthood in South Korea where she was an activist for adoptee rights and an editor at Korean Literature Now. She last taught at Ewha Womans University's Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation. She has an MFA from Antioch University and recently received a Yefe Nof residency. Stoker currently lives stateside and has forthcoming work in Nat. Brut.
Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of Foxlogic, Fireweed (forthcoming in 2020, Backwaters/University of Nebraska Press), Little Spells, James Laughlin Award winner How to Live on Bread and Music, and Salt Memory. She lives in California and teaches poetry at the University of Redlands.
Tian-Ai is a writer and musician from Seattle. She is an alumnus of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. Her work appears in the literary journal Asterism, and has poems forthcoming in Flock magazine, and elsewhere.
Julia Thacker is the granddaughter of a Harlan County coal miner. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in AGNI, Little Star, The Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, and others. She has held fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the National Endowment for the Arts. Other honors include a Pushcart Prize and the Grolier Poetry Prize. She has taught creative writing at Radcliffe Seminars and Tufts University. Her book-length manuscript, The Winter Comb, was a runner-up for the 2019 Berkshire Prize from Tupelo Press. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Eric Tran is a resident physician in psychiatry in Asheville, NC. He is the winner of the Autumn House Press Emerging Writer's contest and the author of The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer. He is also the author of the chapbooks Revisions and Affairs with Men in Suits. His work appears or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere.
Aileen Keown Vaux is a poet and essayist whose chapbook Consolation Prize was published in 2018 by Scablands Books; she writes a bi-monthly column for Spokane, WA's alt-newspaper The Inlander, and interviews writers for The Rumpus. She grew up in Yakima, WA and is inspired by the agricultural landscapes of Eastern Washington State and queer people who live in rural places. Her book Consolation Prize is based on themes from the Central Washington State Fair. [End Page 301]
Natalie Vestin is a writer, artist, and infectious disease researcher from Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of Gomorrah, Baby (Anchor & Plume, 2017) and Shine a light, the light won't pass (MIEL, 2015). Her essays have appeared in Territory, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, The Normal School, and elsewhere, and she has received residencies from Light Grey Art Lab, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Collegeville Institute.
Jeff Whitney is the author of five chapbooks, two of which were co-written with Philip Schaefer. Recent poems can be found in Adroit, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, Salt Hill, and Sycamore Review. He lives in Portland.
Arhm Choi Wild is a queer, Korean-American poet who grew up in the slam community of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and went on to perform across the country, including at Brave New Voices, the New York City Poetry Festival, and Asheville Wordfest. Arhm is a Kundiman fellow with an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize in 2019. Their first book of poems, Cut to Bloom, was the winner of the 2019 Write Bloody Book Contest. Their work appears in the Daring to Repair Anthology, The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures, Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, Split this Rock, Hyphen, Foglifter, Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and other publications. They work as the Director of the Progressive Teaching Institute and as a Diversity Coordinator at a school in New York City.
Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018), winner of the 2019 Devil's Kitchen Reading Award and finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize. She has also translated and edited a chapbook of poems, Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019). Individual poems and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, POETRY, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She has accepted awards and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Ploughshares' Emerging Writers Contest, AWP's WC&C Scholarship Competition, and elsewhere. She is the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and a PhD candidate in Korean literature at the University of Chicago.
Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the best poetry books of 2016 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed. Her previous book Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bytter Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship among other honors. The daughter of Korean immigrants, and a member of the Racial Imaginary Instititute, she teaches at Princeton and in the MFA programs at NYU and Columbia. [End Page 302]
YL Xue lives in NYC and received the Galway Kinnell Memorial Scholarship from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in 2019. [End Page 303]
