Introducing Our New Editors and Contributing Editors

Aaron J. Stone is a PhD candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. Their primary research interests span queer and trans studies, modernist studies, and narrative theory. Stone’s dissertation project, Desires for Form, explores the social crisis of form that nascent queer communities faced in early twentieth-century America as queer people tried to imagine what shapes their lives might take. The project investigates how these subjects turned to narrative to work out their desires for form. Stone has also written a chapter for the edited collection The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race: Why Are We All Gagging? (Intellect Books, 2021). Their work on Charles Chesnutt and American sexology is forthcoming in GLQ.

Caroline Fernelius is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Michigan, where she works at the intersection of 19th century American literature and art historical writing. Her poems have appeared in Storyscape Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, and White Wall Review. You can find her prose in The Decadent Review and The New Southern Fugitives. A graduate of Duke University, Caroline is the recipient of an American Academy of Poets University & College Prize.

On what kind of submissions she’s looking for: “I am especially interested in inventive prose that is as surprising as it is beautiful. Experimentation is great, but it should always be in the service of the project’s overriding consciousness. I tend to gravitate towards work that feels unsettled in some way and enjoy language that inspires (or enacts!) feelings of bewilderment, confusion, or disruption.”

Constanza Contreras is a PhD candidate in the English at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation project looks at racial configurations in the Americas from a hemispheric lens to complicate notions of Latinidad that have historically erased indigeneity and blackness. She focuses on visual and literary narratives and their lingering effects on the racial dynamics of contemporary nation states, and the intersections of race, gender and global indigeneities. Originally from Chile, Constanza is now living in Dublin, Ireland after four years of being lost in the American Midwest. A poet and illustrator, her work was recently featured in the anthology The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT.

On what kind of submissions she’s looking for: “I am interested in poetry that speaks of the intimately but knows how these moments are tethered into a bigger fabric, whatever it may be: family, society, history, and story. Poetry that knows itself to be alive. I am looking for poems that will excite my senses, that will serve as spaces where to tackle the complexities of this bodily existence and that will leave me with more questions than answers. Poems that understand the porosity of borders. Poems that will defy the lines between materiality and language, body and nature, and that will force an undoing but offer a hand for remaking.“

Daniel Weaver is a PhD student in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where he studies the novel and twentieth-century theories of politics and aesthetics. He was a 2019-20 Fulbright Fellow to the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing and has written about culture and books for SupChina, Radii, and the Washington Review of Books. 

On what kind of submissions he’s looking for: “I am looking for writing that is serious, playful, and, above all, curious about literature, culture, and the arts. Essays and interviews should care deeply about their subject, whoever or whatever it is, and find a way to share that commitment with readers. Writing that aspires to be funny, but not cruel, and smart, but not pretentious, is always and especially welcome.”

Katie Willingham is a poet and the author of the collection Unlikely Designs (University of Chicago Press). Her work has been supported by Vermont Studio Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the Helen Zell Writers Program where she earned her MFA. Her work can be found in such journals as Kenyon Review, Poem-A-Day, Bennington Review, Diagram, and Rhino,and in the anthology The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Suzi F. Garcia is the author of the chapbook, Dear Dorothy: A Home Grown Fairytale (Skull + Wind Press, 2020). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing with minors in Screen Cultures and Gender Studies. Suzi is an Executive Editor at Noemi Press, and she currently serves as the CantoMundo Regional Chair for the Midwest. Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming from POETRY, Georgia Review, Fence Magazine, and more. You can find her on Twitter at @SuziG.

Elinam Agbo was born in Ghana and grew up in Kansas. She is a winner of the 2018 PEN/Dau Short Story Prize, two Hopwood Awards for Short Fiction and Nonfiction, and the Les River Fellowship for Young Novelists. Her work has received support from Aspen Words, the Clarion Foundation, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation, among others. A graduate of the 2019 Clarion UCSD Workshop, she holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she co-founded MQR Mixtape, an online imprint of Michigan Quarterly Review. Her writing has appeared in The Bare Life Review, American Short Fiction, Nimrod, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018, and elsewhere. She is currently the 2021-2023 Kenyon Review Fellow in Prose.