ASNIA ASIM is the recipient of the University of Chicago’s Humanities Fellowship and Brandeis University’s Alan Slifka Award. Her poems have received multiple nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Typehouse, Salamander, River Styx, Image, Juked, Southern Humanities Review, and BOOTH, among others. Her work has been anthologized in Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books). Her chapbook Quarantine with Rilke is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
BRIAN CASTLEBERRY’s first novel, Nine Shiny Objects, was a NYT Editor’s Choice, an Indie Next selection, short-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and winner of the Library of Virginia Award in Fiction. His work has been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, Narrative, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. His second novel, Dream of Fire, will be published by Mariner Books in 2023.
SYLVIA CHAN is a venture capitalist who indulges her love for technologies and especially clean technologies in her work. The essay in this issue, also reflecting her interest in bridging the arts and the sciences, is her first attempt at putting them into stories, though she has published scholarly works with Cambridge University Press. Sylvia has also taught at the University of London and University of California, Berkeley and researched at the University of Cambridge.
ASHLEY CROUT graduated from Bard College and the MFA program at Hunter College. She is the recipient of a poetry grant from the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation, and is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has been published in Sojourner, New Orleans Review, Atticus Review, and Dodging the Rain, among others. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina, with her hound, Stella.
LAUREN EGGERT-CROWE is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Bitches of the Drought, a finalist for the 2016 Sundress Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Sixth Finch, DIAGRAM, Tupelo Quarterly, Big Lucks, Hobart, and Gigantic Sequins, among others. She has been awarded residencies at Dorland Mountain Arts and Ragdale. She has an MFA from the University of Arizona.
GABRIELLA FEE’s poetry appears in Washington Square Review, The Common, Guesthouse, LETTERS, Sprung Formal,and elsewhere. Their co-translation of Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto’s “Dolore Minimo” won the 2021 Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize and is under contract with Saturnalia Books. Excerpts appear in Journal of Italian Translation, The Offing, Copper Nickel,and the anthology Italian Trans Geographies.Fee is a graduate instructor and MFA candidate in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
STEPHEN GIBSON is the author of eight poetry collections: Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale (2020 Able Muse Press finalist), Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, University of Arkansas Press), The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize, Story Line Press, Red Hen Press), Paradise (Miller Williams Prize finalist,University of Arkansas Press), and three others.
LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of books of poetry, scholarly essays, and numerous monographs, including The American Poet at the Movies and Poetry Los Angeles. Laurence’s fascination with filmmaking and star power began in “Movieland,” Culver City, California, where as a youngster he and friends would explore nearby MGM lots and sets. Laurence served as editor of MQR from 1977 to 2009.
CYNTHIA GRALLA’s books are The Floating World (Ballantine) and The Demimonde in Japanese Literature (Cambria Press). She has written for Mississippi Review, storySouth, Electric Literature, Salon, Witness, SLICE, and other publications. The essay in this issue is part of Environmental Causes: Essays on Illness and Healing in a Dying World,a collection she is currently writing. She lives on Vancouver Island and teaches writing and literature at Royal Roads University and the University of Victoria.
DEBORA KUAN is the author of Xing (Saturnalia) and Lunch Portraits (Brooklyn Arts Press). Recent poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, and ZYZZYVA. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Santa Fe Art Institute and has been anthologized in the Brooklyn Poets Anthology and Advanced Language and Literature, 2nd edition. She is currently the poet laureate of Wallingford, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and two children. Instagram @poetlaureate_walling.
HARO LEE teaches English in South Korea, where she lives with her grandmother. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Zone 3, The Texas Review, RHINO Poetry, and Dryland, among others. She was the recipient of Epiphany’s inaugural Breakout 8 Writers Prize.
REBECCA LEVI is a New York–born musician and poet based in the south of Chile. Her poems and translations have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Columbia Journal, No Tokens Magazine, among others, and through Princeton University Press and Broadstone Books.
TYLER MOORE is a writer and artist based out of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Tyler is the 2021 recipient of the Eudora Welty Fiction Thesis Prize as well as the 2021 recipient of the Phillip H. Wang Memorial Prize in Poetry. He earned his degrees in English and film production from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Tyler’s work is published, or forthcoming, in perhappened, CP Quarterly, The Lumiere Review, and others.
ZEYNEP ÖZAKAT was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. Her writing has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, where she won the Fiction Open Contest; in Black Warrior Review; and in Gulf Coast Online. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where she received the Shirley Jackson Award in Fiction, the Leonard Brown Prize in Poetry, and a Graduate Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Work. She is currently a 2021–2022 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
JULIE PECORARO lives in Pennsylvania. She received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and has work forthcoming in Indiana Review.
NATHANIEL PERRY is the author of two books of poetry, Nine Acres (American Poetry Review/Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and Long Rules (Backwaters Press, 2021). Recent poems and essays appear in Image, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Virginia and is editor of the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.
WILLIAM PEI SHIH’s stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories, VQR, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Southern Review, Boston Review, F(r)iction, Catapult, and elsewhere. He has been awarded scholarships and support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and the Ragdale Residency. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a recipient of the Dean’s Graduate Fellowship.
JENEÉ SKINNER has a degree in creative writing, studied at the University of Oxford, and is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Crazyhorse Online, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Marianne Russo Award for a novel-in-progress and for the 2021 Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest. Currently, she is the Writing in Color Book Project Fellow for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She can be found on Twitter @SkinnerJenee, on Instagram @jskin94, and at jeneeskinner.com.
LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first book, Water & Salt, won the 2018 Washington State Book Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, and Letters from the Interior, finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. She is currently curating the poetry translation series Poems from Palestine for The Baffler magazine.
MEKIYA WALTERS holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and a BFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His fiction has appeared in Chautauqua, The Write Launch, and Sunspot, and he’s also published poetry. He currently serves as a content writer and editor for ABILITY Magazine.
KATHLEEN WINTER is the author of Transformer, I will not kick my friends, and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past. Her poems and fiction have appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, AGNI, Five Points,and Colorado Review. She received fellowships from the James Merrill House, Cill Rialaig, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Dora Maar House. Her awards include the Ralph A. Johnston Memorial Fellowship and Poetry Society of America’s The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award.
