Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, aphorist, visual artist, pianist as improvisor, blurbist, and poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation in Venice, California. He lives in Los Angeles.
Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is author of The Flayed City (Kaya) and chapbooks The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel) and Our Echo of Sudden Mercy (Next Page). Siya is co-editor of We Were Not Alone (Community Building Art Works) and co-founding editor at Locked Horn Press. Recipient of the Vera Manuel Award, his work appears in Dream Marrow (Burnaby Art Gallery), Best of the Net 2022 (via Split This Rock), and widely in print and online. linktr.ee/harialluri
Photo credit: Erik Haensal
Derek Annis (he/they) is a neurodivergent poet from the Inland Northwest. He is the author of Neighborhood of Gray Houses (Lost Horse Press) and River City Fires (forthcoming from Driftwood Press). Their poems have appeared in The Account, Colorado Review, Epiphany, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review Online, Poet Lore, Spillway, and Third Coast, among others.
Nic Anstett is a Maryland writer who loves the bizarre, spectacular, and queer. She is a graduate from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop; University of Oregon’s MFA program; and the Tin House Summer Workshop, where she was a 2021 Scholar. Her work is published or forthcoming in Witness Magazine, Passages North, North American Review, Barrelhouse, and Lightspeed Magazine.
Byron Baker, painter and ecstatic visual practitioner, telepathically collaborates with poet Will Alexander since 2015, beginning with the group exhibition, “Optic Occultation: Visible Invisibility,” 2017–2022. These collaborators create the series of ten large oil paintings on canvas, culminating in their most recent Mike Kelley Gallery exhibition, “Telepathic Evanescence,” Venice, CA. Also forthcoming is a collaborative book entitled “Anonymous Stella Ravines.” This book consists of 75 black-and-white abstracts by Byron Baker, named and descriptively ignited by the prior named poet.
Photo credit: Lisa Brinker
Nellie Le Beau is the author of Inheritance. Winner of the Los Angeles Review Literary Award, with work translated into Spanish, French, and Arabic, Nellie has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, The Wheeler Centre, and Kenyon Review.
Ashwini Bhasi is a bioinformatician from Kerala, India. She is interested in exploring the somatics of trauma resilience, chronic pain and disability through molecular genetics, poetry and visual art. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Frontier Poetry, Honey Literary, RHINO, The Offing and elsewhere. Musth, which won the 2020 CutBank chapbook contest prize, is her first poetry collection.
Emily Brandt is the author of the poetry collection FALSEHOOD, as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in BOMB, Fence, LitHub, and The Recluse, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from New York University, where she facilitated the Veterans Writing Workshop. Emily is a co-founding editor of No, Dear, and curator of the LINEAGE reading series at Wendy’s Subway. She’s of Sicilian, Polish and Ukrainian descent.
Charli Brissey (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and teacher who works choreographically with various technologies and materials. This primarily includes bodies, cameras, objects, genders, desire, instincts, language, and ecosystems. Their work centers choreography as an invaluable method to research social, political, and ecological phenomena, ultimately to illuminate the simultaneousness of “nature” and “culture.” Brissey’s performance and video work has been presented in various galleries, conferences, film festivals, and performance venues internationally. Their most recent film, Canis Major, toured to nineteen countries and won multiple awards, including Best Experimental Film at OUTFEST and the Richmond International Film Festival. Brissey is an Assistant Professor in Dance at the University of Michigan with affiliations in the Center for World Performance Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. They teach courses in physical practice, video and technology, pedagogy, composition, improvisation, and critical theory.
Teresa Carmody is the author of The Reconception of Marie (2020), Maison Femme: a fiction (2015), and Requiem (2005). Their short stories and essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, WHR, Two Serious Ladies, Diagram, St. Petersburg Review, and more. She co-founded Les Figues Press, and currently directs Stetson University’s MFA program in Florida. Her next book, A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others, is forthcoming from Autofocus Books in 2024.
Michael Chang (they/them) is the author of several collections of poetry, including ALMANAC OF USELESS TALENTS (CLASH Books, 2022) & SYNTHETIC JUNGLE (Northwestern University Press, 2023). Tapped to edit Lambda Literary’s Emerge anthology, their poems have been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net & the Pushcart Prize. They were awarded the Poetry Project’s prestigious Brannan Prize & serve as a poetry editor at the acclaimed journal Fence.
Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered over fifty performance artworks including the déjà vu—live (2022), Jupiter (2021), and Vigil (2021). Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), (ghost gestures) (2021), and the déjà vu (2022). Her writing has also appeared in New Daughters of Africa, Kitchen Table Translation, Migrating Pedagogies, and Experiments in Joy: a Workbook. The aim of her work is to open up space.
CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), which won the 2022 PEN Josephine Miles Award. They received a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award.
Ahana Ganguly is a writer and editor based in New York City. She is a second-year MFA candidate at Pratt Institute and holds a BA in English from Pomona College. She is the submissions editor for Futurepoem and an editorial associate at Enchanted Lion Books. She works primarily in creative nonfiction and the essay.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is an afro-caribbean poet, priestess and practitioner of radical cousinship. She is the author of several books, most recently Dub: Finding Ceremony and Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Alexis is a 2022 Whiting Award Winner in Nonfiction and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow.
Ava Hofmann is a trans woman poet living in Buffalo, NY, where she is a Ph.D. student at the University at Buffalo. She has two full-length books of poems, […] with Astrophil press and love poems / smallness studies with Inside the Castle. She also edits SPORAZINE, a magazine of experimental writing written by trans people. Her website is nothnx.com
Tim Jones-Yelvington is the author of the fiction volumes Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret (Texas Review Press); Strike a Prose: Memoirs of a Lit Diva Extraordinaire (co•im•press); This is a Dance Movie! (Tiny Hardcore Press); and Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There (Rose Metal Press), and the prize-winning poetry volumes Colton Behavioral Therapy (Gazing Grain Press) and Become On Yr Face(DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press).
Carl Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. His most recent book of poetry is Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), and his new prose book is My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022).
Megan Kaminski is a poet and essayist—and the author of three books of poetry, most recently Gentlewomen (Noemi, 2020). Prairie Divination (Sunseen Press, 2022), her illustrated collection of essays + oracle deck with artist L. Ann Wheeler, turns to the plants, animals, and geological features of the prairie as guides for living in good relation to each other. She is Associate Professor of Poetry Writing at the University of Kansas.
L.J. is a writer, content strategist, editor, and professor whose work appears in The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, and others. Her fiction and nonfiction explore the borderlands between cultural expectations for storytelling and its rootedness in the oral tradition. She is at work on a memoir probing the line between love and war, and asking the question of how to tell one’s story in conversation with the language and stories we inherit.
Ginger Ko is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books) and Inherit (Sidebrow), as well as several chapbooks. Her latest project is POWER ON, a book as interactive app, produced by The Operating System. Her poetry and essays can be found in The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere.
Interdisciplinary artist and scholar Cynthia Ling Lee creates work that instigates queer, crip, and feminist-of-color interventions. Lee’s literary output primarily takes the form of writing for performance; her performance work has been presented internationally at venues including Dance Theater Workshop (New York), East West Players (Los Angeles), Kuandu Arts Festival (Taipei), and Chandra-Mandapa: Spaces (Chennai). Cynthia is an associate professor in the Department of Performance, Play and Design at UC Santa Cruz. www.cynthialinglee.com
Beatriz Yanes Martinez (she/they) is a queer undocumented Salvadoran poet raised in Long Island, New York and currently based in Vermont. Their work is informed by bodies of water, oral traditions from their grandparents, a passion for art, and archives. Her work has been published in Bodega Magazine, Acentos Review and La Horchata Zine. She has received fellowships from the Brooklyn Poets, and Community of Writers.
Dona Mayoora is a bilingual/visual/experimental poet and creator of Calligraphy Stories. Her poems have been included in the academic syllabus of universities in India, and published works are Ice Cubukal(2012), Neela Moonga(2019), Listening To Red(2018), Echoes(2019), Language Lines & Poetry(2020) and Ritu|Season(2022). Dona’s visual poems were exhibited in group exhibitions several times in Italy, Spain, USA, Poland, Canada, Switzerland, Portugal & Brazil, and featured in the international anthologies: A History of Visual Text Art, JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry & WAAVe Global Anthology of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry. She has collaborated with poets and artists from Asia, Europe and America. Dona is also a Sullivan Scholar at MFA of the Americas, and she currently lives in Connecticut, U.S.A.
Kym McDaniel is an experimental filmmaker, collaborator, choreographer, and performer. She began filmmaking after a head injury and resulting chronic illnesses changed her relationship to her body, choreography, and dance. Her films have recently screened at the Society for Disability Studies Conference, The Whitney Humanities Center, UnionDocs, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance, and ADF’s Movies by Movers, among others. She has an MFA from the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Screendance within the School of Dance at the University of Utah. www.kymmcdaniel.com
Derek Lee McPhatter creates forward-facing narratives at diverse cultural and technological intersections. Current project: The NightQueen Performance Suite, a collection of evening-length works spanning theater, music, opera, spoken word and new media. A 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, Derek is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and former resident playwright at the National Black Theatre (Harlem, NY). He has written five music-theater works for the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Derek is published in multiple anthologies, including 25 Plays from The Fire This Time Festival (Bloomsbury Press) and the special Afrofuturism volume of Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora.
Photo credit: Jansen B
Yvonne Meier, originally from Switzerland, has been living and working out of New York since 1979. Besides building a career in dance and choreography she has developed her drawing world. The doodles are often one-line drawings that have the beginning in dance improvisation.
Megan Milks is the author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, named a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction,and Slug and Other Stories, both published by Feminist Press. They are working on a memoir in essays called Mega Milk: About My Name (and Family, and Fluidity, and Whiteness, and Cows).They live in Brooklyn.
Olivia Muenz is a disabled writer from New York. She is the author of the poetry collection I Feel Fine (Switchback Books, 2023), which won the 2022 Gatewood Prize, and the chapbook Where Was I Again (Essay Press, 2022). She holds an MFA from Louisiana State University, where she earned the Robert Penn Warren Thesis Award in prose and served as an editor for New Delta Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal.
Leanne Ogasawara was the winner of the 2020 Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, judged by Joyce Carol Oates. She has worked as a translator from Japanese for more than twenty years. Her creative writing has appeared in The Millions, Kyoto Journal, Hedgehog Review, Entropy, the Dublin Review of Books, Pleiades Magazine, and Gulf Coast Journal. See her eclectic monthly column at the science and arts blog 3 Quarks Daily, and her Substack at https://dreaminginjapanese.substack.com/
Angela Peñaredondo is queer, nonbinary filpinx writer and author of nature felt but never apprehened (upcoming Noemi Press, 2023) and All Things Lose Thousands of Times (winner of the 2016 Inlandia Institute’s Hillary Gravendyk Book Prize). An interdisciplinary writer, artist and educator, their work can be found in The Academy of American Poets, Pleiades, Apogee Journal and elsewhere. They are a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, Macondo, TinHouse and the Community of Writers. They are an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, San Bernardino.
Dominica Phetteplace writes fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Wigleaf, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Best Microfiction. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes; a Rona Jaffe Award; a Barbara Deming Award; and fellowships from Tin House, Djerassi, and MacDowell. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the Clarion West Writers Workshop.
Lorraine Schein is a New York writer and poet. Her work has appeared in VICE Terraform, Strange Horizons, NewMyths and Underland Arcana, and in the anthologies Wild Women and Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana del Rey & Sylvia Plath. The Futurist’s Mistress, her poetry book, is available from Mayapple Press. Her new book, The Lady Anarchist Cafe, is out now from Autonomedia.
You can find her work ‘Zodiac Station’ in SomaFlights.
Ricky Ray is a poet, essayist and eco-mystic who lives with his wife and his old brown dog in the old green hills of the Hudson Valley. He is the author of Fealty; Quiet, Grit, Glory; and The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself, a finalist for The Laurel Prize. He was educated at Columbia University and Bennington College, and he lectures on poetry, animism and integral ecology. He sings and things at rickyray.earth.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (she/they) is a queer, sick/disabled, brown/Colombian, poet, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. She is author of The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) and their chapbook, Ephemeral, is the 2022 winner of the Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize, to be published by EcoTheo Collective in 2023. She wants to swim with you in the raucous and joyful possibilities of crip poetics and abolition dreams.
Bishakh Som is an Indian-American trans femme artist and author. Her work has appeared in publications like The New Yorker, The Boston Review and The Georgia Review. Her book Apsara Engine (The Feminist Press) is the winner of a 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel and a 2021 Lambda Literary Award winner for Best LGBTQ Comics. Her graphic memoir Spellbound (Street Noise Books) was also a 2021 Lambda finalist.
Photo credit: Shriya Samavai
Raisa Tolchinsky writes about love, grief, and the wisdom of the body. Her debut book Glass Jaw is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2024. Raisa earned her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Virginia and her B.A. from Bowdoin College. She has previously lived in Chicago, Italy, and New York, where she trained as an amateur boxer. Currently, Raisa is the Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
RONALDO V. WILSON, PhD, interdisciplinary artist, poet, and academic, has recently featured his drawings, video, and performance in a solo exhibit at the Hanes Art Gallery, Wake Forest University, and new drawings in conversation with Torkwase Dyson at Miller ICA, Carnegie Mellon University with University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Wilson is also the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; and Lucy 72. His latest books are the artist book Carmelina: Figures, and Virgil Kills: Stories. The recipient of numerous fellowships, including Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo, Wilson is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program; principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies); and affiliate faculty member of DANM (Digital Arts and New Media).
Terri Witek’s 8 books of poetry include her newest collection, Something’s Missing in This Museum (2023). Witek’s art/text mixes are especially featured in collaboration: she teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes; they also lead The Fernando Pessoa Game at the Disquiet International Literary Program each summer in Lisbon. Their work is represented by the liminal in Valencia, Spain. terriwitek.com
Dom Witten is a Black poet raised on the end of a one-way street in Detroit, MI and the Co-founder of the Poetics Lab. She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Dom’s poems are published or forthcoming in hex literary, Radar Poetry, Black Minds Magazine, Greensboro Review and Lindenwood Review. She is the winner of the 2022 Amon Liner Poetry Award and 2022 Academy of American Poets Prize at UNCG.
Stella Wong is the author of SPOOKS, winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, and AMERICAN ZERO, selected for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize by Danez Smith. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Wong’s poems have appeared in POETRY, Colorado Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, the LA Review of Books, and more.
