NATALIE BAKOPOULOS is the author of Scorpionfish (Tin House, 2020) and The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012). Her work has appeared in Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Mississippi Review, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.
CHAUN BALLARD is a member of the poetry faculty in the Alaska Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA program, a doctoral student of poetry, an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, an assistant poetry editor for Prairie Schooner, an assistant poetry editor for Terrain.org, and a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Chaun Ballard’s chapbook, Flight, was the winner of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and is published by Tupelo Press. His poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, The New York Times, The Slowdown, and other literary magazines.
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). A Pushcart Prize winner, he has received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and Cave Canem. He serves on the editorial board at Alice James Books. “It’s Important I Remember That the Enemy Is Always Within—” will be published in It’s Important I Remember and appears courtesy of Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press.
APOLLO CHASTAIN (ze/hir) is a trans, cripple-punk twenty-one-year- old. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize and three- time winner in the national YoungArts competition, Apollo’s work appears or is forthcoming in journals including Poets.org, a PEN America fellowship publication, Diode Poetry Journal, and Rhino, and under a dead name in journals including The Rumpus. Visit hir at apollopoet.wordpress.com or on Instagram @apollo.chastain.
LEILA CHATTI is a Tunisian American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize and the 2021 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and four chapbooks. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program.
ANNE GLASER was born and raised in Indianapolis before moving to Chicago. She earned a BA in Education from Purdue University, an MS in Special Education from Butler University, and a JD from Valparaiso School of Law. Anne worked in Chicago as a healthcare attorney before working as a medical compliance officer with a Chicago pain management practice. Her writing has been published in the Valparaiso University Law Review and Mothers Always Write.
PATRYCJA HUMIENIK, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer and editor based in Madison, Wisconsin. She has developed writing and movement workshops for the Henry Art Gallery, Arts + Literature Laboratory, Northwest Film Forum, The Seventh Wave, in prisons, and elsewhere. Her first book, We Contain Landscapes, is forthcoming with Tin House.
EVE JONES is the author of the poetry collection Bird in the Machine (Turning Point, 2010). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as AGNI, Blackbird, Conduit, DIAGRAM, FIELD, Lydwine, Mid-American Review, Vinyl, and The Best American Poetry. She lives in Northeast Florida.
JEREMY TEDDY KARN is a Liberian poet and an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His chapbook, Miryam Magdalit, was selected for the 2021 New-Generation African Poets (APBF) by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. His poems have appeared in Lolwe, Poetry Wales, The Adroit Journal, The Penn Review, trampset, The Ilanot Review, and elsewhere.
MELISSA KWASNY is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Cloud Path (Milkweed Editions) and Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today (University of Washington Press). She lives in western Montana.
SARAH MINOR is the author of Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press, 2021), Bright Archive (Rescue Press, 2020), and The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press, 2016). She serves as the Video Essay and Cinepoetry section editor at TriQuarterly and teaches at the University of Iowa.
PETER E. MURPHY was born in Wales and grew up in New York City. Author of eleven books and chapbooks, his prose and poetry have appeared in Guernica, Harpur Palate, Hippocampus, New Welsh Reader, Rattle, The Sun, and elsewhere. A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption is forthcoming from Toplight Books, an imprint of McFarland. He is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University in Atlantic City. www.peteremurphy.com
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Medal of the Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the Jerusalem Prize. She is the author of the novel Butcher (Knopf, May 2024) as well as the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, The Falls, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, and The Accursed. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
VINCE OMNI is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He holds an MFA from the University of Kansas, where he worked in the History of Black Writing (HBW) research center. He is a winner of the Margaret Walker Memorial Prize in Fiction, a Hurston/Wright Fellow, a Kimbilio Fellow, and co-founder of SoulClap: A Black Joy Journal. His story “Mine Own” will be published in Virgin Islands Noir (Akashic, forthcoming).
ESTHER RA is the author of A Glossary of Light and Shadow (Diode Editions, 2023) and book of untranslatable things (Grayson Books, 2018). Her work has been published in Boulevard, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rattle, The Rumpus, Bellingham Review, and The Korea Times, among others. She has received numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize and 49th Parallel Award, and is winner of the Sweet Lit Poetry Contest. Esther is currently a JD candidate at Stanford Law School. estherra.com; Instagram: @esther.haelan.ra
MICHELLE SACKS is the author of the story collection Stone Baby and the novels You Were Made for This and All the Lost Things. Her work has been translated into seven languages, and You Were Made for This is currently being adapted for the screen.
EVELYN SANCHEZ was born in New Mexico and was raised near Washington, DC. She earned an MFA from New York University’s low-residency program in Paris, a JD from Chicago-Kent College of Law, an LLM in Environmental Law from The George Washington University, and a BA in English from Virginia Commonwealth University. Evelyn has served in the United States Air Force and lives in Madrid, Spain.
STEFFI SIN is a Chinese American writer from San Francisco with an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University. Her work centers on family, inheritance, and the intersection of language and belonging. Her writing has been published in The Best Small Fictions 2022, The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She now teaches English at her local community college.
CHARLIE SORRENSON is a queer, trans writer who grew up in Indiana and New Zealand. A third-year fiction candidate at UC Irvine, he was a 2023 Lambda Scholar and a finalist for the 2023 Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. His work is published in Apogee and Tor, among other publications, and he is an alum of the Tin House and Clarion Workshops. Find him on Instagram @charliesorrenson.
TERRY ANN THAXTON has published three poetry collections, Mud Song, Getaway Girl, and The Terrible Wife, as well as a textbook, Creative Writing in the Community: A Guide. Two of her poetry books have been awarded a Florida Book Award. She’s published essays and poetry in New Letters, The Missouri Review, Chattahoochee Review, Pithead Chapel, CALYX, Gulf Coast, and other journals. She teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida.
FERNANDO TRUJILLO is a native of El Paso, Texas. His work has appeared with Passages North, The Cortland Review, and Susurrus Magazine. They have been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. In his free time he likes going for long walks and reading Tang poetry.
JODIE NOEL VINSON holds an MFA in nonfiction creative writing from Emerson College. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Harvard Review, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, Literary Hub, and AGNI, among other places. She is the recipient of the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction, the Ninth Letter Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and a residency from the Jentel Foundation. www.jodienoelvinson.com
ANDY YOUNG’s second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her work has appeared or will soon in The Missouri Review, Pidgeonholes, and Drunken Boat. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. With Khaled Hegazzi, she translates poetry from Arabic, published in Los Angeles Review of Books and the Norton anthology Language for a New Century.
