DIYA ABBAS is a first-generation Pakistani poet from the Midwest. Her poems are featured or forthcoming in Poetry Daily, RHINO, Foglifter, diode, The Offing, and others. She is currently studying English and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison through the First Wave program. Find more of their work at diyabbas.com.
CAL BEDIENT is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at UCLA. He has published five books of literary criticism and five collections of poems, the most recent being The Breathing Place (Omnidawn). Omnidawn will publish a New and Selected poems in 2026. He was a founder and co-editor of the New California Series of poetry and now co-edits Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion.
AMY BENSON is the author of two books: Seven Years to Zero (Dzanc Books 2017), winner of the Dzanc Books Nonfiction Prize, and The Sparkling-Eyed Boy (Houghton Mifflin 2004), chosen for the Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction, sponsored by Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Recent essays and stories have been published in journals such as Agni, BOMB, Electric Literature, LitHub, and Orion. She teaches writing at Rhodes College in Memphis.
LAURIE BLAUNER is the author of nine books of poetry, five novels, and a creative nonfiction book called I Was One of My Memories. A new poetry book called Come Closer won the 2022 Library of Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander Press. She has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Bomb Magazine, Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, South Dakota Review, among other magazines.
Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? is 2021 Texas Poet Laureate CYRUS CASSELLS’s ninth and latest book. Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems and Lorca to the Umpteenth Power are forthcoming in 2025 and 2026. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas and To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu both received the Texas Institute of Letters’ Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book.
ALFRED CORN has published eleven books of poems, two novels, and three collections of critical essays. He has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, and UCLA. In 2013, he was made a Life Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. In 2016, Chamán Ediciones in Spain published Rocinante, a selection of his work translated in Spanish. In 2017, he was inducted into the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame. In 2021, he published a new version of Rilke’s Duino Elegies and in 2022 a selected poems volume appeared under the title The Returns. A selection of Corn’s poetry translated into Italian recently appeared with I Quadri del Bardo under the title Tutto ciò che è. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
JORDAN DEVERAUX’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sugarhouse Review, Bodega, Cult.Magazine Tilted House Review, The Meadow, Blackbox Manifold, and elsewhere. He runs a poetry magazine called Lost Pilots with two of his friends from graduate school. Originally from Woods Cross, Utah, he now works and plays in NYC.
MARTÍN ESPADA has published more than twenty books. His latest collection of poems is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has also received the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His forthcoming collection, Jailbreak of Sparrows, will be published by Knopf in 2025.
PHILLIS LEVIN’s sixth collection, An Anthology of Rain, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press in April 2025. Her previous collection, Mr. Memory & Other Poems (Penguin Books, 2016), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Levin’s honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Trust of Amy Lowell.
SARA MITCHELL is a Chicago-based writer with a background in film, theatre, and hospitality. Her debut essay, “Red Dirt Road, a Crumple Zone,” began while she was in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was completed while in residency at The Vermont Studio Center. Her work often explores themes of Americana, shaped by her experiences as a critical observer and participant. “Red Dirt Road, a Crumple Zone” is her first published work, showcasing her emerging voice in nonfiction.
RUBY HANSEN MURRAY is a columnist for the Osage News. She’s the winner of The Iowa Review and Montana Nonfiction Prizes, and a MacDowell, Ragdale, and Hedgebrook fellow. Her poetry appears in The Hopkins Review, Ecotone, Moss, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prism, and River Mouth Review. Find her prose in Cutbank, Pleiades, The Massachusetts Review, High Desert Journal, and The Rumpus. She’s a citizen of the Osage and Cherokee Nations, living in the lower Columbia River estuary.
LEYLA LOUED-KHENISSI is a Tunisian-American cognitive neuroscientist and mother based in Lausanne, Switzerland. She holds a PhD in neuroscience from the École Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne. Most of her writing to date has come in the form of arcane, peer-reviewed scientific articles on the neuroimaging of uncertainty and surprise in humans. She has written about this work in Psyche magazine in an attempt to illuminate the arcana of her science.
HEMA PADHU’s short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Pinch, New Letters, Fourteen Hills, American Literary Review, Litro Magazine, and elsewhere. She is an Indian immigrant living in San Francisco. She is currently at work on a linked stories collection.
KEMP POWERS is an American screenwriter, director, and playwright. He is best known for his play One Night in Miami and the 2020 film adaptation of the same name, as well as for co-directing the animated films Soul (2020) (which he also co-wrote) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023). His screenplay for One Night in Miami earned him a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination at the 93rd Academy Awards, while his work on Soul made him the first African-American to co-direct a Disney animated feature.
YANNA ROBISON is a poet from Greenville, North Carolina. Her work has been featured in Epiphany Magazine. She is the recipient of a Hopwood award for undergraduate poetry as well as a Paul and Sonia Handleman Award. She is currently studying English at the University of Michigan.
JOHN SEARCY holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, swamp pink, Beloit Fiction Journal, decomP, and First Intensity. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
WILL SUMMAY (he/him) is a poet and psychotherapist based in Pittsburgh, PA. He has been previously published in SamFiftyFour Literary Journal and Laudanum Literary Review.
SANJANA THAKUR is a writer from Mumbai, India. She is the 2024 winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, The Rumpus, and The Southampton Review. Her poetry has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Booth, and Pigeon Pages. Sanjana is a graduate of UT-Austin’s New Writers Project and Wellesley College.
LISA WARTENBERG VÉLEZ is a Colombian writer of fiction who split her childhood between Bogota and South Florida. Her work has received creative and/or financial support from Bread Loaf, Kenyon Workshops, Ucross Foundation, and Tin House Workshop, and she completed her MFA at the University of Houston in 2023. Her work appears in Nimrod, Ghost Parachute, and elsewhere, and is anthologized in Best Debut Stories 2023 (Catapult) as a PEN / Dau Prize winner.
SYD WESTLEY (they/them) is a poet and artist living in Oakland, California. Holding an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, their work has been supported and/or published by Lambda Literary, the Adroit Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, and others. They also write music reviews at https://sydboyxxxmusic.blogspot.com.
KEVIN WILSON is the author of six books, including Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019) and Now is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco, 2022). His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Southern Review, and two editions of Best American Short Stories. He lives in Sewanee, TN, and teaches at the University of the South.
