GEORGE ABRAHAM (they/هو) is an enraged Palestinian who demands every reader to fight, by any means necessary, to end the escalating Zionist-US genocide in Gaza. Against the fascist pro-genocide University of Michigan, their words appear here to honor the caring curation of Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. In editing Mizna and HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry, they hope you will honor the words of Palestinians by fighting for us while we are still alive.
EZZA AHMED is an educator and poet based in NYC. Her poetry is concerned with diaspora, memory, and water (rivers, creeks, lakes, etc.). When she isn’t writing, she enjoys cozying up with a good cup of tea. You can find her poems in Wande Magazine, The Idaho Review, The Gingerbug Press, Sycamore Review, and Apogee Journal.
janan alexandra is the author of COME FROM (BOA Editions, 2025). A recipient of the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, janan has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, the Fulbright Program, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. janan currently teaches Creative Writing at Indiana University as well as in community spaces, edits poetry for The Rumpus, and plays fiddle with the Sweet May Dews.
YOUSRI ALGHOUL is a Palestinian writer from Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City. He has published numerous essays, six story collections, and three novels: Gaza ‘87 (2017), Gallows of Darkness (2021), and Clothing that Miraculously Survived (2024). Alghoul has been a featured speaker on Palestinian affairs at events in Asia, Europe, and the US.
STEFANI J ALVAREZ (she/her) is a transgender migrant worker and activist based in Saudi Arabia from 2008 until 2022. At the Philippine National Book Awards, her Ang Autobiografia ng Ibang Lady Gaga (VisPrint, 2015) won Best Book of Nonfiction Prose and Kagay-an at Isang Pag-Ibig sa Panahon ng All-out War (Psicom, 2018) was a finalist in the Best Book of Short Fiction category. She is an alumna writer-in-residence at Germany’s Akademie Schloss Solitude. (https://stefanijalvarez.com)
AFUA ANSONG, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Afua is also the founder of the Adinkra Poetry Prize, which supports emerging poets in Ghana. Explore her work at afuasong.com.
MICO ASTRID is a Filipino/American interdisciplinary artist whose work explores diasporic identity and memory. As a formerly undocumented immigrant, their practice centers the illumination of stark realities under oppressive states—ultimately working toward a greater collective understanding of injustices embedded in current systems. Mico is a recipient of a Tin House Residency and an Undocupoets Fellowship. Their work can be found in Here to Stay (2024), The Quarterless Review, and at micoastrid.com.
ZEINA AZZAM is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. She is the poet laureate of the City of Alexandria, Virginia, for 2022-25. Her publications include the full-length collection Some Things Never Leave You (2023) and the chapbook Bayna Bayna, In-Between (2021), in addition to poems in online magazines, literary journals, and anthologies. Since 2016, Zeina has served as a mentor for We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a writing program for youth in Gaza, and is currently the poetry editor for WANN. She also volunteers for Grassroots Alexandria, advocating locally for the civil rights of vulnerable communities. Zeina holds an M.A. in Arabic literature from Georgetown University. www.zeinaazzam.com
SAVANNAH BALMIR is a Caribbean-American writer from Mount Vernon, New York. She studied English at Howard University and earned an MFA at the University of Kentucky. Savannah has received fellowships and residencies from Kimbilio, Oxbelly, and Thread Senegal, and her short story “Night Riding,” published in Pinch Journal, was longlisted for the 2024 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean American Writer’s Prize. Her work has appeared in Kweli, Pree, The Seventh Wave, Torch, and elsewhere.
SANJANA BIJLANI writes with questions of care and accountability. Her writing appears in wildness, Cream City Review, 68to05, and elsewhere.
VICTORIA CHANG’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little Brown in the U.K. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.
ALTON M MELVAR DAPANAS (they/them) is an essayist, poet, and translator from the southern Philippines and author of M of the Southern Downpours (2024), In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (2023), and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (2021). Currently an editor-at-large at Asymptote, they’ve appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press), and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Pan Macmillan UK). (https://linktr.ee/samdapanas)
JULIO CESAR DIAZ is a gay Texan Centroamericano rediscovering Houston. They’re the recipient of the 2024 Santa Fe Art Institute BIPOC Award and the 2023 Mass MoCA Massachusetts Artist Fellowship. Diaz’s work can be found in Proverse: Hong Kong, The Cortland Review, Pleiades Magazine, and elsewhere. They’re a graduate of the MFA for Poets & Writers Program at UMass Amherst. Diaz serves as a poetry editor for Poetry Currency.
SAFIA ELHILLO is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022), and the novels in verse Home Is Not a Country and Bright Red Fruit (Make Me a World/Random House, 2021 and 2024). With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).
ÁNGEL GARCÍA, the proud son of Mexican immigrants, is the author of Indifferent Cities (Tupelo Press, forthcoming), winner of a Helena Whitehill Book award and Teeth Never Sleep (University of Arkansas Press), recipient of a CantoMundo Poetry Prize, an American Book Award, and finalist for a PEN America Open Book Award and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell.
SADIA HASSAN is a Somali American poet and essayist from Atlanta. She is the author of Enumeration (Akashic Books, 2020), part of the New-Generation African Poets chapbook set. Her work has appeared in Longreads, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the American Academy of Poets Poem-A-day and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, WI where she was a former Jay C and Ruth Halls Poetry fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing.
GISELLE S. HERNÁNDEZ is a Mexican-North American writer, poet, performer and energy worker. She earned her MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Previous work has appeared in The Comstock Review, and her essay, “The Purpose of My Trip to Tijuana” was published in the collection Living Together, Living Apart: Mixed Status Families and U.S. Immigration Policy. She’s currently at work on finalizing her hybrid memoir Altar. Her website: giselleshernandez.com
BHANU KAPIL is an Asian-American British poet. For twenty-four years, she taught performance and creative writing in the U.S, at Naropa University and Goddard College. Based now in the U.K. as an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, she is researching the archive of Enoch Powell, a British politician who, in 1968, called for the repatriation of the Commonwealth-descended population and their British-born children. TRIPTYCH UPON WAKING draws upon this research, in addition to notes for Ban en Banlieue, which were not included in the book published by Nightboat in 2015. Ban is a girl who lies down on the ground just as a Far Right rally begins, on St. George’s Day (April 23rd, 1979), in the town hall of Southall, Middlesex, an immigrant enclave. Perhaps the third element of this triptych is an attempt to imagine non-genetic descendants. Is poetry the place where it might be possible to communicate with them? The form of the work, an idea of lifting disparate pieces from owing water, derives from a childhood memory of washing clothes in the river Sutlej, in the foothills of the Himalayas.
TOBI KASSIM was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and has lived in the United States since 2003. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Volta, The Brooklyn Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, Zocalo Public Square, Four Way Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Dear Sly Stone, was published by Spiral Editions. Tobi was a 2021 Undocupoets fellow, received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is an associate poetry editor for West Branch.
noam keim (they/them) is a trauma worker, medicine maker and flâneur freak based on stolen Lenni-Lenape land known as Philadelphia where they create webs of support for communities impacted by the legal system.Their non-fiction writing weaves themes close to their heart: antizionism, reverence to the land, healing, queerness, colonialism, plants. Their essays can be found in ALOCASIA, The Massachusetts Review, The Kenyon Review and others. Their essay Fruits of the Desert was named Notable Best American Essay 2024 and their debut essay collection The Land is Holy was published in 2024 via Radix Coop. Connect on IG: noamkeim or noamkeim.com.
NATHALIE KHANKAN is the author of Quiet Orient Riot (Omnidawn), recipient of the 2021 California Book Award in Poetry. She teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley.
GRAHAM LIDDELL is a writer, translator, and scholar of modern Arabic literature. A recent recipient of a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, he wrote a dissertation on narration as a navigational tool in unauthorized migration journeys from the Arab world and Afghanistan. In 2022, Liddell edited an issue of Absinthe entitled Orphaned of Light: Translating Arab and Arabophone Migration. He currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Hope College.
Born in the year of the metal goat, ANNI LIU is the author of Border Vista (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and was a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2022. She’s the recipient of an Undocupoets Fellowship, a Djanikian Scholarship from the Adroit Journal, and residencies at Civitella Ranieri, the Anderson Center, and University of the Arts. She’s an editor at Graywolf Press and lives in Philadelphia.
FARID MATUK is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), The Real Horse (University of Arizona Press, 2018), and Moon Mirrored Indivisible (University of Chicago Press, 2025). With visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Matuk created the book-arts project Redolent, recipient of the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. From Spanish, Matuk has translated Tilsa Otta’s selected poems, publishing these under the title The Hormone of Darkness (Graywolf Press, 2024). His poems appear in The Paris Review, The Nation, Brooklyn Rail, Bomb magazine, Lana Turner Journal, Poetry magazine, among others, and they have been anthologized most recently in The Best American Experimental Poetry, Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, and the Library of America’s Latino Poetry. Matuk’s work has been supported by residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, a visiting Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship from United States Artists.
ALINE MELLO is a Brazilian immigrant raised in the South. She is the author of More Salt than Diamond (Andrews McMeel, 2022). Her work has been included in anthologies such as Breakbeat Poets: Latinext, Somewhere We Are Human, and Here to Stay. Her poems have been published in The New Republic, Poets.org’s Poem-A-Day, The Georgia Review, and others. She is an Undocupoet fellow and has an MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University.
RAJIV MOHABIR is the author of five books of poetry including Seabeast (Four Way Books 2025), and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and for the Guyana Prize for Literature. He is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
BEATRIZ BRENES MORA is an award winning Costa Rican actress, a film school graduate, an immigrant, and a writer. Her work has been published in Barrelhouse and Un Cuento Al Día (a Chilean online literary blog). Her short story “How to Make Tamales After Lucía” was a semi-finalist for the 2023 Sewanee Review Fiction Contest. She’s been to the Tin House Summer and Winter Workshop, Anaphora Arts, Macondo Writers Workshop, the Writing in Color Retreat and was a semi-finalist for the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati.
MIGWI MWANGI is a storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya. He is a graduate candidate at NYU’s Creative Writing MFA program. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Fence among others. He has been nominated for Best New Poets 2024.
HERMELINDA HERNANDEZ MONJARAS was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, and identifies as both an indígena and an undocumented poet of Zapoteco descent. Raised in Fresno, California, she pursued her MFA in Creative Writing.
URAYOÁN NOEL is the translator of works by Wingston González and Nicole Cecilia Delgado and the editor and translator of Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha, a finalist for the National Translation Award. The author of eight books of poetry and of a prize-winning critical study of Nuyorican poetry, Noel lives in the Bronx and is the Director of Graduate Studies of NYU’s MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish. Translator’s note. The original is part of a series of unpublished “sea-sunset” poems that were not included in Berenguer’s book Composición de lugar (Montevideo, ARCA, 1976), celebrated for its innovative serial and concrete poetics. The series was edited and introduced by Alfredo Alzugarat and published in 2021 under the title “Los ponientes olvidados” on the website of the Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay. I am grateful to Alzugarat and to Álvaro Díaz Berenguer for allowing me to publish this translation. U.N.
SUSAN NGUYEN’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, an Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Poetry Northwest, AAWW’s The Margins, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is currently the editor in chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review.
JOSÉ FELIPE OZUNA was born in Guerrero, Mexico, and lives in Minneapolis, MN. He is an Undocupoets Fellow and a 2023–24 Mentor Series Fellow. His poems are published in Poetry Online, The Rumpus, Muzzle, the anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, and elsewhere.
SWATI RANA is a poet and professor. Her work has appeared in Asian American Literary Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Dalhousie Review, Granta, Jacket2, The Paris Review, swamp pink, Wasafiri, and elsewhere. She is the author of Race Characters (2020), which explores how social personhood and literary persona intersect. In 2023, she received the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Poetry. She teaches at UC Santa Barbara in the English Department.
NO’U REVILLA is an ʻŌiwi poet, educator, and lifetime “slyly / reproductive” student of Haunani-Kay Trask. With aloha ʻāina in her veins, she joins the global demand that all oppressed and occupied peoples, from Palestine to West Papua to Kanaky to Hawaiʻi nei, be free. May we never stop reaching for each other.
DARIA ROSE is a writer based in Brooklyn, a PhD student in Art History at Harvard, and a refugee. Her collection of stories Seagulls is forthcoming in 2026.
SUBRAJ SINGH is a writer from Guyana. He has an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Maryland and is currently studying for his PhD in English at the University of Missouri. He is a Tin House Scholar, a Lambda Literary Fellow, and a Clarion West alum. His fiction has been published in AGNI, New England Review, and Gulf Coast.
MONICA SOK is the author of A NAIL THE EVENING HANGS ON (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). She is a recipient of fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, National Endowment for the Arts, Saltonstall Foundation, and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. She lives in New York City and teaches at Barnard College at Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in The Believer, Paris Review, POETRY, New England Review, and Washington Post.
KIM SOUSA (they/she) is a Brazilian American immigrant, poet, editor and abolitionist. Their latest manuscript, WALKING BACK INTO NIGHT, was named a Manuscript of Extraordinary Merit by Tupelo Press’ Summer 2024 open reading period. They are the author of the 2020 St. Lawrence Prize winning and SPD bestselling poetry collection, ALWAYS A RELIC NEVER A RELIQUARY (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). And co-editor of both ATÉ MAIS: LATINX FUTURISMS (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2024) and NO TENDER FENCES: A BENEFIT ANTHOLOGY OF IMMIGRANT AND FIRST-GENERATION POETRY (limited run, 2019), which donated 100% of its proceeds to the immigrant advocacy network, RAICES Texas. You can find Kim in Brazil or NYC and at www.kimsousawrites.com. Talk to them about The X-Files.
ROBERTO TEJADA is the author of the poetry collections Carbonate of Copper (Fordham, April 2025), Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022), Full Foreground (2012), Exposition Park (2010), and Mirrors for Gold (2006), several works of art and media history, and the collection of essays in Latinx cultural poetics Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (2019). He serves as faculty at the University of Houston where he teaches in the Departments of English, Creative Writing, and Art History.
BUNKONG TUON is a Cambodian American writer, Pushcart Prize–winning poet, and professor who teaches at Union College in Schenectady, in NY. He is the author of several poetry collections. In 2024, he published What Is Left, a Greatest Hits chapbook from Jacar Press, and Koan Khmer, his debut novel from Northwestern UP/Curbstone Books. He lives with his wife and children in Upstate New York.
MAI DER VANG is the author of AFTERLAND, YELLOW RAIN, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and PRIMORDIAL. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Tin House, the American Poetry Review, and POETRY, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.
MARY ZHOU is a multimedia artist based in Philadelphia. They are the author of cave mouth tongue loose (The Head & Hand Press, 2024) in collaboration with visual artist Nora E Luks. They have received support from VONA/Voices, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Brooklyn Poets, and their work is shared in The Offing, The Rumpus, Fence, Foglifter, and ANMLY.
