Elmaz Abinader has published a memoir, Children of the Roojme: A Family’s Journey from Lebanon, and two books of poetry, In the Country of My Dreams . . ., winner of PEN Oakland, and This House, My Bones. Elmaz teaches at Mills College at Northeastern University and was a cofounder of VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation.
an chang joon is the author of God-Disease, which won the 2023 Mary McCarthy Prize, and is the Korean translator for Nellie Hermann’s novel The Season of Migration. His writing received support from the Tin House Scholars program and appears in The Iowa Review, Atticus Review, Columbia Journal, and Gulf Coast.
Mary Buchinger, author of seven poetry collections, including There Is Only the Sacred and the Desecrated, Navigating the Reach (2024 Massachusetts Book Award Honors), and Virology, teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. Her work appears in AGNI, Plume, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. www.MaryBuchinger.com
Sébastien Luc Butler was born and raised in Michigan. He is the author of Sky Tongued Back with Light (Black Lawrence Press, 2026) and Viscera (Four Way Books, 2027), finalist for the National Poetry Series. A former Poe/Faulkner Fellow in Poetry, he lives in New York City.
Merrill Cole’s poems have appeared in such venues as New York Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. A queer theorist and translator, he teaches English at Western Illinois University, currently serving as Chapter President of University Professionals of Illinois, an academic union affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.
Carlina Duan is a poet from Michigan. She is the author of the poetry collections I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017) and Alien Miss (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021). Carlina is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches poetry in the Creative Writing program.
Sara Elkamel holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University and currently lives in Cairo. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Field of No Justice and Garden City.
Yahya Frederickson’s recent poetry collections include The Last Eelpouts (North Dakota State University Press, 2026) and Khumásiyát (Finishing Line, 2025), and his poems have recently appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Flyway, The Georgia Review, The Louisville Review, Poem-a-Day, and RHINO. He is a professor of English at Minnesota State University Moorhead, on Dakota and Anishinaabe lands.
Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her first full-length collection, Fool in a Blue House, won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and was published in 2023 by the University of Tampa Press. She lives and teaches in Champaign, Illinois.
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, The New York Times-bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and The New York Times-bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects.
Raza Ali Hasan is the author of three poetry books: Grieving Shias (Sheep Meadow Press, 2006), 67 Mogul Miniatures (Autumn House Press, 2009), and Sorrows of the Warrior Class (Sheep Meadow Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, and Crazyhorse. He teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Cynthia Hogue’s recent collection is instead, it is dark (2023). Her honors include two NEA fellowships and residency fellowships at MacDowell and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. She served as the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University until 2018. Her new collection is The Witness-Tree, forthcoming from Red Hen Press.
Richard Jackson is the author of eighteen books of poetry, including Footprints and The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems, and sixteen books of prose and anthologies. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. He was awarded the Order of Freedom by the President of Slovenia and has received Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA, and NEH Fellowships.
Ariel Katz’s fiction has been published in The Sewanee Review, The Missouri Review, The Threepenny Review, Electric Lit, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a PhD candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
Mehr-Afarin Kohan is a Toronto-based writer. Her fiction appears in The Missouri Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Citron Review, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Born in Tehran, Iran, she immigrated to Canada as a teenager. She is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst by profession. For more information, visit mehrafarinkohan.com.
Megan Levad Beisner is the author of two poetry collections, Why We Live in the Dark Ages and What Have I to Say to You. A MacDowell Fellow and cofounder of Public School Poetry, Meg lives in rural California with her husband and son near Yosemite National Park.
Ting Lin is a writer based in Oakland, California. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Cincinnati Review, Washington Square Review, The Margins, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction writing can be found in publications such as The Nation and The Baffler.
Roger Mitchell’s recent books of poetry are Reason’s Dream and As Water Moves, both with Dos Madres Press. He has recently published a biography of the poet Jean Garrigue, Make Forever Now. Retired from teaching at Indiana University Bloomington, he lives in Jay, New York, with his wife, the fiction writer Dorian Gossy.
Julia Anna Morrison is a poet and filmmaker based in Iowa City. Her first book of poems, Long Exposure, won the Moon City Poetry Award in 2022. She has work recently appearing in or forthcoming from Brink, LIT, Bennington Review, Poetry Northwest, and Oxford Poetry. You can find her at www.juliaannamorrison.com and @snorkelmaiden.
R.J. Petteway is a Portland-based public health professor and poet. His work has been recognized with a National Poetry Month Prize, a Paper of the Year Award, and a Pushcart Prize nomination, among other honors. His poems have appeared in both academic public health and traditional poetry venues, including Bellevue Literary Review, Epiphany, Brain Mill Press, International Journal of Epidemiology, Health Affairs, and Critical Public Health. An alum of UVA, Michigan, and UC Berkeley, he still represents The Ville. #FirstGen.
Victoria Jean Reynolds holds an MFA in poetry from George Mason University. Her work has been recently featured in West Branch, Salt Hill, and Muzzle. She was selected and served as an Isle Royale Artist-in-Residence during the summer of 2025. She currently works as the poetry editor for Stillhouse Press.
Anji Shin is a British Korean writer. She received the Francis LeMoyne Page Award and Mellor Fund from Princeton University for her short fiction and is an alumna of the Tin House Summer Workshop. Born in Oxford, she lives in Brooklyn and is at work on her first novel.
Dalia Taha is a Palestinian poet and playwright based in Ramallah. The author of three poetry books, a novel, two plays, and a children’s poetry book, Taha was a Banipal Visiting Writer Fellow and won the 2025 Writers’ Guild of Norway’s Solidarity Award. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Brown University and teaches at Birzeit University.
Sophia Terazawa is the author of the poetry collections Oracular Maladies (Noemi Press, 2026), Anon (Deep Vellum, 2023), and Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum, 2021) as well as a novel, Tetra Nova (Deep Vellum, 2025).
Asha Thanki’s novel A Thousand Times Before won the 2025 Balcones Prize and was one of NPR’s and The Boston Globe’s best books of the year. Asha’s work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Common, Catapult, and elsewhere. She holds a University of Minnesota MFA and is a Kundiman Fellow.
Josie Tolin is the 2024–2026 Fiction Fellow at Emory University. Her work has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hambidge Center, and more. Her short stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from Oxford American, The Rumpus, Copper Nickel, Salamander, Five Points, and elsewhere.
H.R. Webster is the author of What Follows (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). Her poems can be found in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Offing, Ecotone, AGNI, and Guernica. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley.
Aurelia Wills’s stories have been published in The Journal, North American Review, The Common, Hayden’s Ferry Review, CALYX, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her young adult novel Someone I Wanted to Be was published by Candlewick Press. She was artist-in-residence at the Glen Arbor Arts Center in 2024.
C. Dale Young is the author of a novel and six collections of poetry, most recently Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, he lives in San Francisco, where he practices medicine full-time.
