49th Issue Contributors

Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions, 2016), attempts to queer Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Simone White selected their second assemblage, Villainy for forthcoming publication with Les Figues. They toured with Sister Spit March 2018 & are hype to live in New York. EXTRATRANSMISSION [Kelsey Street Press, 2019] is their first book.
John Barrington is a poet from Western New York, now living in New York City. Much of his work concerns the subconscious image and process of the rural queer. His practice includes multimedia performance and music. John performs as one third of the improvisational collective Cleo. His work has appeared in 8 Poems. Instagram: @110aberdeen 
Julian Talamantez Brolaski is a poet and country singer.  It is the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), Gowanus Atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), and coeditor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of Kari Edwards, as well as lead singer and rhythm guitarist for the Brooklyn-based Juan & the Pines and Oakland-based The Western Skyline.  Julian maintains a blog of handwritten poems here: https://julianspoems.tumblr.com/ Stephanie Chang is a sixteen year-old poet from Canada. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Kenyon Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Cosmonauts Avenue. She has been recognized by the Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize, National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and was a runner-up for the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize. Currently, she writes for Her Culture’s digital magazine.
Chiwan Choi is the author of 3 collections of poetry, The Flood (Tía Chucha Press, 2010), Abductions (Writ Large Press, 2012), and The Yellow House (CCM, 2017). He wrote, presented, and destroyed the novel Ghostmaker throughout the course of 2015. Chiwan is a partner at Writ Large Press and a member of The Accomplices.
Meredith Clark is a poet and writer whose work has received Black Warrior Review’s nonfiction prize and been published in Poetry Northwest,
Phoebe, Gigantic Sequins,
and The Dusie Kollektiv. These days, she
writes about trees, bodies, time, and the uncategorizable. She is at work
on her second book.
Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of BEAST FEAST, and Flung/ Throne, both out from Ahsahta Press, and the chapbook Perverse, All Monstrous, from Nion Editions.  They live in the Arkansas Ozarks with their new puppy, Birdie.
Sophia Dahlin is back in Oakland, still. She holds poetry workshops at E.M. Wolfman Books, and sometimes in the “bike room” of her cooperative house. Recent work can be found in Elderly, Fence, and the Poetry Foundation’s PoetryNow series. With Jacob Kahn, she edits the chapbook press Eyelet.
Angel Dominguez is a Latinx poet and artist of Yucatec Mayan descent, born in Hollywood, and raised in Van Nuys, CA by his immigrant family. He’s the author of Desgraciado (Econo Textual Objects, 2017), and Black Lavender Milk (Timeless Infinite Light, 2015). His work can be found in Brooklyn Magazine, Dreginald, Entropy, Queen Mobs, The Tiny, The Wanderer, and elsewhere in print or on the internet. He currently teaches at CSUMB as a lecturer with the School of Humanities and Communication’s Creative Writing and Social Action concentration. He’s currently working on a book of poems, as well as the follow-up to Black Lavender Milk, Rose Sun Water forthcoming from The Operating System, in 2020.
Melissa Eleftherion is a writer, librarian, and a visual artist. Born and raised in Brooklyn, she is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & six chapbooks: huminsect (dancing girl press, 2013), prism maps (Dusie, 2014), Pigtail Duty (dancing girl press, 2015), the leaves the leaves (poems-for-all, 2017), green glass asterisms (poems-for-all, 2017) & little ditch (above/ground press, 2018). Her work has been widely published, and has appeared in over eighty literary journals and anthologies. Melissa now lives in Mendocino County where she manages the Ukiah Library, teaches creative writing, & curates the LOBA Reading Series. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.
Bernard Ferguson (he/him) is a Bahamian immigrant poet, an MFA candidate at NYU, a Writers in the Public Schools fellow, and an Assistant Editor at Washington Square Review. He’s the winner of the 2019 Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Prize, a 2019 Adroit Journal Gregory Djanikian Scholarship, and has had work published or forthcoming in The Common, SLICE Magazine, Pinwheel, Winter Tangerine, and the Best New Poets 2017 anthology, among others. He hopes you tell him about your wonder.
Nick Hoff is a poet, translator, and bookseller. His first book of poetry, Some Ones, was published by Tuumba Press in 2015. He has translated the work of Friedrich Hölderlin in Odes and Elegies (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), and, in collaboration with Andrew Joron, Michael Donhauser’s Of Things (Burning Deck Press, 2016). Hoff makes his living as an independent bookseller in San Francisco and Durham, North Carolina.
Natalie Homer is the author of the chapbook Attic of the Skull (dancing girl press, 2018). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Meridian, The Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, the minnesota review, The Pinch, Blue Earth Review, The Lascaux Review, and others. She earned an MFA from West Virginia University and lives in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Valerie Hsiung is the author of three full-length poetry collections:        e f g (Action Books, 2016), incantation inarticulate (O Balthazar Press, 2013), and under your face (OBP, 2013). Individual poems can be found or are forthcoming in dozens of publications, including The Nation, The Believer, PEN Poetry Series, Denver Quarterly, Sonora Review, Poetry Northwest, Pinwheel, and beyond. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the winner of Bayou Magazine’s 2019 Kay Murphy Poetry Prize, she has performed her work at Treefort Music Festival, DC Arts Center, Common Area Maintenance, and Casa Libre en la Solana. Born and raised in Ohio, Hsiung is now based out of New York.
Nathalie Khankan teaches Arabic language and literature at UC Berkeley. From Copenhagen via Damascus and Ramallah, she currently lives in San Francisco. These poems are from a recently completed manuscript | quiet orient riot |.
Stacy Kidd is the author of two chapbooks: A man in a boat in the summer (Beard of Bees Press) and About Birds (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has appeared in journals including Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Interim, and Phoebe, among others. She lives and writes in Oklahoma.
A.D. Lauren-Abunassar is an Arab-American writer who resides in Iowa City, IA. Her work has appeared in The Moth, Zone 3, Spires, Comstock Review, The Apeiron Review, Zeniada, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2017 Zone 3 Annual Poetry award, an Academy of American Poets award honorable mention, and was a 2017 fellow at the Bucknell Seminar for Young Poets. She is currently pursuing her M.F.A at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Chen Li lives in Hualien, Taiwan. An author of fifteen poetry books, he is a recipient of Taiwan’s National Award for Literature and the Arts, the Taiwan Literature Award, and other literary prizes. Chen Li is a prolific essayist and translator. He has translated, in collaboration with his wife Chang Fen-ling,  the works of Carol Ann Duffy, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Brenda Hillman, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Sylvia Plath, Wisława Szymborska, and other poets into Chinese.
Aditi Machado is the author of Some Beheadings, which received of the Believer Poetry Award, and several chapbooks among which Prologue| Emporium is the most recent. She has translated Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia into English. Her writing appears in journals like Lana Turner, The Rumpus, Western Humanities Review, and Jacket2. She works as the Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Washington University in Saint Louis. She has published several chapbooks, among which Prologue| Emporium is the most recent. She works as the Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Washington University in Saint Louis.
Aura Maru (pen name of Aurelia Cojocaru) is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, where she is also pursuing an MA in English with a Creative Emphasis. Born in the Republic of Moldova, she writes in Romanian and English. Her book of poetry in Romanian, entitled Du-te free, was recognized by Moldova’s National Library as one of the ten most read books for the year 2015. The book has also won Moldova’s Writers’ Union Prize for Debut as well as the Government’s Youth Prize, and was a finalist for Romania’s Young Writer Award.
Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation. Her books include The Ants (Les Figues, 2014), and Costume en Face (a translation of Tatsumi Hijikata’s butoh dance notations). She teaches at Brown University.
Sara Nicholson is the author of What the Lyric Is and The Living Method, both from the Song Cave. She lives in Arkansas.
Sarah Passino’s work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Poetry Daily, and Boston Review’s collection What Nature and The Brooklyn Rail. She has poems forthcoming from Capital and Ritual, a collaborative anthology by Wendy’s Subway and the Bard Graduate Center. She received the Rachel Wetzsteon Poetry Prize from the 92nd Street Y and was a 2018 Poets House Fellow.
Raised in the shadow of Houston refineries, Emily Pinkerton currently lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University, and her writing has previously appeared or is forthcoming in ZYZZYVA, Juked, BlazeVOX, and Mirage #4/Period[ical], among others.  Emily is the author of three chapbooks: Natural Disasters (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016), Bloom (Alley Cat Press, July 2018) and Adaptations (Nomadic Press, forthcoming September 2018). She is currently a 2017-2018 Writer in Residence at Alley Cat Books in San Francisco. More of Emily’s publications can be found at thisisemilypinkerton.tumblr.com, and she tweets as @neongolden. Her favorite color is fog.
Noah Ross is an East Bay bookseller, the author of SWELL (Otis Books / Seismicity Editions, 2019) and ACTIVE RECEPTION / SODOMETERS (Nightboat Books, 2021), and co-edits baest: a journal of queer forms & affects.
Karthik Sethuraman is an Indian-American living in San Francisco. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in sPARKLE & bLINK, Kestrel, Hematopoiesis, and New Southerner, among others. Recently, he was shortlisted for Glass Poetry’s 2019 Chapbook series. Along with English language poetry, he spends time reading and translating poems from the Tamil diaspora.
Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of five collections of poetry, including the forthcoming The Octopus Museum (Knopf.) Her other books are Our Andromeda, So Much Synth, Human Dark with Sugar, and Interior with Sudden Joy. She teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in Verona, NJ.
Brandon Shimoda’s most recent books are The Grave on the Wall (an ancestral memoir, City Lights, 2019) and The Desert (poetry and prose, The Song Cave, 2018). He lives in the desert, where he is currently writing (more often falling sideways through the desire to write) a book about the ruins of Japanese American incarceration.
Rae Winkelstein is a writer and editor. Other poems have been published in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Lana Turner, CutBank, Caketrain, Gasher, and Strange Cage.
Elaine Wong lives in San Antonio, Texas. She translates poetry and fiction from Taiwan. Her translation of Chen Li was given an Honorable Mention by the 2018 Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. She is also a part-time linguistics lecturer.
Jules Wood is a queer femme poet, teacher, and burlesque performer studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently serves as the poetry editor of Storyscape Journal. Her poems can be found in Lana Turner and Nat. Brut, among other publications.
Candice Wuehle is the author of the full-length collection BOUND (Inside the Castle Press, August 2018) and the chapbooks VIBE CHECK (Garden-door Press, 2017), EARTHAIRFIREWATERÆTHER (Grey Books Press, 2015) and curse words: a guide in 19 steps for aspiring transmographs, (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). Poems from her collection, DEATH INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, appear in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, The Bennington Review, and The New Delta Review. She is originally from Iowa City, Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Interdisciplinary artist and educator avery r. young is a 3Arts Awardee and one of four executives for The Floating Museum. His poetry and prose are featured in several anthologies and periodicals including The BreakBeat Poets, Poetry Magazine and  photographer Cecil McDonald Jr’s In The Company of Black.  He is the featured vocalist on flouist Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening (FPE Records) and is currently touring with her Black Earth Ensemble and his funk/soul band de deacon board. Young’s first collection of poetry is neckbone: visual verses (Northwestern University Press), and has recorded the accompanying soundtrack tubman (FPE Records).
S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. Their poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming in Tin House, Indiana Review, The Offing, jubilat, Nat Brut, and others. Their other writings can be found in Bomb Magazine and Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. S. is a MFA candidate in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis and The Poetry Editor of The Spectacle.  Social media handles:  Twitter: @syarberry1 Instagram: @_syarberry_

Cover Artist

Nicki Green is a transdisciplinary artist living and making work in the Bay Area. Originally from New England, she completed her BFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and her MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. Her work focuses on craft processes, and her sculptures, ritual objects and various flat works explore topics of history preservation, conceptual ornamentation and aesthetics of otherness.