Isabel Acevedo is an MFA candidate in poetry at Georgia College and State University. She serves as assistant poetry editor for Arts & Letters. Her work has previously appeared in the Santa Ana River Review.
Steven Alvarez is the author of The Codex Mojaodicus, winner of the 2016 Fence Modern Poets Prize. He lives in New York City.
e bond makes digital spaces by day, handmade books by night, hangs out with trees on weekends and writes something close to poems in the spaces in between. Under the studio name roughdrAftbooks, she creates artists’ books, handmade journals, and fine art that blur the boundaries of art, craft, design, collage, and poetry. The piece found in this issue is a fragment of a seven scroll series called iteration. The originals are 8-feet-tall visual spaces that explore: three years of walking through redwood groves / imagining our collective history / from multiple points of view / questioning reiterating patterns of form & behavior / exploring the nature of perspective / our habitual tendencies / & how to see it all from the other side. You can find other work at ebondwork.com & instagram.com/eisroughdraft.
Shane Book’s first volume of poetry, Ceiling of Sticks (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was a Poetry Society of America “New Poet” Selection. His second, Congotronic (University of Iowa Press / House of Anansi Press, 2014), won the Archibald Lampman Award and was a finalist for the Canadian Authors Association Award, City of Ottawa Book Award, and 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also a filmmaker whose award-winning work has screened around the world. He was educated at New York University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Currently, he is the 2016–2017 writer in residence at the University of Calgary.
Ariana Brown is an Afromexicana poet from San Antonio, Texas, with a BA in African diaspora studies and Mexican American studies from UT Austin. A “part-time curandera,” Ariana is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and a 2014 collegiate national poetry slam champion. When she is not onstage, she is probably eating an avocado, listening to the Kumbia Kings, or validating black girl rage in all its miraculous forms. Her work is published or forthcoming in Nepantla, African Voices, Bird’s Thumb, BOAAT, and ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets from Arte Público Press. She is currently earning an MFA in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh.
T. H. Carter lives in Syracuse, NY, where he attends the Syracuse University MFA program and leads poetry workshops for high school students in the community. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his poems can be found in The Seneca Review, Copper Nickel, Stone Canoe, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, and Birdfeast.
Ansley Clark received her MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she currently teaches creative writing. She is the author of the chapbook Geography (dancing girl, 2015). Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Typo, Sixth Finch, Jellyfish, Black Warrior Review, inter|rupture, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.
Sean Collins is a writer, bicyclist, and zombie enthusiast living in Philadelphia. He is currently pursuing his MFA in poetry from Temple University.
CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of nine books of poetry and essays, the latest of which is titled While Standing In Line For Death and is forthcoming from Wave Books (September 2017). He is a Pew Fellow and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, RADAR, Flying Object, and Ucross. For his books, essays, and details on the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films, 2016), please visit CAConrad.blogspot.com.
Poet, translator, and editor, Peter Covino is associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island; author of The Right Place to Jump and Cut Off the Ears of Winter, both from W. Michigan University Press; and co-editor of essays on Italian American Literature and Culture, Bordighera, CUNY. His prizes include the 2007 PEN American / Osterweil Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize for Literary Excellence, among others.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly (8th House Publishing, 2016). He is the managing editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and children.
Keith Donnell Jr., originally from Philadelphia, currently lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is an MFA candidate at San Francisco State University and holds an MA in English from the University of Southern California where he focused on 20th century African American literature. His work will appear in forthcoming issues of Juked, New American Writing, Yemassee, Bayou Magazine, Nomadic Journal: Wonder, Redivider and LUMINA.
K. M. English has recent poems appearing or forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, inter|rupture, cream city review, Third Coast, A Dozen Nothing, and other places. She recently completed a first full-length collection, WAVE SAYS.
Fatima Espiritu is an educator and poet with an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Work can be found in Bayou, Foglifter, LIT, Whiskey Island, and other places.
Andie Francis is the author of the chapbook I Am Trying to Show You My Matchbook Collection, from CutBank Books. She holds an MFA in poetry from The University of Arizona and serves as an assistant poetry editor for DIAGRAM. Her work appears in Cimarron Review, CutBank, Greensboro Review, Portland Review, Prick of the Spindle, Timber Journal, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, and teaches at Northern Arizona University.
Kwoya Fagin Maples is a poet from Charleston, SC. She teaches creative writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, AL. Maples is a Cave Canem Fellow and Homeschool Literary Lambda Fellow. She lives in Birmingham with her husband Marcus and three daughters, Eden, Vivienne, and Maya.
Evelyn Gemberling is a senior at UC Berkeley studying legal studies. She is from a mixed-race family and this is her first experience with writing poetry.
Michael Gray won a 2012 AWP Intro Journals Project Award and the 2013 Hot Street Emerging Writers Contest, was nominated for Best New Poets 2014, and was named a finalist in The Lit Pub’s 1st Annual Poetry Contest and the SpringGun Press 2014 Open Reading Period. His translations of Yau Ching appear in Shadow Beings (XXX Zines, 2014). His work also appears or is forthcoming in Poetry East West, Puerto del Sol, Dogwood, Rock & Sling, Fence, LONTAR, and elsewhere.
Lilian Ha is a student from the suburbs of Seattle, Washington, and a reader for Winter Tangerine. Her work is featured or forthcoming in The James Franco Review, Yellow Chair Review, The Gambler, Rogue Agent, and Sweet Tree Review, among others.
David Alejandro Hernandez is an undocumented immigrant, originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised in Northern California. His poetry has appeared in OmniVerse, Berkeley Poetry Review, and the inaugural issue of Berkeley Arts + Design. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, he was awarded the Eisner Prize in Poetry, the Joan Lee Yang Memorial Prize, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. Currently, he is an MFA candidate in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis.
Emily Wallis Hughes grew up in Agua Caliente, California, a small town in the Sonoma Valley. Her poems have been published in Elderly, Menage, A Women’s Thing, ZAUM, and other little magazines. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers–New Brunswick and composition at the College of Staten Island. She lives in Brooklyn, where she volunteers at Ugly Duckling Presse.
John James is the author of Chthonic, winner of the 2014 CutBank Chapbook Award. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, West Branch, Best American Poetry 2017, and elsewhere. He serves as graduate associate to the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University, where he received the Ora Mary Pelham Poetry Prize.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of five books of poetry, the forthcoming Milk (Wave Books, 2018), as well as ROME (W. W. Norton / Liveright, 2014) and Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE, all out from Wave Books. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013) and several chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). Currently, she is an assistant professor of poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, co-directs Columbia Artist/Teachers, and lives in New York City.
Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up three miles from the CIA and currently lives in Denver, where she works as the program director for Chinook Fund. Her poetry books include Underground National (Factory School), Solar Maximum (Futurepoem), and a forthcoming collection titled No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise (Kore). A former Pew Fellow in the Arts for Literature, she has held international residencies for video art and poetry. Her published essays examine experimental poetry, race, and imaginations of the future. Find her at silentbroadcast.com.
Momtaza Mehri is a poet, essayist and meme archivist. Her work is featured and forthcoming in DAZED, Sukoon, Bone Bouquet, VINYL and Poetry International. She is a Complete Works Fellow and winner of the 2017 Out-spoken Page Poetry Prize. Her chapbook sugah.lump.prayer was published as part of the New Generation African Poets series in 2017. She will also appear in Ten: Poets of the New Generation, to be published by BloodAxe Books in 2017.
Tessa Micaela is a poet, student midwife, community herbalist, and quiet firecracker. Tessa belongs to the editorial collective for HOLD: a journal, and is the author of there are boxes and there is wanting (Trembling Pillow Press, 2016) and the chapbook Crude Matter (ypolita press, 2016). Other writing has appeared in Make/shift, Dusie, Open House, Sink Review, Calamity and various other jars and corners. Tessa lives in Central Vermont, by way of Philadelphia and Oakland.
Tanya Muzumdar teaches English and poetry at North Central Michigan College. She is also the editor of Dunes Review. Her poems appear in Cimarron Review, Nashville Review, Prairie Schooner, Superstition Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Vinyl, and elsewhere. She has been a writer in residence at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
Amy Narneeloop is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first chapbook, Hair, is available from Ugly Duckling Presse. Narneeloop currently lives in Sacramento with her partner, where she is working on a fantasy novel and trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.
Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington DC area, Hoa Nguyen currently makes her home in Toronto. Her poetry collections include As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice, Poems 1998–2008, and Violet Energy Ingots from Wave Books. She teaches poetics at Ryerson University, for the low-residency MFA programs at Miami University and Bard College, and in a long-running, private workshop.
Cheyenne Nimes is a cross-genre writer living by the Great Salt Lake. Recipient of an NEA in poetry, she attended San Francisco State University and Iowa. Work is forthcoming in the anthology The Shell Game (University of Nebraska Press, 2018).
Ethan Plaue’s poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, OmniVerse, and VOLT.
Kimberly Ann Priest is an MFA candidate in creative writing at New England College, and holds an MA in English language and literature from Central Michigan University. She teaches online for Central Michigan University and New England College. Her academic and creative writing explores a variety of topics from motherhood and domesticity, to violence, religion, sexual identity, and sexual trauma, and her poetry has appeared in several journals including The 3288 Review, ArLiJo, Borderlands: The Texas Review, Critical Pass, Storm Cellar, Temenos, and Ruminate Magazine.
Glenn Shaheen is the author of the poetry collections Predatory (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) and Energy Corridor (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), and of the flash fiction chapbook Unchecked Savagery (Ricochet Editions, 2013).
Paul Siegell is the author of wild life rifle fire (Otoliths Books), jambandbootleg (A-Head Publishing) and Poemergency Room (Otoliths Books). He is a senior editor at Painted Bride Quarterly and has contributed to American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Rattle, and many other fine journals. Kindly find more of his work—and concrete poetry t-shirts—at ReVeLeR @ eYeLeVeL (paulsiegell.blogspot.com) and @paulsiegell.
Eric Sneathen splits his time between Oakland and UC Santa Cruz, where he is a PhD student in literature. His poetry has been published by Mondo Bummer, Faggot Journal, and P-Queue, and his first collection, Snail Poems, was recently published by Krupskaya.
Claire Marie Stancek is the author of MOUTHS (Noemi Press, 2017). With Lyn Hejinian and Jane Gregory, she is co-editor and co-founder of Nion Editions, a chapbook press. With Daniel Benjamin, she co-edited an anthology of contemporary Australian poetry, Active Aesthetics (Tuumba / Giramondo, 2016). These poems are taken from her second full-length book of poetry, Oil Spell, which is forthcoming from Omnidawn in spring 2018.
Cole Swensen is the author of seventeen volumes of poetry, most recently On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017) and Gave (Omnidawn, 2017) as well as a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise (University of Michigan, 2011). Her works have won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, the National Poetry Series, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, she co-edited the Norton anthology American Hybrid (2009) and guest-edited BAX: Best American Experimental Writing 2014.
Beatrice Szymkowiak is originally from France but she has been living in the USA for more than 13 years. She is currently finishing her MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. She lives, works, and writes in Portland, OR.
Jose Trejo-Maya was born in Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico, where he spent his childhood in the small neighboring rural pueblo of Tarimoró and wherefrom he immigrated in 1988. His inspirations include Netzahualcoyotl, Humberto Ak’abal, Ray A. Young Bear, and James Welch. He has been published in various literary journals in the UK, in the US, in India, in Spain, and in Australia. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2015 and was awarded Tercer Premio en El Centro Canario Estudios Caribeños El Atlántico en el Certamen Internacional de Poesía en 2016. While in ceremony with Chololo medicine men in the Tule River Reservation, he dreamt the prophecy published here…
Peter Twal works at Purdue University as an electrical engineer. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016, Kenyon Review Online, Columbia Poetry Review, Pleiades, Crab Creek Review, Quarterly West, cream city review, The Journal, RHINO, Booth, Yemassee, Forklift, Ohio, DIAGRAM, Bat City Review, New Orleans Review, Ninth Letter Online, Third Coast, and elsewhere. You can read more of his writing at petertwal.com.
Jane Wong’s poems can be found in anthologies and journals such as Best American Poetry 2015, Best New Poets 2012, Pleiades, Third Coast, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the US Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Squaw Valley, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is the author of the book Overpour (Action Books, 2016), along with three chapbooks. This fall, she will be an assistant professor of creative writing at Western Washington University.
Emily Jungmin Yoon’s poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Offing, and elsewhere, and her translations have been published in The Literary Review, Columbia Journal Online, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, AWP’s WC&C Scholarship Competition, The Home School in Miami, the Aspen Institute, New York University, and the University of Chicago. She is the poetry editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is a PhD student in the East Asian languages and civilizations department at the University of Chicago.