50th Issue

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Contributors

BAHAAR AHSAN is a poet based in the Bay Area with familial roots in the southern Iranian port city of Abadan. Bahaar’s work is both speculative and deeply embedded in lineage(s). Her poems can be found in Amerarcana, bést, Apogee, and elsewhere.

LOUISE AKERS is a poet living in Queens, NY. They earned their MFA from Brown University in May of 2018. They also received the Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing in 2017 and the Confrontation Poetry Prize in 2019. Louise’s work can be found in Fugue Journal, Confrontation Magazine, DREGINALD, bést, and elsewhere.

COLLEEN BARAN is a Canadian artist, designer, and writer. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prism, jubilat, Pleiades, Always Crashing, SPAM, Berkeley Poetry Review (48), and the anthology Best Canadian Poetry 2019. She was the winner of Prism’s 2019 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize.

TESS BROWN-LAVOIE is author of Lite Year, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series.

KELL CONNOR lives in Nebraska. Their work appears in Bennington Review, Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. They are the author of the chapbook For Destruction (Doom Town USA, 2018).

ANAÏS DUPLAN is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). His writing has been published by Hyperallergic, PBS News Hour, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, and the Bettering American Poetry anthology.

Duplan is the founding curator forthe Center for Afrofuturist Studies. It is an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. As an independent curator, he has facilitated artist projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. Duplan’s video and performance work has been shown at Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2020. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He now works as Program Manager at Recess and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Poetry at Columbia University.

MARÍA ESQUINCA is a poet and journalist. Her poetry has appeared in Waxwing, The Florida Review, Glass:A Journal of Poetry, Acentos Reviewand others. She has poems forthcoming from Cream City Review & Palabritas. Her book reviews and interviews have appeared in Adroit Journal and ANMLY. A fronteriza, she was born in Ciudad JuĂĄrez, Chihuaha, MĂ©xico and mostly grew up in El Paso, Texas.

KRYSTA LEE FROST is a mixed race Filipino American poet. She halves her life between the Philippines and the United States. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Margins, Entropy, Susquehanna Review, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

VIVIAN IA lives in Berlin. Pushcart- nominated, their poetry has appeared in Bone Bouquet, Tiny Seed, The Gravity of the Thing, and Fourteen Hills.

LEENA JOSHI is an artist and writer currently based in Oakland, California. Their poetry, essay, and visual art practice consider the lateral roots of affect, gender, labor, and desire within a transmedia practice of world building. Leena’s writing can be found in The Felt, Gramma, Monday: The Jacob Lawrence Gallery Journal, Tagvverk, La Norda Specialo, Poor Claudia, and bluestockings magazine, among others.

BHANU KAPIL is a British-Indian- American poet who teaches at the intersection of lyric and narrative aims. Her most recent work is How To Wash A Heart (Pavilion Poetry, 2020). This year will also bring a new edition of Incubation: a space for monsters (Kelsey Street Press) and a short work of science-fiction that will be published as the introduction for Unknown Language by Hildegard Von Bingen and Huw Lemmey (Ignota Books). Bhanu is a winner of the Windham-Campbell prize for poetry. She has also spent the last year at the University of Cambridge as the Judith E. Wilson fellow in poetry.

ALICIA BYRNE KEANE is a PhD student from Dublin, Ireland. She has a first class honours degree in English Literature and French from Trinity College Dublin and a MSt. in English Literature 1900-Present from Oxford University. She is working on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study that problematizes ‘vagueness’ and the ethics of translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at TCD. Her poems have been published in The Moth, Entropy, Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and the [PANK] blog, among others. She has performed at Electric Picnic, Body & Soul, and Lingo Festival. She has also had two spoken word performances recorded for Balcony TV.

WAYNE KOESTENBAUM—poet, critic, artist, performer—has published nineteen books, including Camp Marmalade, Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). His next book, a collection of essays, Figure It Out, will be published by Soft Skull in May 2020. He has exhibited his paintings in solo shows at White Columns (New York), 356 Mission (L.A.), and the University of Kentucky Art Museum. His first piano/vocal record, Lounge Act,was released by Ugly Duckling Presse Records in 2017; he has given musical performances at The Kitchen, REDCAT, Centre Pompidou, The Walker Art Center, The Artist’s Institute, The Poetry Project, and the Renaissance Society. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and French at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

FA R I D M AT U K is the author of This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. A book-arts project, Redolent, made in collaboration with Colombian visual artist Nancy Friedemann-SĂĄnchez, is forthcoming from Singing Saw Press.

GEOFFREY G. O’BRIEN is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Experience in Groups (Wave, 2018). He is a Professor of English at UC Berkeley and also teaches for the Prison University Program at San Quentin.

WILL RUSSO is a poet from New York City pursuing an MFA at the Schoolof the Art Institute of Chicago. His poems have appeared in Newtown Literary, where he received a Pushcart Prize nomination. They are also forthcoming in Faultline, Waxing & Waning, and Meniscus. He has attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

JENNIFER SOONG is the author of Near, At (Futurepoem 2019). Her poems have appeared or are forthcomingin Social Text, The Colorado Review, Panda’s Friend, Omniverse, Earthbound Poetry Series, DIAGRAM, and others. They have also been translated into Spanish. She is the poetry editor at Nat. Brut and currently lives in New Jersey, whereshe works on poetry and forgetting at Princeton University.

JULIANA SPAHR’s most recent book is Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (Harvard U P).

PHIL SPOTSWOOD is a poet from Alabama, and a PhD Creative Writing student at Illinois State University. His most recent work can be found in BAEST, Burning House Press, and Dreginald. He is the recipient of the 2018 Robert Penn Warren MFA Poetry Thesis Award judged by Tonya Foster, and the 2017 William Jay Smith MFA Poetry Award judged by Daniel Borzutzky. He tweets @biometrash.

FARGO TBAKHI (he/him) is a queer Palestinian american performance artist currently based in DC. He is the winner of the 2018 Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Prize, a Pushcart nominee, and a 2020 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Fellow. His writing can be found in Foglifter, Gay Magazine, The Shallow Ends, Mizna, Peach Mag and elsewhere. His solo show, My Father, My Martyr, and Me: Postcolonial Instructions for Loving the Palestinian Body has been programmed at OUTsider Fest 2020 and at INTER- SECTION Solo Fest 2020. It is also available for booking. Find him on twitter @YouKnowFargo.

NAIMA YAEL TOKUNOW is an educator, writer, editor, & artist currently living in New Mexico. She is the author of three chapbooks, Shadow Black, winner of the Frontier Digital Chapbook Prize (forthcoming 2020), Planetary Bodies, published in 2019 by Black Warrior Review, and MAKE WITNESS, published in 2016 by Zoo Cake Press. A four-time PushcartPrize nominee, she has been a TENT Residency Fellow. She proudly edits the Black Voice Series for Puerto del Sol. New work is published or forthcoming from DATABLEED, Bone Bouquet, Figure 1 and elsewhere. More information is available at naimaytokunow.com. She is blessed to be black and alive.

EMMA TRAIN is a poet from Berkeley, California. A graduate of UC Davis’ MFA program in creative writing, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she studies contemporary American poetry and poetics. She currently serves as the Assistant Director for the New Writers Project. Her poetry has most recently appeared in the Colorado Review.

HUNG Q. TU is the author of two books of poetry, Structures of Feeling, Verisimilitude and a chapbook, A Great Ravine. He lives and works in San Diego, California.

LINDSAY TURNER is the author of Songs & Ballads (Prelude, 2018). She is the translator of several books of contemporary Francophone poetry and philosophy, including work by Stéphane Bouquet, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Frédéric Neyrat, and Ryoko Sekiguchi. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she lives in Denver, where she is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver.

ALLI WARREN’S new book of poems is Little Hill (City Lights). She published her Poetry Center Book Award-winning debut, Here Come the Warm Jets, with City Lights in 2013. Alli is also the author of I Love It Though (Nightboat Books, 2017), as well as numerous chapbooks. She has edited the literary magazine Dreamboat, co-curated the (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand, co- edited the Poetic Labor Project, and contributed to SFMOMA’s Open Space. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Harpers, Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB. She has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 2005.

LEILA WEEFUR (She/They/He) is a trans-gender-noncomforming artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, CA. Their interdisciplinary practice examines the performativity intrinsicto systems of belonging present in our lived experiences. The work brings together concepts of the sensorial memory, abject, hyper surveillance,and the erotic. They have worked with local and national institutions including SFMOMA, The Wattis Institute, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York. Weefur is a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute. They are a member of the curatorial film collective, The Black Aesthetic.

EMMA RUTH WILSON is a Midwestern poet. She completed her MFA in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. She makes a zine called The Paris Review Zine and hosts a podcast called Poetry Hello (@PoetryHello on Twitter). Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Critics’ Union, Poets.org, PANK, CHEAP POP, and others.

COVER ARTIST 

E BOND is an artist + writer + bookbinder + educator & designer. Currently, she makes digital spaces by day, handmade books by night, hangs out with ancient trees on weekends and writes something close to poems in the spaces between. Under the studio name roughdrAftbooks—created in 2003— she creates artists’ books, handmade journals and mixed media pieces that blur the boundaries of art, craft, design and poetry. e holds a degree in graphic design and art history from Moore College of Art & Design and an MFAin Creative Writing and Book Art from Mills College. You can find her work here: ebondwork.com.