51st Issue

A plain text version and image description of Tarik Dobbs’ poem “Every Morning I Take a Bus Through the West Bank, Minneapolis” can be found here


Contributors

TR BRADY is a poet and fiber artist based in Iowa City. TR’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Paperbag, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, and Copper Nickel. TR holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the co-founder/co-editor of Afternoon Visitor, a new journal of poetry and hybrid text.

.CHISARAOKWU. (she/her) is an Igbo American poet, actor, and healthcare futurist. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Obsidian, Glass, Tinderbox Poetry, Midnight & Indigo, and others. Named a Cave Canem Fellow in 2020, she earned her BA in History from Stanford University and her MD from Duke University School of Medicine. She is working on a biomythography set amongst the Igbo of Lafayette, Louisiana.

S. BROOK CORFMAN is the author of two poetry collections: My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites (Fordham University Press), a New York Times’ Best Poetry Book of 2020, and Luxury, Blue Lace, chosen by Richard Siken for the Autumn House Rising Writers’ Prize. They are also the author of several chapbooks including Frames (Belladonna* Books), and their work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Agni, Apogee, The Brooklyn Rail, and Conjunctions, among other places. Born & raised in Chicago, they now live in a turret in Pittsburgh. @sbrookcorfman & Sbrookcorfman.com

LEYLA ÇOLPAN is the author of What Passes & What Passes Through (Ghost City Press 2020), a collaborative chapbook with multimedia artist Sasha Barile. Hir work was the recipient of a 2019 Academy of American Poets Undergraduate Prize and the 2020 Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry, judged by Kazim Ali, and it has appeared or is forthcoming with The Adroit Journal, Columbia Journal, Poet Lore, Best New Poets, and others. Ze tweets @ LeylaColpan.

ANNIE CHRISTAIN is a professor of composition and ESOL at SUNY Cobleskill and a former artist resident of the Shanghai Swatch Art Peace Hotel and the Arctic Circle Art and Science Expedition. Her poems have appeared in Seneca Review, Oxford Poetry, Prelude, and The Lifted Brow, among others. She was a first-place winner of the Driftwood Press In-House Poem Contest and received the grand prize of the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the Greg Grummer Poetry Award, the Oakland School of the Arts Enizagam Poetry Award, and the Neil Shepard Prize in Poetry. Her books include Tall As You Are Tall Between Them (C&R Press 2016) and The Vanguards of Holography (Headmistress Press 2021), selected for Sappho’s Prize in Poetry.

TARIK DOBBS is an Arab American, queer writer born in Dearborn, MI, USA. Dobbs’s poems appear soon now in American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, The Poetry Review, & the 2020 Best of the Net Anthology. They are presently a writer-in-residence at InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit and a Poetry Editor at Poetry Online.

MICHELLE GARCIA FRESCO is a Domincan Poet and Spoken Word artist from Lynn Massachusetts. She is currently a Senior at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, double majoring in Creative Writing and Sociology. Believing in the power of poetry as a medium for social justice, Garcia`s writing is often inspired by the women in her family, social and racial injustices in America, coping with loss and mental health, as well as her Dominican roots. Her work can be found in Wbur:The Artery, Tinderbox Poetry, Latinx Book Review, Road Runner Review and Elsewhere.

KRYSTA LEE FROST is a mixed race Filipino American poet who halves her life between the Philippines and the United States. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, The Margins, Berkeley Poetry Review, Hobart, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

EMMA GOMIS is a Catalan American essayist, poet, editor and translator. She is the cofounder of Manifold Press. Her texts have been published in Denver Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Entropy, Asymptote, and Vice Magazine among others and her chapbook Canxona is forthcoming from b l u s h lit. She was selected by Patricia Spears Jones as The Poetry Project’s 2020 Brannan Poetry Prize winner. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Poetics from Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where she was also the Anne Waldman Fellowship recipient and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in criticism and culture at the University of Cambridge.

MANDY GUTMANN-GONZALEZ is from Vilches, Chile. Their poetry has appeared in West Branch, The Malahat Review, Boulevard, BLOOM, Hobart, and other literary journals. Their novel in Spanish, La Pava (Ediciones Inubicalistas, 2016), follows three children who indirectly experience the trauma of the Pinochet military dictatorship in Chile. They won the 2018 Boulevard Emerging Poets Prize and have received fellowships from the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, the Lambda Writing Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices, The Center for Book Arts, and the Frost Place Conference on Poetry (Latinx Fellow). They hold an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University and teach creative writing at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

JOEL HARRIS is a Trinidadian poet, artist and co-founder of Sirius International Caribbean Defence Contractors Ltd., where he leads outreach programs. In 2020 he was shortlisted at Into the Void’s Poetry Prize and has served as an editor and contributor to two books: The Alpha Barrier of North South Dialogue and The Twilight of America’s Omnipresence that were discussed at the National Defence University, Washington D.C. and US Congress. His poetry is now live in Anthropocene’s spring 2021 issue. He’s working on a debut poetry collection and is pursuing an arts double major at McGill University.

IMANI ELIZABETH JACKSON is a poet from Chicago. Her first book, Flag, is forthcoming from Futurepoem in 2022, and her chapbook, saltsitting, is available from g l o s s. Her writings have appeared in Apogee, BOMB, midst, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.

MINA KHAN writes into the confusion of violence and tenderness. A first-gen Pakistani-Korean American, their work nests between nations, generations. They are the author of the chapbook, Mon— monuments, monarchs & monsters (Sputnik & Fizzle 2020), and are published or forthcoming in the Margins, One Minute Press, Lammergeier, and more. They are a current MFA Candidate at Columbia University.

BRANDON KRIEG‘S most recent book is Magnifier, winner of the 2019 Colorado Prize for Poetry chosen by Kazim Ali. His poems have appeared in Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, and many other journals. He lives in Kutztown, Pennsylvania and teaches at Kutztown University.

GINA LEE is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Texas in El Paso. Her poems have been published in Rio Grande Review and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. She is an Associate Poetry Editor for Poets Reading the News. New Jersey is home.

SHATARA LIORA is a poet and writer. She is also a licensed therapist by trade. Shatara has two indie poetry collections, “East of A Cold Red Sun” and “Love’s Third Eye”. She has been published in Rigorous Literary Magazine, Thought Catalog, Black Girl In Om and featured in Nailed Magazine. In her spare time, she enjoys art galleries, museums, travel, and all things vintage.

LYDIA T. LIU is a poet and a PhD student in computer science at University of California, Berkeley. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Frogpond, Indiana Review, Pigeon Pages, and The Columbia Review.

MICHAEL MCKEE GREEN‘S first book of poetry, Fugue Figure (the Kent State University Press 2018), won the Stan and Tom Wick Prize. He received his MFA from Boise State University, where he sat on Ahsahta Press’ editorial board, and is currently a PhD student in SUNY Buffalo’s Poetics Program.

LONDEKA MDLULI is a South African-born writer who is of dual nationality. Although she was born in South Africa she does not shy away from her Zimbabwean heritage. Londeka began writing poetry at age 9 after falling in love with rhetoric language. She has since written many of her pieces based on what she finds most charming: water. The 19-year-old is also an undergraduate student at the University of Western Cape, in Cape Town, South Africa majoring in Library science and Philosophy

ERIC MORALES-FRANCESCHINI is an anti-disciplinary scholar and poet, author of the study, The Epic of Cuba Libre: the mambí, mythopoetics, and liberation (under contact with University of Virginia Press), and the chapbook Autopsy of a Fall (Newfound 2021), winner of the 2020 Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in southern Florida, he is a Berkeley alum (Rhetoric PhD) and now assistant professor of English and Latin American Studies at the University of Georgia.

DANIEL MOYSAENKO is a Ukrainian American poet and recipient of awards and fellowships from Emory University, the Academy of American Poets, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he earned his MFA. Poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. And critical writing has appeared in journals such as Chicago Review, Harvard Review, and Kenyon Review. He holds a PhD in poetry from Florida State University and lives in Ohio’s Chagrin Valley.

NEHA MULAY is an Australian-Indian writer and a current MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Maine Review, and Coffin Bell Journal among other publications. She is the Web Editor for the Washington Square Review.

MARY MUSSMAN is a poet and literary researcher interested in the semiotics and somatics of queer experience. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The White Review, wildness, fields, and elsewhere. A PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, she lives and works on unceded Ohlone Homelands.

ELISHA MYKELTI is a musical poet whose work focuses on the everyday—the absurd, the normal, and not so often pretty—life of the Black American woman. Through the use of dialect, her work pays special attention to her birthplace in the South and her roots up North. Elisha is a teacher and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, with a concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee.

ASTRA PAPACHRISTODOULOU is an experimental poet and curator based in London. She is the author of several poetry pamphlets including Astropolis (Hesterglock Press, 2020) and Stargazing (Guillemot Press, 2019). She is the founder of Poem Atlas a platform that showcases visual poets from around the world through physical and online exhibitions.

HANNAH RUBIN is a writer and interdisciplinary artist working wetly across performance, text, choreography, installation, image-making, and ritual. They work in the tension points of language and perception—invoking language as a queered site of desire, magic, intimacy, manipulation, and violence. They have performed or exhibited work in Los Angeles, Oakland, Portland, New York City, Seattle, Vermont, and San Francisco their writing has been published or is forthcoming in F Magazine, BOAAT Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, smoke + mold, The Bombay Gin, and many others. Currently, they run IN TOUCH, a clay experiment that choreographs queer connection through elemental touch, and coordinate 20 lines a day, a durational daily writing collaboration with sixteen artists. Together with Noelle Armstrong they host mellow drama, a humidly intimate poetry radio show on KCIA.

ROSIE STOCKTON is a poet based in Los Angeles. Their first book, Permanent Volta, is the recipient of the 2019 Sawtooth Prize, and is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in May 2021. Their poems have been published by Jubilat, Apogee, Social Text Journal, Mask Magazine, an WONDER. They are currently a Ph.D. Student in Gender Studies at UCLA.

SOPHIA TERAZAWA‘S debut full-length collection, Winter Phoenix, is forthcoming with Deep Vellum. A recent graduate of the University of Arizona MFA program, she is the author of two chapbooks, I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press), a winner of the 2015 Essay Press Digital Chapbook Contest, and Correspondent Medley (Factory Hollow Press), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Additional work has appeared in journals and magazines, such as, The Offing, New Delta Review, The Iowa Review, and The Rumpus.

WENDY XU is most recently the author of Phrasis, named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, and the forthcoming collection The Past (Sept 2021, Wesleyan). She lives in Brooklyn and teaches poetry at The New School.

Cover Artist

EVAN BLACKWELL is an Artist based in Atlanta, GA. She received her M.F.A from the School of The Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in Boston, MA, and her B.F.A from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. She is working primarily in painting, from paper to canvas, to large scale murals. She is focusing on themes of abstraction as a historical archive and form of memory for both the collective and the individual.