Masthead


Editor-in-Chief

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over thirty volumes of poetry, essays, and fiction. An expert consultant with the United States Fulbright Commission and a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Darling’s work has also been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry, a 2024 Villa Lena Foundation Fellowship, a 2024 Civita Institute Fellowship, and eleven juried residencies at the American Academy in Rome. Dr. Darling has taught at Yale University, the American University in Rome, Stanford University, where she leads a workshop in professional empowerment through their Continuing Studies Division, the New School, the University of Cyprus, The Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, Cedar Crest College’s Pan-European M.F.A. Program, and Webster University’s Geneva, Switzerland Campus, where she leads a biannual writing workshop for diplomats. She will serve as Visiting Researcher at Universidade do Porto and Visiting Fellow at the European Law and Governance School in Spring 2025, as well as Visiting Faculty at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid for the 2025-2026 academic year. She has served on juries for the Fulbright Specialist Award, the Corporation of Yaddo’s artist-in-residence program, the literature fellowship program at Millay Colony for the Arts, the Helene B. Wurlitzer Foundation’s artist-in-residence program, and many other awards in the United States and abroad.  Born and raised in the American Midwest, she now divides her time between Greece, Rome, and the Amalfi Coast.

Associate Editors-in-Chief

Erica Buist

Erica Buist is a writer, journalist, teacher and author based in London. Formerly a staffer at the Guardian, she has been a freelance features writer for several years. Her first book, a hybrid of memoir and journalism called This Party’s Dead (published by Unbound and Penguin UK, February 2021) follows her on a journey from finding the corpse of a loved one to seven death festivals on five continents. She teaches creative writing and features writing for newspapers for Guardian Masterclasses and as part of the Guardian and Lincoln University’s MA program in Creative Writing and Publishing. Erica’s short fiction has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Liars’ League London, and Guts Publishing. She has been awarded writing residencies at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, Vermont Studio Center, Faberlull (Spain), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Arte Studio Ginestrelle (Italy). She tweets @ericabuist.

Wendy Chen

Wendy Chen (wendychenart.com) is the author of Unearthings (Tavern Books), editor of Figure 1 (thefigureone.com), and poetry editor of Denver Quarterly. Her work has appeared in CrazyhorseRattleA Public Space, and elsewhere. Chen is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Most Promising Young Poet Prize, and fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She earned her MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and is currently pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Denver. Her debut novel, Their Divine Fires, is forthcoming from Algonquin winter 2024.

Managing Editor

Tiffany Troy

Tiffany Troy is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly. She is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]), finalist of the Changing Light Award from the University of West Alabama, and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote as well as a 2024 Queens Art Fund New Work Grant recipient from the New York Foundations of the Arts.

Senior Awards Administrator

Izzy Casey

Izzy Casey’s poems have been published in Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, Black Warrior Review, Bennington Review, BOAAT, Prelude, NY Tyrant, The Columbia Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the recipient of a fellowship with the Poetry Foundation. In addition to working for Tupelo Quarterly, she has edited for the Iowa Prison Writing Project, Bennington Review, The Iowa Review, Turtle Point Press, University of Iowa Press, and more.

Production Assistant

Yamini Pathak

Yamini Pathak is the author of the chapbooks, Atlas of Lost Places (Milk and Cake Press) and Breath Fire Water Song (Ghost City Press). Her words are forthcoming or have appeared in About Place Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Vida Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She is a Poet in Schools for the Geraldine Dodge Foundation and serves as poetry editor for Inch micro-chapbooks (Bull City Press). Yamini received her MFA from Antioch University and is an alumnus of VONA/Voices and Community of Writers. She is a member of the Duniya Collective, a group of BIPOC inter-disciplinary artists. Born in India, she lives with her family in New Jersey.

Education Coordinator

Maya Klinenberg

Maya Klinenberg is the Education Coordinator for Tupelo Quarterly and Book Review Co-Editor for The Los Angeles Review. She has a certificate in Editing & Publishing from UCLA Extension and graduated from the University of California, Riverside with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing with a Poetry focus. Some of her poems are forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly. Maya was recently a judge for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and a proofreader for the newly published novel, In Pursuit of Safetyby Deb Rotuno and Jenny Rarden. She also holds a Montessori teaching credential and has nearly a decade of experience working with children. Maya hopes to one day combine her interests in children’s education and editing and become a children’s or young adult book publisher.

Senior Poetry Editors

José Felipe Alvergue

José Felipe Alvergue was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, and grew up on the Mexico/US Border. He is a graduate of both the CalArts Writing (MFA) and Buffalo Poetics (PhD) programs. He is also the author of gist : rift : drift : bloom (2015), precis (2017), and scenery (2020), which won Fordham University Press’s Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. His work appears in Best American Experimental WritingBoston ReviewApogeeTupelo Quarterly, and has been selected by Banhu Kapil for TQ16’s Prose Open Prize. An Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Transnationalism, José works and lives in Wisconsin.

Ruth Awad

Ruth Awad is a 2021 NEA Poetry Fellow and the author of Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2020). She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work appears in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. 

Catherine Imbriglio

Catherine Imbriglio is the author of two books of poetry, Parts of the Mass (Burning Deck), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Intimacy (Center for Literary Publishing), which received the Colorado Prize in Poetry. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in After Spicer (John Vincent, ed.), American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, Conjunctions, Contemporary Literature, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Green Mountains Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, West Branch,  and elsewhere. A selection of her poetry was anthologized in the Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, ed. Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press). She is a recipient of an Untermeyer fellowship in poetry, a fellowship and two merit awards in poetry from the RI State Council on the Arts.

Simone Muench

Simone Muench is Professor of English at Lewis University where she serves as Director of the Creative & Professional Writing Program and Faculty Advisor for Jet Fuel Review. She is the author of Lampblack & Ash (Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Sarabande, 2000), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014) and other books. Her most recent, Suture, is a collaborative book of sonnets written with Dean Rader (Black Lawrence, 2017). Currently, she is editing an anthology of multi-genre collaborative writing (Black Lawrence, 2018). She is a recipient of fellowships from the NEA, Vermont Studio Center, Artsmith, Illinois Arts Council, and Yaddo. In 2014, she was honored with the Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award for innovation, achievements, and community contributions.

Senior Prose Editors

EJ Colen

EJ Colen is a PNW-based educator, writer, and editor interested in long-form poetry, the lyric essay, literary and visual collage, and research-based approaches to storytelling and memoir. She is the author of What Weaponry, a novel in prose poems, poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Lambda Literary Award and Audre Lorde Award finalist in 2011) and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies, flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, long poem / lyric essay hybrid The Green Condition, and fiction collaboration True Ash. Nonfiction editor at Tupelo Press and freelance editor/manuscript consultant, she teaches in the English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Departments at Western Washington University.

Elizabeth Gentry

Elizabeth Gentry’s debut novel Housebound won the 2012 Madeleine Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Award (judged by novelist and fairy tale advocate Kate Bernheimer) and was published by Lake Forest College’s innovative &NOW Books, with distribution by Northwestern University Press. Housebound was also a finalist for the 2014 Binghamton University John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Other work has appeared in So to Speak, Confrontation, The Collagist, and Third Coast. Originally from Asheville, North Carolina, Elizabeth lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she teaches for the University of Tennessee English Department. She received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Alex Lemon

Alex Lemon’s most recent book is The Wish Book (a finalist for Best Poetry Collection by The Writer’s League of Texas). He is the author of Happy: A Memoir (Scribner; a finalist for Best Book of Non-fiction by The Writer’s League of Texas) and three other poetry collections: Mosquito, Hallelujah Blackout, and Fancy Beasts. An essay collection and a fifth poetry book are forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His writing has appeared in Esquire, American Poetry Review, The Huffington Post, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, Tin House, Kenyon Review, AGNI, New England Review, The Southern Review and jubilat, among others. Among his awards are a 2005 Fellowship in Poetry from the NEA and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He is an editor-at-large for Saturnalia Books, the poetry editor of descant, and sits on the editorial board of TCU Press and the advisory board of The Southern Review. He lives in Ft. Worth, Texas, writes book reviews for the Dallas Morning News, and teaches at TCU and the Low-residency MFA program at Ashland University.

Michael Martone

Michael Martone‘s most recent book is Brooding. He lives in Tuscaloosa and teaches at the University of Alabama.

Bronwyn Mills

Bronwyn Mills received her MFA under poet James Tate (UMass, Amherst); her Ph.D. (Comparative Literature) under poet Kamau Brathwaite and novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o at NYU; and was an Anais Nin Fellow. Besides New York, she has also lived in Istanbul, Turkey; La République du Bénin (where, on a Fulbright Fellowship, she played hooky with voodoo priests); Paris, France; and Western Massachusetts. She reviewed dance and theatre for the Valley Advocate, was senior editor for the online literary journal, Frigate, and most recently guest edited the Turkish issue of Absinthe; New European Writing (#19). She taught at Stevens Institute of Technology; Kadir Has University in Istanbul; and Abomey-Calavi in Bénin. Books include Night of the Luna Moths (March Street Press) and the fabulist novel Beastly’s Tale (Rocky Shores); and, recently, a short story in Agni from By the Spoonmaker’s Tomb, a collection of vignettes based on her experiences while living in Istanbul. She is also a co-founder and contributor to Witty Partition (formerlyThe Wall), an international, online journal fostering communication among writers and readers of many languages. Now living and writing in a tiny mountain village far, far away, Mills is interested in the palimpsest of language and how it reveals our deepest collective secrets. Read more at https://bronwynmills.org.

Laurie Sheck

Laurie Sheck is the author of two hybrid works, A Monster’s Notes, and Island of the Mad, as well as five books of poems. Her lyric essays have appeared in the Paris ReviewGranta, and elsewhere. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The Willow Grove ( poems) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New YorkerThe NationThe New York Times, and Poetry. She has taught at Princeton, Columbia, Rutgers , at CUNY as a Distinguished Visiting Writer, and most recently at the New School. She lives in New York City.

Seth Brady Tucker

Seth Brady Tucker is a poet and fiction writer originally from Lander, Wyoming. His first book won the 2011 Elixir Press Editor’s Poetry Prize (Mormon Boy), and was a finalist for the 2013 Colorado Book Award. His second book won the Gival Press Poetry Award (We Deserve the Gods We Ask For) and appeared in September, 2014. Recently, his fiction won the Bevel Summers Fiction Prize from Shenandoah, was a finalist for the Jeff Sharlet Award from the Iowa Review, and won the Flash Fiction Award from Literal Latte. Seth has served as a Carol Houck Smith Scholar in Poetry at Bread Loaf, and as the Tennessee Williams Scholar in Fiction at Sewanee, is a co-director of the Seaside Writers’ Conference, and teaches engineers to write at the Colorado School of Mines. He was a paratrooper with the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, and served in the Persian Gulf War in another lifetime.

Senior Editor in Collaborative & Cross-Disciplinary Texts

Mary-Kim Arnold

Mary-Kim Arnold is a poet, writer, and artist. She is the author of The Fish & The Dove (Noemi Press, 2020) and Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018), which was a nominee for the 2019 Krause Essay Prize, and has been honored by the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association, and named a “Best of 2018” Book by Entropy Magazine. Other writings have appeared in HyperallergicConjunctionsThe Denver QuarterlyThe Georgia ReviewThe Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2020 Howard Foundation Fellowship, the 2018 MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and the 2017 Fellowship in Fiction from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Adopted from Korea and raised in New York, Mary-Kim lives in Rhode Island, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University and in the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University.

Hasanthika Sirisena

Hasanthika Sirisena is a writer, visual artist, and cartoonist living in Central PA. Her work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018)and twice named a notable story by Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. She is currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Susquehanna University. Her books include the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and the forthcoming essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University 2021). 

Senior Editor in Social Media

Erica Buist

Erica Buist is a writer, journalist, teacher and author based in London. Formerly a staffer at the Guardian, she has been a freelance features writer for several years. Her first book, a hybrid of memoir and journalism called This Party’s Dead (published by Unbound and Penguin UK, February 2021) follows her on a journey from finding the corpse of a loved one to seven death festivals on five continents. She teaches creative writing and features writing for newspapers for Guardian Masterclasses and as part of the Guardian and Lincoln University’s MA program in Creative Writing and Publishing. Erica’s short fiction has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Liars’ League London, and Guts Publishing. She has been awarded writing residencies at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, Vermont Studio Center, Faberlull (Spain), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Arte Studio Ginestrelle (Italy). She tweets @ericabuist.

Senior Reviews Editors

Walker Rutter-Bowman

Walker Rutter-Bowman lives in Washington, D.C. and teaches writing at American University. He earned his MFA in fiction from Syracuse University, where he served as the Fiction Editor of Salt Hill. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Nashville ReviewHobartTin House OnlineKenyon ReviewHarvard ReviewFull StopKirkus, and Best Small Fictions 2019. He has received fellowships from the Edward Albee Foundation and the Ucross Foundation.

Senior Book Reviews Editors

Linda Michel-Cassidy

Linda Michel-Cassidy writes criticism and conducts interviews for venues such as The RumpusHunger MountainElectric Literature, and Heavy Feather Review. Her writing appears in Rattle, Catamaran, Tahoma Review, No Tokens, Eleven Eleven, and others. Michel-Cassidy’s story collection, When We Were Hardcore, is to be published in early 2024. She lives on a houseboat in Northern CA and in an old adobe in Northern New Mexico.                 lmichelcassidy.com

Esteban Rodríguez

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Valley (Sundress Publications 2021), and an essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press 2021). He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, Associate Poetry Editor for AGNI, and a regular reviews contributor for Heavy Feather Review. He lives in central Texas.

Senior Translations Editors

Ming Di

Ming Di is a Chinese poet and translator, author of six books of poetry in Chinese and one in collaborative English translation, River Merchant’s Wife (Marick Press, 2012). She taught Chinese at BU before moving to California where she lives now. She has translated four books of poetry from English to Chinese and co-translated four books from Chinese to English including Empty Chairs – Poems of Liu Xia (Graywolf Press, 2015, finalist for the Best Translated Book Award in 2016.) She edited and co-translated New Cathay – Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Tupelo Press, 2013)

Ariel Francisco

Ariel Francisco is the author of Under Capitalism If Your Head Aches They Just Yank Off Your Head (Flowersong Press, 2022), A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020) and All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The New York City Ballet, Latino Book Review, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Louisiana State University.

Naoko Fujimoto

Naoko Fujimoto was born, raised in Nagoya, Japan. Her poetry collections are Where I Was Born, winner of the editor’s choice by Willow Books (2019), Glyph:Graphic Poetry=Trans. Sensory by Tupelo Press (2021), and Mother Said, I Want Your Pain, winner of the Shared Dream Immigrant Contest by Backbone Press (2018). Her first chapbook, Home, No Home (2016), won the annual Oro Fino Chapbook Competition by Educe Press, and another short collection, Silver Seasons of Heartache (2017) by Glass Lyre Press, are available from each press. She is a RHINO Poetry associate & translation initiative editor.

Lisa Katz

Lisa Katz, b. New York/ in Israel since 1983. Ph.D, Hebrew University. Author of Are You With Me, (Finishing Line, 2016) and Reconstruction, poetry written in English and translated into Hebrew (Am Oved, 2009). Translator from the Hebrew of: Admiel Kosman, So Many Things Are Yours, forthcoming in 2023 (Zephyr); of Miri Ben Simhon, The Absolute Reader, a chapbook, 2020 (Toad Press). Late Beauty (Zephyr), poems by Tuvia Ruebner, a 2018 National Jewish Book Award finalist; Approaching Youin English, poems by Admiel Kosman (Zephyr, 2011) and Look There: selectedpoems of Agi Mishol (Graywolf, 2006). Served as Israeli editor of Poetry International Archives Rotterdam, from 2003 until the site ended in 2021, and April 2017-2021, as Central English editor of the Dutch site; in Fall 2017, translator in residence at the Iowa MFA Translation program. Recent book reviews, “Intersectionality and Identity,” on women’s memoirs,  Missouri Review Summer 2021 and “Translators in Body & Soul,” an omnibus review,  Missouri Review Fall 2022 

Senior Editor (India)

Arundhathi Subramaniam

Described as “one of the finest poets writing in India today” (The Hindu, 2010), and as a “unique poet of our times in a league all by herself” (Indian Literature, 2020), Arundhathi Subramaniam is a leading Indian poet. and writer on the sacred. She is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose,most recently, the poetry volume, Love Without a Story. Other works include the well-loved Penguin Bhakti poetry anthology, Eating God; and the bestselling Penguin biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life

She is the recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2020 (India’s premier literary award conferred by its apex academy of letters), the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Il Ceppo Award in Italy, the Mystic Kalinga Award, the Zee Women’s Award for Literature, and the Homi Bhabha and Charles Wallace fellowships, among others.  Her book, When God is a Traveller, was the Season’s Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

She has been widely anthologized, invited to international poetry conferences in Europe, USA, China, West Africa, Australia, Israel, among other countries, and translated into several languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Italian, German, Spanish and French.  She has worked over the years as curator, critic, and poetry editor. She grew up in  Mumbai, a beloved and exasperating city she still considers to be home, although she now divides her time between Mumbai, Chennai and New York. 

Senior Visual Arts Editor

Mary Kathryn Jablonski

Visual artist/poet Mary Kathryn Jablonski is Senior Editor in Fine Arts for Tupelo Quarterly. She has been a contributor at Numéro Cinq magazine and is author of “Sugar Maker Moon” (Dos Madres Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including Atticus Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Film Live, Poetry Ireland Review, Quarterly West, Salmagundi, and Verse Daily, among others. She was recently awarded a NYSCA Individual Artist’s Grant in Poetry, and an excerpt of her resulting collaborative video/film “Compass” (made with filmmaker Laura Frare) was awarded “Best Experimental Short” in the 2023 NYSWI Film Festival. Jablonski’s artwork (largely printmaking, drawings and handmade books) has been exhibited throughout the Northeast U.S. and is held in public & private collections. Visit MKJpoet.com

Elaine Sexton

Elaine Sexton‘s fourth collection of poetry, Drive, is forthcoming from Grid Books (Beacon, NY) in 2022. Her poems, reviews, and visual art have been published in journals and sites including the American Poetry Review, Art in America, Five Points, Oprah Magazine, Plume, Poetry, and Poetry Daily. A former senior editor at ARTnews and avid micro-publisher, she teaches at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute, and has been guest faculty at numerous graduate writing programs and art centers in the U.S. and abroad, including New York University, City College (CUNY), and Art Workshop International (Assisi, Italy).  She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. elainesexton.org

Associate Editors

Amanda Auerbach

Amanda Auerbach is a poet and literary critic living in Wheaton, MD. Her book What Need Have We For Such as We was published by C&R Press in 2019, and her poems have also appeared in the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Conjunctions.She is an Assistant Professor of English at Catholic University where she teaches literature and creative writing. 

Brigitte Byrd

Brigitte Byrd grew up in France and was trained as a dancer before migrating to the United States. She is the author of three poetry books, most recently Song of a Living Room (Ahsahta). Her current work is featured in Denver Quarterly, North American Review, The Laurel Review, Terminus, and Stone, River, Sky (Negative Capability), among others. She is Professor of English at Clayton State University where she teaches creative writing and contemporary poetry. Brigitte lives in Atlanta.

Chris Campanioni

Chris Campanioni has worked as a journalist, model, and actor, and he teaches literature and creative writing at Baruch College and Pace University, and interdisciplinary studies at John Jay. His “Billboards” poem that responded to Latino stereotypes and mutable—and often muted—identity in the fashion world was awarded the 2013 Academy of American Poets Prize and his novel Going Down was selected as Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards. He edits PANK and lives in Brooklyn, where he wrote his new book, Death of Art, out now from C&R Press. Chris is looking for work that is surprising, something that upends generic and formal expectations and parameters. He especially likes re-contextualizing pop culture, hybrid work, and collage. Send him something that startles you.

Kara Candito

Kara Candito is the author of Spectator (University of Utah Press, 2014), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, and Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in APR, Blackbird, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, Drunken Boat, Forklift Ohio, The Rumpus, Indiana Review, Best New Poets 2007, and elsewhere. Candito is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and the recipient of scholarships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Council for Wisconsin Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Oxbow School of Art.

Cassandra Cleghorn

Cassandra Cleghorn is the author of Four Weathercocks (Marick Press, 2016). Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Paris Review, Yale Review, Colorado Review, New Orleans Review, Boston Review, Poetry International, and Tin House. She teaches English and American Studies at Williams College, and serves as Poetry Editor of Tupelo Press.

Zoe Contros Kearl

Zoe Contros Kearl is a writer and editor raised in Texas and based in Vermont. ZCK holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from New York University’s Gallatin School. ZCK currently serves as Managing Editor for American Chordata Magazine. Zoe currently works in solar energy and serves on several boards for the Town of Shaftsbury.

Laura Cronk

Laura Cronk is the author of two books of poems, Ghost Hour and Having Been an Accomplice from Persea BooksShe is the chair of undergraduate writing at The New School in New York City where she teaches courses on pedagogy and creative practice. She coordinates programs for writers such as the Summer Writers Colony and The Riggio Writing & Democracy program. Originally from Indiana, she currently lives with her family in New Jersey.

Jonathan Fletcher

Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts.  His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests.  A Pushcart Prize nominee, he currently serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow and lives in San Antonio, Texas.  His debut chapbook, This is My Body, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.

Andy Frazee

Andy Frazee is the author of The Body, The Rooms (Subito Press, 2011), and a chapbook, That the World Should Never Again Be Destroyed By Flood (New American Press, 2010). He holds his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois and his PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. He currently serves as the Associate Director of Writing and Communication at Georgia Tech, where he teaches courses in postmodern literature.

Anastasia K. Gates

Anastasia K. Gates is a writer, poet, and artist from the Great Appalachian Valley of Pennsylvania. Her poem “Blood Orange” was shortlisted for the inaugural Oxford Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Oxford Poetry, Some Kind of Opening, Counterclock Journal, and others. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Columbia University in the City of New York.

Eileen G’Sell

Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic with contributions to Hyperallergic, DIAGRAM, Salon, VICE, the Boston Review, Ninth Letter, and Conduit, among other publications. In 2019 she was nominated for the national Rabkin prize for arts journalism. Her first full-length volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018; chapbooks are available from Dancing Girl and BOAAT Press. She currently teaches composition, creative writing, and film at Washington University in St. Louis. 

Melissa Ginsburg

Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City, the poetry collection Dear Weather Ghost, and two poetry chapbooks, Arbor and Double Blind. A second poetry collection, Doll Apollo, will be published in 2022 by LSU Press, and the poetry chapbook Apollo is forthcoming in June from Condensery Press. Her poems have appeared in the New YorkerGuernicaKenyon ReviewFenceSouthwest Review, and other magazines. Originally from Houston, Texas, Melissa studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Mississippi. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with two dogs, eleven chickens, and the writer Chris Offutt.

Jose Hernandez Diaz

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024) The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He has been published in The American Poetry Review, Yale Review, The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Iowa Review, Huizache, The Nation, Poetry, Poets.org, The Southern Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He has taught creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and online for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, and The Writer’s Center. Additionally, he serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.

Rochelle Hurt

Rochelle Hurt is the author of two poetry collections: In Which I Play the Runaway (2016), winner of the Barrow Street Book Prize, and The Rusted City (2014), published in the Marie Alexander Series from White Pine Press. She is the recipient of awards from Crab Orchard ReviewArts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, Phoebe, Poetry International, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fund, Vermont Studio Center, and the Jentel Artist Residency Program. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Best New Poets, Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati, where she formerly served as Assistant Editor for Cincinnati Review.

Brenda Iijima

Brenda Iijima’s involvements occur at the intersections and mutations of poetry, research movement, animal studies, ecological sociology, sensory representation and submerged histories. She is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks and artist’s books. Her most recent book, Remembering Animals was published by Nightboat Books in 2016. She is also the editor of the eco language reader (Nightboat Books and PP@YYL). She is the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, located in Brooklyn, NY (http://yoyolabs.com/).

Virginia Konchan

Author of Vox Populi (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017), Virginia Konchan’s poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Best New Poets, StoryQuarterly, The Believer, and The New Republic, and her criticism in Jacket2, Boston Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She is co-founder of Matter, a journal of poetry and political commentary.

George Kovalenko

George Kovalenko is a poet whose work has appeared in Colorado ReviewCrazyhorseThe Cincinnati ReviewNinth LetterYalobusha Review, and elsewhere. He has received support from the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, holds an M.F.A. from New York University, and is a Ph.D. student at the University of Denver.

Megan Levad

Megan Levad is the author of Why We Live in the Dark Ages and What Have I to Say to You. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Granta Online, and the fashion magazine AnOther, among other publications. Megan also writes song lyrics; her first opera, Kept, premiered in May 2017. She lives in California.

Dawn Lonsinger

Dawn Lonsinger is the author of Whelm (winner of the 2012 Idaho Prize in Poetry). Her poems and lyric essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Subtropics, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Cornell University and a PhD from the University of Utah, and is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Muhlenberg College, teaching courses in Creative Writing, Poetry & Politics, and Monstrosity in Literature & Film. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, the Scowcroft Prize in Prose chosen by Lydia Yuknavitch, and the Utah Writers’ Contest in Prose chosen by Susan Steinberg. Learn more about Lonsinger at www.dawnlonsinger.com. Dawn loves how poems escort her through the serpentine movements of others’ minds and thus disrupt her; she is hungry to read work that seduces and disturbs, that haunts with its particularity, pathos, landscape, and humanity.

Dora Malech

Dora Malech’s most recent books of poems are Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), Soundings: Selected (Eris Press, 2019), and Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The New YorkerPoetry, and The Best American Poetry. She is the recipient of awards that include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, and a Writers’ Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She lives in Baltimore, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Brad Aaron Modlin

Brad Aaron Modlin’s book EVERYONE AT THIS PARTY HAS TWO NAMES won The Cowles Prize and includes the poem “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade,” featured in the premier episode of the Poetry Unbound podcast. Brad’s work has been the basis for orchestral scores and art exhibitions. He is a professor and The Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at University of Nebraska in Kearney, where he teaches undergrads and grads; coordinates the visiting writers’ series; and gets chalk all over himself.  

Vi Khi Nao

Vi Khi Nao is the author of Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018) and Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.

Lisa Olstein

Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections and two books of nonfiction: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press 2006); Lost Alphabet (Copper Canyon Press 2009); Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press 2013), Late Empire (Copper Canyon Press 2017), Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press 2020), and Climate, a book of epistolary essays co-written with Jule Carr (Essay Press 2022). Dream Apartment, a new collection of poems, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2023. Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Residency Fellowship, Hayden Carruth Award, Pushcart Prize, Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and Writers League of Texas book award. A member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, she currently teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs.

Darius Phelps

Darius Phelps is a PhD Candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University, Anaphora Arts Fellow,  and 2023 Recipient of the NCTE Early Career Educator of Color Award. He is the Assistant Director of Programs under The Center for Publishing & Applied Liberal Arts (PALA) department at NYU. An educator, poet, spoken word artist, and activist, Darius writes poems about grief, liberation, emancipation, reflection through the lens of a teacher of color and experiencing Black boy joy. His  work and poems have appeared in the School Library Journal, NY English Record, NCTE English Journal, English Quarterly, Pearl Press Magazine, ëëN Magazine, and many more. Recently, he was featured on WCBS and highlighted the importance of Black male educators in the classroom.

Elizabeth A.I. Powell

Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of  three books of poems and a novel. Her latest Atomizer was published by LSU Press in 2020.  Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was a 2016 New Yorker Books We Love and won the 2015 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize. Her first book, The Republic of Self, is a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her novel Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was released in Spring 2019. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Women’s Review of Books,  The Colorado Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Vermont State University. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. 

Henk Rossouw

Henk Rossouw’s debut Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018, won the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. The African Poetry Book Fund included his chapbook The Water Archives in the box set New-Generation African Poets: Tano. His poems have been or will be featured in POETRY, The Paris Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry Northwest, World Literature Today, and Boston Review. Henk teaches at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he co-directs the UL Creative Writing Program.

Naima Yael Tokunow

Naima Yael Tokunow (née Woods) is an educator, writer, artist, and editor, currently living in New Mexico. Her work (and life) focus around interrogating black femme identity, ancestral legacies, and black futurity. She is the author of three chapbooks, MAKE WITNESS, published in 2016 by Zoo Cake Press, Planetary Bodies, out from Black Warrior Review in 2019, and Shadow Black, winner of the 2019 Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner, Jericho Brown. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a TENT Residency Fellow. She proudly edits the Black Voice Series for Puerto del Sol and reads for Nat. Brut and Poetry Magazine. New work is published or forthcoming from Tupelo Quarterly, The Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, DATABLEED, Berkeley Poetry Review, , DIAGRAM and elsewhere. More information is available at naimaytokunow.com. She is blessed to be black and alive.

Christopher Salerno

Christopher Salerno is the author of five books of poetry. His newest book, The Man Grave, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Award from Persea Books. Previous books include Sun & Urn (UGA Poetry Prize), ATM (Georgetown Poetry Prize), Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Poetry Prize), and Whirligig. A trade book, How To Write Poetry: A Guided Journal, was published by Calisto Media in 2020. His poetry has received the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, the Founders Prize from RHINO Magazine, the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Award, the Laurel Review Chapbook Prize, and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship. His poems have appeared in New York Times Magazine, New Republic, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Jubilat, and elsewhere. He teaches Creative Writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey where he serves as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum. Visit him at www.csalernopoet.com 

Zach Savich

Zach Savich‘s latest books include the poetry collection The Orchard Green and Every Color (Omnidawn, 2016) and Diving Makes the Water Deep, a forthcoming memoir about cancer, teaching, and poetic friendship. He is also the author of the poetry collections Full Catastrophe Living (University of Iowa, 2009), Annulments (Center for Literary Publishing, 2010), The Firestorm (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and Century Swept Brutal (Black Ocean, 2013), as well as a book of prose, Events Film Cannot Withstand (Rescue Press, 2011). His work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, the CSU Poetry Center’s Open Award, and Omnidawn’s Chapbook Prize. His poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, A Public Space, VOLT, jubilat and other journals and anthologies. A former editor with the Kenyon Review, Savich teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, and co-edits Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series.

Kayla Sargeson

Kayla Sargeson is the author of the chapbook Mini Love Gun (Main Street Rag, 2013). Her poems also appear or are forthcoming in 5 AM, Columbia Poetry Review, Chiron Review, Main Street Rag, and on Prosody. She co-curates the MadFridays reading series and is the poetry editor for Pittsburgh City Paper’s online feature Chapter & Verse. She looks for poems that punch her in the gut.

Yetta Rose Stein

Yetta Rose Stein reads and writes in Livingston, Montana. She is a graduate of Hellgate High School and received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Mountain Outlaw, and elsewhere. She is the Managing Editor for the Hunger Mountain Review and a board member of Opera Montana. Stein teaches poetry at the Bozeman Field School and East Side Elementary.

Christina Stoddard

Christina Stoddard is the author of Hive, winner of the 2015 Brittingham Prize in Poetry (University of Wisconsin Press). Her poems have appeared in various journals including Spoon River Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, and Asheville Poetry Review. Christina received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she was the Fred Chappell Fellow. Her work has also received support from the Ragdale Foundation and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. Originally from Tacoma, WA, Christina currently lives in Nashville, TN and is the Managing Editor of the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, a scholarly journal in economics. www.christinastoddard.com Christina looks for art that isn’t afraid to swing from the rafters. She wants to be hooked, taken along for the ride—because if the sentences are good, she’ll follow them anywhere.

Contributing Editors

Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang‘s fourth book of poems, Barbie Chang, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017. Her third, The Boss, won the PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Her other books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle. Her picture book, Is Mommy? (Simon & Schuster), illustrated by Marla Frazee was named a New York Times Notable Book. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2017. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Antioch University’s MFA Program. You can find her at www.victoriachangpoet.com.

Oliver de la Paz

Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, published by Liveright Press in 2023, is long listed for the National Book Award and is the winner of the 2023 New England Book Award. With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Oliver serves on the board for Poetry Daily and on the board for the Worcester County Poetry Association. A recipient of grants and awards from the NEA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Artist Trust, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, his work has appeared in journals like Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Poetry, and in anthologies and periodicals such as Asian American Poetry:  The Next Generation and in the New York Times. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. 

Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Which (2024) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored five collections, the most recent of which was CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Her nonfiction publications include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (with Julie Marie Wade, Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. 

Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn (writer, playwright, poet) has published twelve books, most recently This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020), a hybrid memoir; and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (2019). He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston. His acclaimed memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro, and has been translated into fifteen languages.

John Gallaher

John Gallaher is the author of Brand New Spacesuit, forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2020, Map of the Folded World (University of Akron Press, 2009) and The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way Books, 2007), which won the Levis Poetry Prize. He is an associate professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University and coeditor of The Laurel Review.

Stella Hayes

Stella Hayes is the author of poetry collections, Father Elegies’24and One Strange Country ’20 (What Books Press). She grew up in Brovary, a suburb outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, and Los Angeles. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from NYU. Her work has appeared in Tupelo QuarterlyFour Way ReviewPoet Lore, and is forthcoming from Image Journal, among others. At Washington Square Review, she served as poetry editor from 2022-2023, and assistant fiction editor, from2021-2022. She’s co-editor at Through Lines Magazine, and senior poetry editor at October Hill Review.

Karla Kelsey

Karla Kelsey’s poetry books include Blood Feather (Tupelo Press, 2020), A Conjoined Book (Omnidawn, 2014), Iteration Nets(Ahsahta, 2010), and Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary (Ahsahta, 2006) selected by Carolyn Forché for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Her book of experimental essays, Of Sphere, was selected by Carla Harryman for the 2016 Essay Press Prize and was published in 2017. From 2010-2017 she edited The Constant Critic, Fence Books’ online journal of poetry reviews. She currently co-publishes with Aaron McCollough SplitLevel Texts, a press specializing in hybrid genre projects, and with Poupeh Missaghi she edited the first volume of Matters of Feminist Practice, a journal of feminist criticism published by Belladonna* Collaborative.

Shane McCrae

Shane McCrae is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Oberlin College, and a faculty member at Spalding University’s low-residency MFA in Writing Program. His most recent books are In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017) and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), and his poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Pinwheel, DREGINALD, and elsewhere. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a fellowship from the NEA, and a Pushcart Prize.

Cutter Streeby

Cutter Streeby holds an MFA from the University of East Anglia and an MA in Literature from King’s College, London. He has delivered many lectures on poetics, translation, and translation theory, including “Navigating Lèse-Majesté: Translating the Poetry of Zakariya Amataya” at universities across Thailand and Malaysia while teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Publications, translations, and anthologies include The White Review, LitMag, Chicago Quarterly Review, Chestnut Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cincinnati Review and World Literature Today, among others.  

L.J. Sysko

L.J. Sysko is the author of THE DAUGHTER OF MAN, which was selected for the Miller Williams Poetry Series by Patricia Smith and published by University of Arkansas Press in 2023, and BATTLEDORE, a poetry chapbook about early motherhood published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. Sysko’s work has been anthologized in BEST NEW POETS and LET ME SAY THIS, appearing also in publications such as Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review’s “Poem of the Week, Tupelo Quarterly, and Mississippi Review. A former high school English teacher, Sysko is now Director of Executive Communications at Delaware State University. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware with her family. You can find her at ljsysko.com.

Avia Tadmor

Avia Tadmor received scholarships and awards from Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation/Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop Series, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Adroit Journal’s Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program. Her poems, translations, and literary reviews can be found in The New Republic, New England Review, Iowa Review, Narrative, Tupelo Quarterly, Columbia Journal Online, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at Columbia University and is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor at New York University. Born in Jerusalem, she lives in New York. 

Allison Benis White

Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me in This (Four Way Books 2017) and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry and named a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the California Book Award. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She has received honors and awards from the San Francisco Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, The Writer’s Center, and Poets & Writers magazine. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Editors Emerita

Nandini Bhattacharya

Nandini Bhattacharya is a novelist, professor of English , public speaker and blogger. Her first novel Love’s Gardenappeared in October 2020 and has garnered praise as a fascinating and well-crafted journey into India’s complex past” (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni), and “a sprawling family saga set against a background of some of the most momentous events of twentieth-century Indian history” (Clifford Garstang). She is the author of three scholarly monographs, the latest being Hindi Cinema: Repeating the Subject (Routledge 2012). She’s completing Homeland Blues, her second novel, about love, race, and colorism in the US and in India as seen through a female immigrant’s perspective, as well as a new scholarly monograph about how colonialism and capitalism continue to shape India’s cultural production. Shorter work has been published or will be in Oyster River Pages, Sky Island Journal, the Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories 2021, Bombay Review, PANK, and others. She can be found at AmazonAuthor’s GuildTwitterInstagramFacebook, and her Blog

Erin M. Bertram

Erin M. Bertram is the author of thirteen chapbooks, including from The Vanishing of Camille Claudel (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016) and Relief Map, a winner of C&R Press’s 2016 Summer Tide Pool Chapbook Competition. Bertram has received awards and scholarships from the Frank O’Hara Award Chapbook Series, Washington University in St. Louis, Prague Summer Program, Augustana College, and the Academy of American Poets. Their poems and lyric hybrid texts have appeared in Diagram, Cream City Review, Leveler, So to Speak, Uprooted: An Anthology on Gender & Illness, and elsewhere. The recipient of the 2017 English Graduate Student Association Award in Teaching Excellence, they are a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where they teach, help direct the Writing Center, and volunteer with the LGBTQA+ Resource Center.

Destiny O. Birdsong

Destiny O. Birdsong is a Louisiana-born poet, fiction writer, and essayist whose work centers on issues faced by black women and women of color, including intergenerational narratives, emotional labor, trauma (and the oversimplification of its narratives), cultural exploitation, and marginalization in healthcare. Her work has either appeared or is forthcoming in African American Review, The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, storySouth, Guernica, and elsewhere. Destiny has received support from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The MacDowell Colony, Pink Door, The Ragdale Foundation, and the Tin House Summer Workshop. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, is forthcoming from Tin House Books in 2020.She earned both her MFA and PhD from Vanderbilt University. Learn more at destinybirdsong.com.

Emma Bolden

Emma Bolden is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013) and medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2016). She’s also the author of four chapbooks of poetry — How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge by Edge, Toadlily Press); The Mariner’s Wife, (Finishing Line Press); The Sad Epistles (Dancing Girl Press); and This Is Our Hollywood (in The Chapbook) – and one of nonfiction – Geography V (Winged City Press). A Barthelme Prize and Spoon River Poetry Review Editor’s Prize winner, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry and The Best Small Fictions as well as such journals as The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Conduit, the Indiana Review, Harpur Palate, the Greensboro Review, Feminist Studies, The Journal, and Guernica.

Emari DiGiorgio

Emari DiGiorgio is the author of Girl Torpedo (Agape, 2018), the winner of the 2017 Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become (Five Oake Press, 2017). She’s the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, the Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She’s received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy of the Arts, and Rivendell Writers’ Colony. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.

Rebecca Hazelton

Rebecca Hazelton is the author of the poetry books Gloss, Vow, and Fair Copy, and the co-editor of The Manifesto Project anthology. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Best American Poetry.

Brandi Homan

Brandi Homan is the author of two books of poetry, Bobcat Country and Hard Reds, from Shearsman Books and two chapbooks from dancing girl press. With Hanna Andrews and Becca Klaver, she co-founded Switchback Books. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago and a PhD in Creative Writing, Prose, from the University of Denver.

Gariot Pierre Louima

Gariot Pierre Louima has an MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is the dean of admissions at Goddard College in Vermont. His short stories have been published in Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, The Caribbean Writer, carte blanche, Tupelo Quarterly, and the anthology So Spoke the Earth. A former journalist, he reported for the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, and Palm Beach Post. He has critical work forthcoming in Representations of Internarrative Identity (Palgrave Macmillan).

Shannon Nakai

Shannon Nakai‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati ReviewCream City ReviewThe Atlanta ReviewGulf StreamImagePorkbelly PressMidwest Review, among others; and anthologized in Kaye Linden’s 35 Tips for Writing Powerful Prose Poems. Previous accolades include a Fulbright in Turkey and a Visiting Scholarship at Oxford University. She holds an MFA from Wichita State University, where she was named a Bruce Cutler Fellow. She currently lives with her husband and son in Kansas.

W. David Powell

W. David Powell is an educator, collage artist and Graphic Designer living in Underhill, Vermont. David has been Art Editor of Green Mountains Review and The Saranac Review. His art, essays and interviews have also appeared in Kolaj Magazine, Cut Me Up, Indiana Review, River City, Whitefish Review, as well as book covers, album covers and promotional work for music and theatrical productions.

Elizabeth Robinson

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Rumor, from Free Verse Editions.  Robinson has been a winner of the National Poetry Series for Pure Descent and the Fence Modern Poets Prize for Apprehend.  She has also been the recipient of grants from the Fund for Poetry, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Brown Foundation/Museum of Fine Arts Houston for a residency at the Maison Dora Maar.  Later this year, the University of Akron Press will be publishing Quo Anima: innovation and spirituality in contemporary women’s poetry, a collection of essays and interviews that Robinson co-edited with Jennifer Phelps.  She works as the homeless navigator for Boulder Municipal Court. 

Letitia Trent

Letitia Trent‘s books include the novels Almost Dark and Echo Lake, the poetry collection One Perfect Bird, and the chapbooks The Women in Charge and You aren’t in this movie. Her work has appeared in 32 poems, Fence, Black Warrior Review, Diode, Smokelong Quarterly, and Sou’Wester, among others. Trent’s short story, Wilderness, was nominated for a Shirley Jackson award and included in Best Horror of the Year Volume 8, edited by Ellen Datlow. Trent is part of the horror podcast The Brood. She lives in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, with her husband, son, and three black cats.

Tony Trigilio

Tony Trigilio’s latest book is Inside the Walls of My Own House (BlazeVOX [books], 2016), the second installment of his multivolume poem The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood). He is also the author of White Noise (Apostrophe Books, 2013), and Historic Diary (BlazeVOX, 2011), among others. He is the editor of Dispatches from the Body Politic: Interviews with Jan Beatty, Meg Day, and Douglas Kearney (Essay Press, 2016) and Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press, 2014), and he co-edits Court Green—recently revived as an independent online journal after 12 years in print. He is a Professor of Creative Writing/Poetry at Columbia College Chicago.

Khadijah Queen

Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit (Akashic Books 2008) and Black Peculiar (2011), which won the Noemi Press book award for poetry and was a finalist for the Gatewood Prize at Switchback Books. Individual poems and prose appear in Tin House, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Memoir, Fire and Ink: A Social Action Anthology, The Force of What’s Possible and widely elsewhere. Her verse play Non-Sequitur won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers and was produced by The Relationship theater company in December 2015, with accompanying publication by Litmus Press. Fearful Beloved also appeared in 2015, and a fifth book, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, will be published by YesYes Books in spring 2017.

Executive Editor

Jeffrey Levine

Jeffrey Levine is the author of two books of poetry: Rumor of Cortez, nominated for a 2006 Los Angeles Times Literary Award in Poetry, and Mortal, Everlasting, which won the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Prize. His many poetry prizes include the Larry Levis Prize from the Missouri Review, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Ekphrasis Poetry Prize, and the 2007 American Literary Review poetry prize. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Levine is founder, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Tupelo Press.

Advisory Board Members

Molly McCully Brown

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body (Persea Books, 2020), which was named one of Kirkus’s top nonfiction titles of 2020, and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the co-author of the poetry collection In the Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Essays 2021, The Guardian, The New York Times and elsewhere. The Recipient of a United States Artists fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellowship, and the 2018-2019 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, she is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Nonfiction at Old Dominion University.

Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout; Ka-Ching!Two and TwoQueen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky.She and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). And she and Julie Marie Wade co-authored The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Duhamel teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born to an American father and Japanese mother. Her memoir, “Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye” from WWNorton, was a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award, Indies Choice Best Book for Nonfiction and the Northern California Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. American Harvest: God, Country and Farming in the Heartland (Graywolf) explores Mockett’s experience across “the divide,” and is a tribute to the complicated and nuanced history of the United States and its people. She lives in San Francisco, and teaches fiction and nonfiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Lee Siegel

Lee Siegel has been a senior editor at the New Republic, TV critic for the New Republic, book critic for the Nation, art critic for Slate, staff writer at Harper’s, Talk magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, weekly columnist for the New York Observer, weekly columnist for the Daily Beast, and associate editor of ARTnews. He has published over 700 articles, essays and reviews in every major magazine and newspaper in the country, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, New York magazine, City Journal, the New York Review of Books, Time, Newsweek, Dissent, Commonweal and Radical History Review. In 2002, he received the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism.

Siegel has published 3 catalog essays for art exhibitions, and four introductions to books: The Modern Library’s The Lost Girl by D.H. Lawrence; New York Review Books’ Story of a Friendship by Gershom Scholem; Granta’s In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm; New York Review Books’ Walkabout by James Vance Marshall. He has published 6 books: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination (Basic Books, 2006); Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television (Basic Books, 2007); Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (Spiegel and Grau/Doubleday, 2008); Are You Serious? How To Be True and Get Real in The Age of Silly in 2011 (HarperCollins, 2011); Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence (Yale University Press, 2016); The Draw: A Memoir (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2017). Siegel’s writing has been translated into 8 languages. His latest book, Why Argument Matters, will be published by Yale University Press in spring 2022.

Lee Upton

Lee Upton is the author of fourteen books, including six books of poetry, two short story collections, a novella, volumes of literary criticism, and an essay collection from Tupelo, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing and Ambition, Boredom, Purity & Secrecy.  Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and in numerous other journals as well as three editions of Best American Poetry.  Her most recent fiction collection, Visitations, was listed by Kirkus as one of the “Best of the Indies 2017.” Her first collection of stories, The Tao of Humiliation, wasselected by Kirkus for their listing of “The Best Books of 2014,” one of eleven books in the subcategory of short stories that included collections by celebrated international authors, among them Alice Munro and Hilary Mantel. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania. 

In Memoriam

Okla Elliott

Okla Elliott (1977-2017) served an assistant professor at Misericordia University in northeast Pennsylvania. He completed a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Illinois, an MFA in creative writing at Ohio State University, and a certificate in legal studies at Purdue University. His work appeared in Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, A Public Space, Subtropics, and elsewhere, as well as being included as a “notable essay” in Best American Essays 2015. His books include From the Crooked Timber (short fiction), The Cartographer’s Ink (poetry), The Doors You Mark Are Your Own (a novel), Blackbirds in September: Selected Shorter Poems of Jürgen Becker (translation), and Pope Francis: The Essential Guide (nonfiction). From 2016 to 2017, Elliott served as an Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly. We are grateful for his contributions to our magazine and the larger literary community.