BEGINNING IN 2018, AUTHOR BIOS FOR ALL FUTURE ANTHOLOGIES WILL APPEAR HERE.
READ RITUAL: An Anthology (2020-23)
Christian Aldana’s (she/they) poetry is a safe space for wicked and sinister femmes who hate imperialism. They are a queer, multiracial Filipinx community organizer based in Chicago. Though she has a soft spot for the Midwest, part of her will always be in South East Asia (Cebu and Saigon) where she grew up. She is the founder and Creative Director of Luya, a poetry organization that centers the voices of people of color. Alongside their comrades at The Digital Sala, Christian is dreaming up alternative visions of what radically flexible, community-centered, revolutionary poetic spaces can be. Their debut chapbook is The Water We Swim In from Sampaguita Press (2023).
Maria Bolaños (she/they) is a Filipina American poet, residing on the unceded land of the Gabrielino, Tongva, and Kizh Peoples. As co-Editor in Chief for Marías at Sampaguitas magazine and co-Founder of Sampaguita Press, Maria is committed to building spaces for Filipinx/a/o literature as well as Black, Indigenous, and POC literature. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and their poems can be found in publications such as decomp journal and Cut Fruit Collective’s Cut Fruit Stories, among others. More of her work can be found on Instagram and Twitter, @mariabeewrites.
Aaron Brame is the former senior poetry editor at the Pinch Journal. His poetry and prose appears in Lumina, Hartskill Review, Kindred, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other places. He lives with his family in Memphis, Tennessee.
Ina Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner with an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears in the American Poetry Review, the Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and is the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, out from Alice James Books (2023).
Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Christina Sharpe. He has fellowships from CantoMundo, Artist Trust, and the Poets House. His work has been published in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and BOMB, among other journals and newspapers, and has been translated to the Ukrainian. He currently lives in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography. www.paulhlava.com
Maria Guzman is a Dominican American poet and writer. Her poems appear in EcoTheo Review, Rattle Magazine, and The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought. She has been nominated for 2020 & 2021 Best of the Net. María has received support from Community of Writers at The Valley, Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and VONA Voices. She holds a BA in Urban Studies & Anthropology from Saint Peter’s University. Currently, María is working on her MFA in Poetry at New York University & lives in New Jersey.
Raychelle Heath is a poet, artist, teacher, yoga and meditation instructor, podcaster, and traveler. She holds a BA in languages from Winthrop University and an MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina. While she primarily writes poetry, she considers herself a storyteller. She uses her poetry and her podcast to tell the multifaceted stories of black women in the world. She also explores her experiences with the culturally rich communities that she has encountered in her travels. Her work has been published by Travel Noire, Fourth Wave, Yellow Arrow Journal, The Brazen Collective, and Community Building Art Works. She currently works as curriculum director and sanctuary coach for the Unicorn Authors Club. She also occasionally facilitates workshops there and for "The World We Want" generative writing workshop.
Alexis V. Jackson earned her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2018, where she was a Chair’s Fellow, and her Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a concentration in writing from Messiah College in 2013. While at Messiah College, Jackson studied post-colonial literature/poetry and Shakespeare in Oxford University. Jackson’s interests are in exploring the connectedness of “holy text” and the words of Black women. In Jackson’s work, June Jordan is placed in conversation with Missy Elliott, Hortense Spillers, and the women in Jackson’s own matrilineal lineage. Influenced by M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and the work of Jayne Cortez, Jackson’s work makes use of found text, explores the concept of planar time/ Black woman omnipresence, brings attention to the music that has narrated her experiences, and is heavily influenced by her identities as a 90s-raised, darker-skinned, Black woman, Philadelphia native. She has served as a reader for several publications, including Callaloo & Bomb Magazine, and her interests include the tradition of black woman poets, womanist theology, poetic form, and womanism. Alexis V. Jackson lectures in the University of San Diego’s English Department. She has also taught poetry at Messiah College.
Arthur Kayzakian is the winner of the 2021 inaugural Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series for his collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, which was also selected as a finalist for the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. He is the recipient of the 2023 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is also the winner of the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition for, My Burning City. He serves as the Poetry Chair for the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA). His work has appeared in several publications including Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, Portland Review, Chicago Review, Nat. Brut, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness Magazine, and Prairie Schooner.
Carlos Gabriel Kelly González specializes in U.S. Latinx studies and critical game studies. He works to infuse Latinx ways of seeing into video game studies through borderlands perspectives and lived/embodied experience. He earned his Ph.D. from Ohio State University and is a Postdoctoral fellow in Latinx Studies at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. His forthcoming book Ready Player Juan: Latinx Masculinities and Stereotypes in Video Games is scheduled for a Fall 2023 release with University of Arizona press and will be the first book to deploy U.S. Latinx studies (via border and performance theory) to interrogate AAA action-adventure video games. You can find his piece on Hellblade:Senua’s Sacrifice in Cultural Studies in the Digital Age (Hyperbole press). Currently, Carlos is thrilled to be co-editing the first ever collection of Latinx video game studies Coded Latinx: Latinx Gaming and Game Studies in North America with Regina Marie Mills. In addition to his research, Carlos is also a published performance poet with his 2019 debut collection Wounds Fragments Derelict.
Muriel Leung is the author of the 2022 Poetry Society of America's Four Quartets Prize winning Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books) in addition to Bone Confetti (Noemi Press) and Images Seen to Images Felt (Antenna) in collaboration with artist Kristine Thompson. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop, Community of Writers, among others. She received her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Southern California.
Carly Joy Miller is the author of Ceremonial (Orison Books, 2018), selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2017 Orison Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Like a Beast (Anhinga Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poet’s Poem a Day, Gulf Coast, West Branch, and elsewhere. A digital content writer and editor, Carly also teaches in The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn.
Author of the poetry collection, City of Pearls (Upset Press, 2019), Sham-e-Ali Nayeem is a Hyderabadi Muslim American poet, multi-disciplinary artist and musician. She is the recipient of the 2022 Leeway Transformation Award and the 2016 Loft Literary Center Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship.
Đỗ Nguyên Mai is a Vietnamese poet and educator from Santa Clarita, California, a city which currently occupies the ancestral, unceded territory of the Tataviam people. They are the author of Ghosts Still Walking (Platypus Press, 2016) and Battlefield Blooming (Sahtu Press, 2019).
Angela Peñaredondo is a queer, non binary Filipinx writer, artist, and assistant professor of Creative Writing. They are the author of nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press), All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, Winner of Hillary Gravendyk Regional Prize) and the chapbook, Maroon (Jamii Publications). Their work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets, Pleiades Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. They received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Kundiman, and Macondo and others. They are based in unceded lands of the Tongvan, Serrano and Tataviam nations (Los Angeles, California). Find them at angelapenaredondo.com or @domainedenarwhal
Jason Magabo Perez serves as San Diego Poet Laureate 2023-24. Perez is the author of Phenomenology of Superhero (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016) and This is for the mostless (WordTech Editions, 2017). Perez’s work has also appeared in various publications such as Witness, Entropy, The Feminist Wire, The Operating System, Faultline, Interim, Marías at Sampaguitas, and Kalfou. Previous Artist-in-Residence at Center for Art and Thought (CA+T), Perez currently serves as Community Arts Fellow at Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies, Associate Editor at Ethnic Studies Review, and core organizer with The Digital Sala. Perez is an Associate Professor and Director of Ethnic Studies at California State University San Marcos.
Seema Reza is the author of A Constellation of Half-Lives (poetry, Write Bloody Publishing) & When the World Breaks Open (memoir, Red Hen Press). Based in Maryland, she is CEO of Community Building Art Works, an award-winning organization that brings workshops led by professional artists to veterans, service members, and healthcare providers. Reza’s work with veterans is featured in the 2018 HBO documentary We Are Not Done Yet. She was awarded the Col John Gioia Patriot Award by the USO of Metropolitan Washington-Baltimore for her work with service members. Her writing has appeared in print and on-line in McSweeney’s, The Feminist Wire, The Washington Post, The LA Review, The Offing, and The Nervous Breakdown, among others. An alumnus of Goddard College and VONA, she has taught poetry in classrooms, jails, hospitals, and universities, and has performed across the country at universities, theaters, festivals, bookstores, conferences & one fine mattress shop.
Erin Rodoni’s most recent book is And if the Woods Carry You, winner of the 2020 Southern Indiana Review Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Her two previous collections are: Body, in Good Light and A Landscape for Loss. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies such as Blackbird, Poetry Northwest, and Best New Poets. She has won awards from AWP, Ninth Letter, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize. She teaches at the Writing Salon in San Francisco, serves on the board of the Marin Poetry Center, and raises two small humans.
Jessica Salfia is a writer and public school teacher in West Virginia. Her writing has appeared in the Charleston-Gazette Mail, West Virginia Living Magazine, Goldenseal Magazine, multiple volumes of the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and the Washington Post. Her poem, “Rootbound” was selected for the 2018 Women of Appalachia Project, and she was the winner of 2016 and 2019 West Virginia Fiction Competitions. She is the co-editor of the book 55 Strong: Inside the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike.
Czaerra Galicinao Ucol is a queer Filipino writer from Chicago. They are the poet laureate of their parents’ backyard. A 2020 graduate of the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program at New York University, their work has appeared in Marías at Sampaguitas, beestung, and Walang Hiya. They are a Best New Poets 2021 and Best of the Net 2021 nominee. Their debut chapbook is Pisces Urges (Sampaguita Press, 2023). They are also the Programs and Communications Director of Luya, a local grassroots poetry organization centering people of color, which was nominated for Best Poetry Organization in Chicago Reader’s Best of 2021 Awards. In their free time, they like cooking new recipes, practicing Filipino Martial Arts, and listening to Lake Michigan’s waves crashing.
Clara Bush Vadala is a veterinarian and poet from Van Alstyne, Texas where she lives with her partner, their beautiful daughter, and their menagerie of animals. She has had recent work published or forthcoming with New South Review, Daily Drunk Mag, and Moss Puppy, among others. Her full-length poetry collection, Resembling a Wild Animal, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions in 2024.
R.A. Villanueva is the author of Reliquaria, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. New writing has been featured by the Academy of American Poets, Ploughshares and Poetry—and appears widely in international literary publications such as The Poetry Review, Oxford Poetry, and Poetry London. His honors include commendations from the Forward Prizes and fellowships from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and Kundiman. He lives in Brooklyn.
READ WATER: An Anthology (2018-20)
Jehan Bseiso is a poet and researcher who has been working with Médecins sans Frontières /Doctors Without Borders since 2008. Her co-authored book I Remember My Name (2016) is the creative category winner of the Palestine Book Awards. Her poetry is published in various online and offline outlets including The Electronic Intifada, Warscapes and Mada Masr. Her co-edited poetry anthology Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by and for Refugees (Interlink Publishing) is forthcoming in December 2018.
Abigail Chabitnoy earned her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University and was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Nat Brut, Red Ink, and Mud City, and she has written reviews for Colorado Review and the Volta blog. She is an enrolled descendant of the Koniag Corporation and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. She grew up in Pennsylvania and currently resides in Colorado, where she is a research associate for a consulting firm specializing in supporting indigenous self-determination. Her debut poetry collection, How to Dress a Fish, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in Fall 2018.
Cathy Linh Che is the author of the poetry collection Split (Alice James Books, 2014), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies.
Kwame Dawes is the author of 21 books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. In 2016 his book Speak from Here to There, a co-written collection of verse with Australian poet appeared, and his most recent collection, City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern University Press), appeared in 2017. In 2018 a new edition of his 1995 epic, Prophets, was released by Peepal Tree. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and is Chancellor Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He also teaches in the Pacific MFA Program. He is Series Editor of the African Poetry Book Series, and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. In 2018 Dawes was elected a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Hahm Dong-seon was born in 1930 in Yonbaek, Hwanghae Province. When Korea was partitioned, the plain of Yonbaek marked the northenmost part of South Korea, south actually of the 38th parallel; but when hostilities ceased at the end of the Korean War in 1953, Yonbaek found itself with Kaesong in North Korea.
Hahm Dong-seon did advanced study in Korean Literature at Chungang and Kyunghee Universities, completing his master's and doctorate. Subsequently he was on the faculty of Cheju University and Sorabol Art College and he ended up in the Creative Writing Department of Chungang University where he remained till he retired. Currently he is professor emeritus at Chungang University. He has been Chairman of the Korean Modern Poets Association and Vice─president of the Korean Writers Association; currently he is Vice─chairman of Korean PEN. He was awarded the Modern Poet's prise in 1979, the PEN Literature Prize in 1995, and the Republic of Korea Culture and Arts Prize in 1997.
Hahm Dong-seon made his debut in the pages of Hyondae Munhak in 1958. He has enjoyed a full career as poet, literary commentator and essayist, with a large number of publications to his credit. His poetry is a weave of the traditional on the one hand and of the clash between the modern and foreign cultural influences on the other. Firstly, he has made a significant contribution to the modern tradition in terms of self─reflection and identity, as reflected in his penchant for Korean emotion and native speech patterns. Secondly, he writes a realist poetry, representing material things objectively and searching for variety through the use of such techniques as the objective correlative. Thirdly, his poetry reflects the pain of history, the pain of those who have not been home to North Korea since the division of the country in 1950. Hahm Dong-seon sublimates his personal pain to the national level and demonstrates the will to overcome division.
Bryce Emley is a freelancer, Composition adjunct, and barista in New Mexico. His poetry and prose can be found in The Atlantic, Narrative, Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, Best American Experimental Writing, etc., and he serves as Poetry Editor of Raleigh Review. Read more at bryceemley.com.
Richard Hamasaki taught language arts in Hawaiʻi from 1975 to 2015, including 28 years at Kamehameha Schools, Kapālama campus. In 2001, the University of Hawaiʻi Press published From the Spider Bone Diaries, Poems and Songs. In 2009, UH Press published Westlake, Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947-1984) co-edited with Mei-Li Siy. Richard is executive producer of the 2019 narrative film Down on the Sidewalk in Waikiki inspired by Westlake’s poems — screenplay by ʻĀina Paikai; directed by Justyn Ah Chong.
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco on March 1, 1941. He attended St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California and received both an MA and PhD in English from Stanford University.
His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems (Ecco Press, 2010); Time and Materials (2007), which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Sun Under Wood: New Poems(Ecco Press, 1996), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Human Wishes (Ecco Press, 1989); Praise(Ecco Press, 1979), which won the William Carlos Williams Award; and Field Guide (Yale University Press, 1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series.
Hass has also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River (Ecco Press, 1995), and is author or editor of several other collections of essays and translation, including What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World (Ecco Press, 2012); The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (Ecco Press, 1994); and Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry(Ecco Press, 1984).
Most recently, he received the 2014 Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry by the Academy of American Poets. Hass served as poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and is Distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Linda Hogan. A Chickasaw novelist, essayist, and environmentalist, Linda Hogan was born in Denver, Colorado. She earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs and an MA in English and creative writing from the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Hogan is the author of the poetry collections Calling Myself Home (1978); Daughters, I Love You (1981); Eclipse (1983); Seeing Through the Sun (1985), which won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Savings (1988), The Book of Medicines, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (1993); Rounding the Human Corners (2008); Indios (2012); and Dark. Sweet. New and Selected Poems (2014). Intimately connected to her political and spiritual concerns, Hogan’s poetry deals with issues such as the environment and eco-feminism, the relocation of Native Americans, and historical narratives, including oral histories. William Kittredge, in his introduction to Hogan’s Rounding the Human Corners, noted, “poets like Linda, through their language, open for us a doorway into their specific resonating dream of the electric universe.”
Hogan’s collections of prose also reflect her interests in the environment and Native American culture. Her books include the essay collection Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (1995), The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001), and, with Brenda Peterson, Sighting: The Gray Whales’ Mysterious Journey (2002). Together with Brenda Peterson, she also edited the anthology The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women and the Green World (2001). A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation for her fiction, Hogan’s novels include Mean Spirit (1990), Solar Storms (1995), Power (1998), and People of the Whale (2008).
Active as an educator and speaker, Hogan taught at the University of Colorado and at the Indigenous Education Institute. She has been a speaker at the United Nations Forum and was a plenary speaker at the Environmental Literature Conference in Turkey in 2009.
Hogan’s awards include a Lannan Literary Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Spirit of the West Literary Achievement Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. In 2015 she received a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Culture Foundation.
Brandon Igarta is a kanaka maoli poet, musician, and scholar. They are currently working towards an MA in Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University, focusing on queer identities in the Pacific.
Erin Kae’s poetry has been featured in Fugue, The Susquehanna Review, and Terrain among others (under the name Erin Koehler). Jen was recently nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize by Aster(ix) Journal, and was selected for the Adroit Journal Editor’s List for the 2015 Prize for Poetry.
Jen Karetnick is the author of seven poetry collections, including American Sentencing (Winter Goose Publishing, May 2016), long-listed for both the 2017 Julie Suk Award and the 2017 Lascaux Prize, and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. The winner of the 2017 Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the 2016 Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize and the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, she has had work nominated for Pushcart and 'Best of the Net' awards and featured online at The Fourth River, JMWW, The Missouri Review (forthcoming), Rattle, Red Bird Chapbooks and Yellow Chair Review. In addition, she has performed in an episode of 'Literary Death Match.'
Jen received an MFA in poetry from University of California, Irvine and an MFA in fiction from University of Miami. Her poetry, prose, playwriting and interviews have appeared recently or are forthcoming in TheAtlantic.com, Crab Creek Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Evansville Review, Guernica, The McNeese Review, Negative Capability, One, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Prime Number Magazine, Spillway, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily and Waxwing. She is co-founder/co-director of the not-for-profit organization, SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami), and co-editor-in-chief for SWWIM Every Day.
Jen's writing has been anthologized in Only Light Can Do That from THE RATTLING WALL and PEN Center USA; Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands; The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poetry; Hurricane Blues; Hysteria; Reeds and Rushes; Tigertail: A South Florida Annual; and Wild Horses: The Women on Fire Series, and included in the community and cross-genre film, dance and visual art productions Poems2Go (16 states); Poetry Postcards (Los Angeles); video remix poems at Poetry Storehouse (online); the Dancing Poetry Festival (San Francisco); The Poetry Project by Miami Dance Festival 2013 (Miami); Fluent Imprint Project, curated by C. Emerson Fine Arts (St. Petersburg, Florida); Parlor Games: Scientia, by artist Timea Tihanyi (Linda Hodges Gallery, Seattle); The Betsy-South Beach Illuminated Broadsides, curated by artist Andrew Reid for National Poetry Month 2013 (Miami); and Sweat Broadsheets II 2014, curated by artist Tom Virgin and poet Michael Hettich (Miami).
Jen works as the Creative Writing Director for grades 6-12 at Miami Arts Charter School; the dining critic for MIAMI Magazine; and a food-travel-lifestyle journalist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in outlets including Culture Cheese Magazine, Fodor's, Food Arts, ForbesTraveler.com, GoodHousekeeping.com, MentalFloss.com, Miami Herald, Mobil Travel Guides, The New York Times, PasteMagazine.com, Racked.com, Southern Living, The Sun Sentinel, TalesoftheCocktail.com, Today.com and USA Today. She is the author of the Les Dames d'Escoffier M.F.K. Fisher Award-winning cookbook, Mango (University Press of Florida, October 2014) and co-author of the 2015 World Gourmand 'Best Woman Cookbook USA' cookbook, From the Tip of My Tongue, with Cindy Hutson (Story Farm Press, 2015), which also came in third for 'Best in the World.' Her 16th book, The 500 Hidden Secrets of Miami (Luster, 2017), is forthcoming in November. She lives in Miami Shores on the remaining acre of a historic mango plantation with her husband, two teenagers, three dogs, three cats and fourteen mango trees.
James Kimbrell has published three volumes of poetry, Smote (2015), My Psychic (2006), and The Gatehouse Heaven (1998) and was co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea: Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-Seon, and Choi Young-Mi (2002) all with Sarabande Books. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and two NEA Fellowships, his work has been featured in journals such as Poetry, The Nation, and Ploughshares, and in both Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is a professor in the English Department at Florida State University.
Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. In 1959, the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964. Lee attended the Universities of Pittsburgh and Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport. He has taught at several universities, including Northwestern and the University of Iowa.
He is the author of The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon & Schuster, 1995); Behind My Eyes (W. W. Norton & Co., 2008); Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You (BOA Editions, 1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His other work includes Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (Edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, BOA Editions, 2006), a collection of twelve interviews with Lee at various stages of his artistic development; and The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), a memoir which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
He has been the recipient of a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, the I. B. Lavan Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1998, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from State University of New York at Brockport.
He lives in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife, Donna, and their two sons.
David Maduli is a veteran public school teacher, deejay and father of two. He is a proud alumnus of the VONA and Las Dos Brujas writing communities, and was the 2011 recipient of the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. Born in San Francisco and raised all over, David is a longtime resident of Oakland, California. He recently completed his MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College with a fellowship in Community Poetics.
Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya, in 1964 and immigrated to the United States in his teens. Mattawa received a BA in political science and economics from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga before earning an MA in English and an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, as well as a PhD from Duke University in 2009.
His collections of poetry include Tocqueville (New Issues, 2010), Amorisco (Ausable, 2008), Zodiac of Echoes(Ausable, 2003), and Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow Press, 1995). He is also the author of Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet’s Art and His Nation (Syracuse University Press, 2014).
Mattawa has also translated many volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry and co-edited two anthologies of Arab American literature. His many books of translation include Adonis: Selected Poems (Yale University Press, 2010), Invitation to a Secret Feast(Tupelo Press, 2008) by Joumana Haddad, A Red Cherry on A White-Tile Floor (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) by Maram Al-Massri, Miracle Maker, Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi (BOA Editions, 2004) and Without An Alphabet, Without A Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef (Graywolf Press, 2002), among others.
Mattawa is the 2010 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the PEN American Center Poetry Translation Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2014, Mattawa was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Currently, Mattawa teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Robert Miltner is professor of English at Kent State University Stark and is on poetry and fiction faculty of the NEOMFA. He has received a Wick Poetry Center chapbook award for Against the Simple, a Red Berry Editions Chapbook Award for Eurydice Rising, and the Many Voices Poetry Prize from New Rivers Press, selected by Tim Seibles, for Hotel Utopia. Recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in poetry, Miltner has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Louise Bogan Award for Artistic Merit and Excellence (Trio House). Recent or forthcoming poetry and creative nonfiction can be found in Los Angeles Review, Diagram, Rappahannock Review, Juxtaprose, Eleven Eleven, and Pacific Review.
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize; Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention 2018) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017). His book of translations I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) is forthcoming from Kaya Press in November, 2018. His poems appear in Best American Poetry, Guernica, POETRY, New England Review, Kenyon Review, and Quarterly West. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from at Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry at Auburn University and translations editor at Waxwing Journal.
Faisal Mohyuddin teaches English at Highland Park High School in suburban Chicago, is a recent fellow in the U.S. Department of State's Teachers for Global Classrooms program, and received an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia College Chicago in 2015. He was awarded the 2014 Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner and was selected as a finalist in Narrative's Eighth Annual Poetry Contest in 2016. His writing has appeared and is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Atlanta Review, RHINO, Chicago Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, the minnesota review, Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas), and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago with his wife and son.
Gloria Muñoz is the author of the chapbook Your Biome has Found You (Finishing Line Press). As a Colombian/American writer, she interested in exploring identity, migration, environmental degradation, and race. Her writing has appeared in publications including Best New Poets, Acentos Review, Forage Poetry, Brooklyn Review, and Entropy. Gloria holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of South Florida. She teaches creative writing at Eckerd College.
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.
Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli wahine poet / activist / scholar born and raised in Pālolo Valley to parents Jonathan and Mary Osorio. Heoli earned her PhD in English (Hawaiian literature) with the completion of her dissertation entitled: “(Re)membering ʻUpena of Intimacies: A Kanaka Maoli Moʻolelo Beyond Queer Theory.” Currently, Heoli is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Heoli is a three-time national poetry champion, poetry mentor and a published author. She is a proud past Kaiāpuni student, Ford fellow, and a graduate of Kamehameha, Stanford (BA) and New York University (MA).
Jennifer Reimer’s first book of prose poetry, The Rainy Season Diaries, was published by Quale Press in 2013. The Turkish translation of The Rainy Season Diaries was released by Siirden Press (Istanbul) in July 2017. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in: The Denver Quarterly, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Chaffey Review, 580 Split, Tinfish, Puerto del Sol, Weave, Zoland, 14 Hills, Gyroscope, Versal, Panoply, Glass, Alternating Current, Glass and New Delta Review, amongst others. She earned an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco and a PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Achiote Press.
Noʻu Revilla is a queer Indigenous poet and educator of Hawaiian and Tahitian descent. Born and raised on the island of Maui, she has performed throughout Hawaiʻi as well as in Canada, Papua New Guinea, and at the United Nations. Her work has been published in Literary Hub, Poetry, Black Renaissance Noire, The Missing Slate, and Poem of the Week by Kore Press. Her chapbook Say Throne was published by Tinfish Press in 2011. She is currently finishing her Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa.
Anjoli Roy is a creative writer and high school English teacher in Honolulu. In fall 2017, she graduated from the English Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa with her PhD in English and creative writing. Her dissertation, titled “Where the Water Is,” is an unpublished book-length collection of creative nonfiction stories. Anjoli’s creative writing has appeared in online and print literary journals and edited collections, including Entropy, Waxwing, The Asian American Literary Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Kweli, and River Teeth. A VONA alum, she attended Bich Minh “Beth” Nguyen’s memoir workshop in summer 2018. Her award-winning and nominated works include “Tigers, Woman, Eels: A Family Narrative” (winner of the 2017-2018 COG Page to Screen Award judged by Gish Jen), “Birthing Ancestors” (nominated by Waxwing for a 2018 Best of the Net award), and “Love Letter to Kurseong” (third-place winner of the 2016 Ian MacMillan Writing Awards for Creative Nonfiction).
Anjoli is also PhDJ for “It’s Lit with PhDJ.” This bimonthly radio show, which features writers to love and the music their work plays best around, airs on Central Pacific Time Radio twice monthly.
Anjoli is from Pasadena, California. She is a mashi to seven, a godmother to one, and the last of her parents’ three girls. She loves cats, surfing with loved ones or alone, and the rain that she oftentimes wakes up to in Pālolo Valley.
Valorie K. Ruiz is a Xicana poet fascinated by language and the magic it evokes. She is an MFA Candidate at San Diego State University where she works with Poetry International and volunteers with Poetic Youth. Outside of her poetic work, she enjoys exploring digital literature and can be found working on her Twine game (Brujerías) or making galaxy gato themed websites in her spare time.
Caitlin Scarano is a poet based in northwest Washington, and a PhD candidate in English (creative writing) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work was included in Best New Poets 2016 and The Best Small Fictions 2016. Her debut collection of poems, Do Not Bring Him Water, was released in Fall 2017 by Write Bloody Publishing. You can find her at caitlinscarano.com
Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer whose mission is to create poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. Her first full-length book, SOUVENIR, was released in February 2014 (WordTech Editions) and was a Willa Award Finalist in 2015. Her plays A HISTORY OF THE BODY and TINY FIRES were selected as Finalists for the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival. A HISTORY OF THE BODY was also commissioned by the East Bay Community Foundation and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. A YBCAway awardee, her work has been presented nationally; selected for the Utah Arts Festival, One Minute Play Festival, United States of Asian America. She has been a several-season member of Playground at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. www.aimeesuzara.net
Heather Sweeney’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in dusie, Bombay Gin, Summer Stock, Shantih, White Stag, and Bad Pony. She currently lives in San Diego where she teaches writing and yoga.
Eileen R. Tabios has released over 50 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. Her books include a form-based “Selected Poems” series, The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets 1996-2019, THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: Selected Visual Poetry (2001-2019), INVENT(ST)ORY: Selected Catalog Poems & New 1996-2015, and THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New 1998-2010. She’s also released the first book-length haybun collection, 147 MILLION ORPHANS (MMXI-MML); a collected novels, SILK EGG; an experimental autobiography AGAINST MISANTHROPY; as well as two bilingual and one trilingual editions, the English/Romanian I FORGOT ARS POETICA / AM UITAT ARTA POETICA, the English/Spanish ONE, TWO, THREE: Hay(na)ku / UNO DOS TRES: Hay(na)ku, and the English/Romanian/Spanish YOUR FATHER IS BALD. Her award-winning body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku poetic form as well as a first poetry book, BEYOND LIFE SENTENCES (1998), which received the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry. Translated into nine languages, she also has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 15 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays, as well as exhibited visual art in the United States, Asia and Serbia. Her writing and editing works have received recognition through awards, grants and residencies. More information is available at http://eileenrtabios.com
Brigit Truex has lived closer and farther from water all her life, in terrain along the Northern Atlantic beaches to the starling blue of Lake Tahoe. All the while, capturing moments in her poetry. In addition to her full-length book, Strong as Silk, her work has appeared in various national and international journals and anthologies such as Atlanta Review, Yellow Medicine Review, I Was Indian, and Canary.
Melissa Tuckey is a poet and literary activist. She has a background in environmental activism and is a co-founder of Split This Rock, a national organization dedicated to “calling poets to the center of public life.” Tuckey is author of Tenuous Chapel, a book of poems selected by Charles Simic for the ABZ Press First Book Prize (2013) and editor of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (University of Georgia Press 2018). Her honors include a fellowship at Black Earth Institute, a winter fellowship at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and writing awards from DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Ohio Arts Council. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and teaches community-based creative writing workshops in Ithaca, New York.
Koon Woon was born in a small village near Canton in 1949, immigrated to the United States in 1960, and presently resides in Seattle’s International District. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Poem and the World: An International Anthology and Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry. As the publisher of the literary zine, Chrysanthemum, and Goldfish Press, Woon is a vocal advocate for Seattle literature. The Truth in Rented Rooms is his first book, and Water Chasing Water was released by Kaya is 2013. He is an internationally-anthologized poet and has been awarded the Pen Oakland Award Josephine Miles prize for literary excellence and an American Book Award.
Syncretism & Survival: Forum on Poetics (2017-19)
ELMAZ ABINADER is a poet whose work has been inspired by the dislocation of her parents from Lebanon to the US, and has radiated outward to dislocations, occupations, and disenfranchisement of other people in the Arab World and Diaspora.
Her first book, a memoir, The Children of the Roojme: A Family’s Journey from Lebanon was the story of three generations of Lebanese and their various challenges in finding a home away from their country. Based on diaries, interviews and letters, the book covers two centuries, ending in 1947. Her second publication, a poetry collection, In the Country of My Dreams…. Provides a collection of very specific dislocations—not only the family immigration but her own transition from New York to the Midwest and the shock of the open terrain of Nebraska and the intimate relationships with natural elements.
In addition to these publications, Elmaz has written and performed several one-women plays: Country of Origin, Ramadan Moon, 32 Mohammeds, Voices from the Siege and The Torture Quartet. Each uncovers a personal perspective on the lives of Arabs in the middle of political trauma. For instance, 32 Mohammeds is an intersection with the death of Mohammed al-Durra, a boy killed in Palestine before the second Intifada; Ramadan Moon explores the mythology associated with women who are veiled and the different reasons and responses to the veil.
Her latest poetry collection, This House, My Bones draws parallels between the changes of the earth through natural means to the changes in our bodies during unnatural traumas and how that trauma moves through generations. (Willow Press, 2014). Her current project is a novel: When Silence is Frightening (working title). www.elmazabinader.com
ELIZABETH ACEVEDO was born and raised in New York City and her poetry is infused with her Dominican parents’ bolero and her beloved city’s tough grit. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. With over twelve years of performance experience, Acevedo has graced stages nationally and internationally including renowned venues such as The Lincoln Center, Madison Square Garden, the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts, and South Africa’s State Theatre. Acevedo is a National Slam Champion. She has been published or has poems forthcoming in The Acentos Review, The Ostrich Review, Split This Rock, Callaloo, Poet Lore and The Notre Dame Review.
Acevedo is a Cave Canem Fellow, Cantomundo Fellow, and participant of the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop. She has written two collections of poetry, her chapbook Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths and Medusa Reads La Negra’s Palm. The Poet X is her debut novel. She lives with her partner in Washington, DC. Find her online at www.acevedowrites.com.
JAMES E. ALLMAN JR. is a poet with credentials—degrees in biology and business—that qualify him for an altogether different trade. However, he easily tires of the dissected and austerely economized. He is a dabbler with an expensive photography-habit and a poetry-dependency. Nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, his work appears, or is forthcoming, in Black Warrior Review, Los Angeles Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Sugar House Review, and Third Coast, among others. He’s written reviews for Rattle as well as other journals, blogs and sundries and is the co-founder of an artist community called Continuum.
SANDRA BEASLEY is the author of three poetry collections—Count the Waves, I Was the Jukebox, and Theories of Falling—and a memoir, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. Honors for her work include a 2015 NEA fellowship, the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, and two DCCAH fellowships. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches with the University of Tampa low-residency MFA program.
DANIEL BORZUTSKY’s books and chapbooks include, among others, The Performance of Becoming Human (2016); In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015); Memories of my Overdevelopment (2015); Bedtime Stories For The End of the World! (2015), Data Bodies (2013), The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011), and The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007). He has translated Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (2015) and Song for his Disappeared Love (2010), and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (2008). His work has been supported by the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pen/Heim Translation Fund. He lives in Chicago.
DERRICK WESTON BROWN holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. He has studied poetry under Dr. Tony Medina at Howard University and Cornelius Eady at American University. He is a graduate of the Cave Canem Summer workshop for black poets and the VONA summer workshop. His work has appeared in such literary journals as The Little Patuxent Review, Mythium, The Tidal Basin Review, DrumVoices, The Columbia Poetry Review, and the online journals Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Howard University’s Amistad, LocusPoint, MiPOesias,Vinyl Poetry, Borderline, ThisMag and most recently had a poem go viral through Colorlines. He’s also performed at many poetry venues around the country, from The Nuyorican Poets Café and The Bowery in NYC to Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles. He is a former publications advocate and book buyer for a bookstore which was operated by the social justice nonprofit Teaching for Change, and which located within the restaurant, bar, coffee shop and performance space known as Busboys and Poets. He has appeared on Al-Jazeera America’s “The Stream,” and VOA (Voice of America), Rwanda Radio.
As the first Poet-in-Residence of Busboys and Poets, he is the founder and host of The Nine on the Ninth, the very first and longest running poetry series of the Busboys and Poets, and currently helps coordinate the poetry programming at the 14th & V Street location. He teaches Poetry and Creative Writing to a small but gifted class of high schoolers at Emerson Preparatory School. He was the visiting Writer-in-Residence of Howard County Maryland for the 2012-2013 academic year and the 2015 Spring Semester Writer-in-Residence of The University of The District of Columbia. He is also a participating DC area author for the PEN/Faulkner foundation’s Writers-in-Schools program. He’s performed at such esteemed venues as The Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe and the Bowery. He has lead workshops and performed at Georgetown University, George Washington University and Chicago State. He has appeared on Al-Jazeera and NPR as well. In May of 2014 he was also the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant. He is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, and resides in Mount Rainier, Maryland. His debut collection of poetry, entitled Wisdom Teeth, was released in April 2011 on Busboys and Poets Press/PM Press.
You can follow him on social media on Facebook and on Instagram @theoriginalDerrickWestonBrown.
JERICHO BROWN is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. His first book, Please, won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Thom Gunn Award, and it was named one of the best books of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. Brown is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
KARLA CORDERO is the 2015 recipient of the Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for writers of color from The Loft Literary Center (Minnesota, Minneapolis) and recipient of the Global Diversity Award at San Diego State University. Cordero curates, Voice For Change, a reading series inviting award winning spoken word artists to share their narratives on survival, and she hosts writing workshops for undocumented migrants in shelters located in Mexicali, Mexico.
She is the founder and editor of Spit Journal, an online literary review for poetry and social justice. Cordero is the 2013 Grand Slam Champion and the first Latina female to be part of the San Diego Elevated slam team, which placed 4th in the nation at the National Poetry Slam in Boston. She received her Masters of Fine Arts in 2015 and currently teaches at San Diego City College.
Cordero’s work has been published in the Acentos Review, Word Riot, Toe Good Poetry and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Grasshoppers Before Gods (2016), was published by Dancing Girl Press.
CYNTHIA CRUZ is the author of four collections of poems: How the End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016), Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014), The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012), and Ruin (Alice James Books, 2006). Her fifth collection, Dregs, as well as a collection of essays on silence and marginalization are both forthcoming in 2018, as well as an anthology of Latina poetry she is editing.
Her essays and art writings have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, Guernica, and The Rumpus. She is currently at work on two poetry anthologies: one of Latina poets and the other, a collection of poetry by female poets around the issue of consumption and nourishment. She is a regular contributor for the art journal Hyperallergic. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in writing and an MFA in Art Criticism & Writing from the School of Visual Arts. In the fall, she will be pursuing a PhD in German Studies at Rutgers University. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is currently at work on a collection of essays on language and iterations of silence.
KYLE DARGAN is the author of four collections of poetry, Honest Engine (2015), Logorrhea Dementia (2010), Bouquet of Hungers (2007) and The Listening (2003), all published by the University of Georgia Press. For his work, he has received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Dargan has partnered with the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities to produce poetry programming at the White House and Library of Congress. He’s worked with and supports a number of youth writing organizations, such as 826DC, Writopia Lab and the Young Writers Workshop.
Dargan’s poems and non-fiction have appeared in publications such as Callaloo, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, The Newark Star-Ledger, Ploughshares, TheRoot.com, and Shenandoah. While a Yusef Komunyakaa fellow at Indiana University, he served as poetry editor for Indiana Review. He is the founding editor of Post No Ills magazine and was most recently the managing editor of Callaloo. He is currently an Associate Professor of Literature and Director of Creative Writing at American University.
Originally from Newark, New Jersey, Dargan is a graduate of Saint Benedict’s Prep, The University of Virginia and Indiana University.
MEG DAY is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and The Publishing Triangle's 2015 Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University, a 2015 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, and Jacar Press' Julie Suk Award. Day is the author of two chapbooks: When All You Have Is a Hammer (winner of the 2012 Gertrude Press Chapbook Contest), and We Can't Read This (winner of the 2013 Gazing Grain Chapbook Contest). Day's poems appear or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, cream city review, Drunken Boat, and Vinyl, among other journals, and in recent anthologies, including Best New Poets of 2013, Wingbeats II: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival edited by Andrea Gibson, and Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics.
Day was raised in northern California's Bay Area. Day holds a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego, an M.F.A. from Mills College, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing with an emphasis on Disability Poetics from the University of Utah where Day was a Steffensen-Cannon Fellow, a United States Point Foundation Scholar, and Poetry Editor for Quarterly West. The 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Day has also received awards and fellowships from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Lambda Literary Foundation, Hedgebrook, Squaw Valley Writers, the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities, and the International Queer Arts Festival. Day is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Pennsylvania. www.megday.com
NATALIE DIAZ was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellow and a 2012 Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. In 2104, she was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, as well as the Holmes National Poetry Prize and a Hodder Fellowship, both from Princeton University, a Civatella Ranieri Foundation Residency, and a US Artists Ford Fellowship.
Diaz teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Rez MFA program and lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she directs the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, working with the last remaining speakers at Fort Mojave to teach and revitalize the Mojave language.
JILL ALEXANDER ESSBAUM is the author of several collections of poetry and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, as well as its sister anthology, The Best American Erotic Poems, 1800-Present. She is the winner of the Bakeless Poetry Prize and recipient of two NEA literature fellowships. A member of the core faculty at the University of California, Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program, she lives and writes in Austin, Texas.
TARFIA FAIZULLAH is the author of Register of Eliminated Villages (Graywolf 2017) and Seam (SIU 2014), the 2015 winner of a VIDA Award, GLCA New Writers’ Award, and the Milton Kessler First Book Award. Recent poems appear in Poetry Magazine, jubilat, New England Review and are anthologized in Best New Poets 2013, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, and elsewhere. Tarfia is the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor of Poetry at the University of Michigan and co-directs Organic Weapon Arts with Jamaal May.
CARMEN GIMéNEZ SMITH is the author of a memoir and four poetry collections—including Milk and Filth, finalist for the 2013 NBCC award in poetry. A CantoMundo Fellow, she teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press.
THOMAS HAYDEN (1939-2016) was a radical anti-war and civil rights activist in the 1960s, eventually serving a combined 18 years in the California State Assembly and State Senate. After his political career, Hayden wrote for major publications and advance his ideals for social reform as director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center.
A co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1961, Hayden also joined the Freedom Riders in the South after authorities refused to enforce desegregation of public buses. He was jailed in Albany, Georgia, for attempting to desegregate a railway station. While incarcerated, he began drafting the famed Port Huron Statement, which introduced the concept of "participatory democracy" to a wider audience. Hayden later became president of SDS and helped form the Economic Research and Action Project to spur civil rights progress. During the mid-1960s, Hayden worked with inner-city New Jersey residents as part of the Newark Community Union Project and began traveling to Hanoi, Vietnam. He was arrested for protesting at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, becoming one of the "Chicago Seven" defendants who were convicted for conspiracy to incite violence but later had their convictions overturned.
Having already published several books, including his 1988 autobiography, Reunion: A Memoir, Hayden focused more on writing in the new millennium with regular contributions to such publications as The New York Times, The Huffington Post and The Nation. He also became the director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Culver City, California, through which he continued to share liberal ideas, support social and environmental and animal welfare causes, and speak out against wars for the remainder of his life. In 2015, he published Listen, Yankee!: Why Cuba Matters.
LAUREN JENSEN-DEEGAN lives in Eugene, Oregon. Among other publications, her poetry has been included in The Best American Poetry, been featured as a Poet’s Sampler in the Boston Review and selected as a finalist for the James Wright Poetry Award and Fineline Competition in which both selections appeared in the Mid-American Review.
CLAIRE KAGEYAMA-RAMAKRISHNAN (1969-2016) was a full-time English instructor at Houston Community College in Houston, Texas, a graduate of the Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing program at University of Houston, where she was a Cambor Fellow; a graduate of the M.A. literature program at University of California at Berkeley, and graduate of the M.F.A. in poetry program at University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. Her first book, Shadow Mountain, won the Four Way Books Intro Book Prize, and was published by Four Way Books; her second book, Bear, Diamonds and Crane was published by Four Way Books in 2011.
ILYA KAMINSKY is a poet, translator, and essayist who lives in San Diego.
JOAN NAVIYUK KANE is the author of Milk Black Carbon, The Straits, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife and Hyperboreal. She has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, the USA Projects Creative Vision Award, an American Book Award, the Alaska Literary Award, and fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation, Alaska State Council on the Arts, Alaska Arts and Cultures Foundation, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and the School for Advanced Research.
Kane graduated from Harvard College, where she was a Harvard National Scholar, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she was the recipient of a graduate Writing Fellowship. Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, she raises her children in Anchorage, Alaska, and is a faculty mentor with the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
MARIAMA J. LOCKINGTON is a writer, nonprofit educator, and transracial adoptee who calls many places home. Her poetry chapbook The Lucky Daughter is now available from Damaged Goods Press, and her middle grade novel-in-verse QUESTIONS I HAVE FOR BLACK GIRLS LIKE ME is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for Young Readers in 2019. Her essay “What A Black Woman Wishes her Adoptive White Parents Knew” trended on Buzzfeed News Reader in August 2016.
Mariama has edited and contributed to many youth-centered book projects including: Be Honest and Other Advice from Students Across the Country (2011, The New Press), Growing Our Hearts and Brains: Poems on love, technology, and success (2014, 826NYC), Chicken Makes the Ice Cream Taste Better: Stories on Food and Community (2015, 826NYC), and her co-authored lesson plan “The Science of Superpowers” is included in STEM to Story: Enthralling and Effective Lesson Plans for grades 5th-8th (2015, Jossey-Bass).
She is a Bread Loaf Scholar, Voices of Our Nation Arts Alumni, a Literary Death Match Champion, and she earned her Masters in Education from Lesley University and her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.
Mariama lives in Lexington, KY with her partner and their dapple-haired dachshund, Henry. When she is not writing or teaching, you’ll find Mariama singing karaoke, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or re-reading her favorite book, Sula by Toni Morrison.
DAVID MADULI is a writer, veteran public school teacher, active deejay and father. Born in San Francisco, he is a longtime resident of Oakland and winner of the 2011 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize.
NICK MAKOHA represented Uganda at Poetry Parnassus as part of the Cultural Olympiad held in London. A former Writer in Residence for Newham Libraries, his 1-man-Show My Father & Other Superheroes debuted to sold-out performances at 2013 London Literature Festival and is currently on tour. He has been a panelist at both the inaugural Being a Man Festival (Fatherhood: Past, Present & Future) and Women of the World Festival (Bringing Up Boys). In 2005 award-winning publisher Flippedeye launched its pamphlet series with his debut The Lost Collection of an Invisible Man. Part of his soon to be published first full collection The Second Republic is in the anthology Seven New Generation African Poets (Slapering Hol Press). Nick recently won the Brunel African Poetry prize and has poems that appear in the The Poetry Review, Rialto, The Triquarterly Review and Boston Review.
SALLY WEN MAO is the author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). She is the current Singapore Creative Writing Residency 2015 Resident.
LO KWA MEI-EN is the author of Yearling (Alice James Books, 2015), which received the Kundiman Poetry Prize, The Bees Make Money In the Lion (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2016), winner of the CSUPC Open Competition, and The Romances, a chapbook forthcoming from The Lettered Streets Press. She is from Singapore and Ohio, where she currently lives and works in Cincinnati.
MICHAEL MLEKODAY is the author of The Dead Eat Everything (Kent State University Press, 2014), a National Poetry Slam Champion, and a doctoral student at the University of California, Davis. Mlekoday’s poems have appeared in Verse Daily, The BreakBeat Poets, cream city review, Salt Hill, and other venues.
DAVID MURA is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. A Sansei or third generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (Anchor-Random), which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity (1996, Anchor). Mura’s second book of poetry, The Colors of Desire (1995, Anchor), won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library. His first, After We Lost Our Way (Carnegie Mellon U. Press), won the 1989 National Poetry Series Contest. He has also written the chapbook, A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography & Addiction (Milkweed Editions). His book of critical essays, Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto & Mr. Moto: Poetry & Identity, was published by the U. of Michigan Press in its Poets on Poetry series in 2002. His third book of poetry, Angels for the Burning, was published by Boa Editions Ltd. in 2004.
Mura has received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, two NEA Literature Fellowships, two Bush Foundation Fellowships, four Loft-McKnight Awards, several Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and a Discovery/The Nation Award. He teaches at Hamline University, VONA (Voices of the Nation Association), and the Stonecoast MFA program. Mura lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Dr. Susan Sencer, and three children.
DIANA KHOI NGUYEN is a native of California, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s poems appear in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, and PEN America, among others. She has also received the Fred and Edith B. Herman Award from the Academy of American Poets and Scotti Merrill Award from the Key West Literary Seminars, as well as four Bread Loaf Writers Conference scholarships, an Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Lucille Clifton Scholarship from the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. A Ruth Lilly Fellowship finalist and Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo fellow, she earned her MFA from Columbia University and was recently the Roth Resident in poetry at Bucknell University. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver. www.dianakhoinguyen.com
CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan/Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, co-star of the poetry album Undercurrent, and author of three collections of poetry: from unincorporated territory [hacha], from unincorporated territory [saina], and from unincorporated territory [guma’]. He is an Associate Professor in the English Department and affiliate faculty with the Center for Pacific Islands Studies and the Indigenous Politics Program at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa.
MICHAEL SHEEHAN is a former fellow of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University. While editor-in-chief of Sonora Review, he curated a tribute to David Foster Wallace, which included Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Michael Martone, Sven Birkerts, Charles Bock, and many others. His collection of stories, Proposals for the Recovery of the Apparently Drowned, was published by Colony Collapse Press in late 2012. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions, Necessary Fiction, The Collagist, and Terrain, among other places.
MATTHEW SHENODA is a writer and professor whose poems and essays have appeared in a variety of newspapers, journals, radio programs and anthologies. He has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his work has been supported by the California Arts Council and the Lannan Foundation among others.
His debut collection of poems, Somewhere Else (Coffee House Press), was named one of 2005's debut books of the year by Poets & Writers Magazine and was winner of a 2006 American Book Award. He is also the author of Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone (BOA Editions Ltd.), editor of Duppy Conqueror: New & Selected Poems by Kwame Dawes, and most recently author of Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press), winner of the 2015 Arab American Book Award and with Kwame Dawes editor of Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2017).
Shenoda teaches in the fields of ethnic studies and creative writing and has held several faculty and administrative positions at various institutions. Formerly the Assistant Provost for Equity and Diversity at CalArts he is currently the Dean of Academic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Special Advisor to the President at Columbia College Chicago where he is also Professor of English and Creative Writing. Additionally, Shenoda has served on the Board of Directors of several arts and education organizations and is a founding editor of the African Poetry Book Fund. He lives with his family in Evanston, Illinois.
DAVID SHOOK is a poet and translator in Los Angeles, where he runs Phoneme Media. His book Our Obsidian Tongues was long-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize in 2013. His many translations include books by Mario Bellatin, Tedi López Mills, and Víctor Terán. In addition to his writing, Shook has produced literary films in places like Bangladesh, Cuba, and Equatorial Guinea. He recently edited Like a New Sun: New Indigenous Mexican Poetry, featuring poetry from six different indigenous Mexican languages.
JAVIER SICILIA is a founder and leader of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity in Mexico. Sicilia is a renowned poet, essayist, activist and journalist in Mexico and writes for various print media outlets such as Processo and Reforma. Sicilia was founder and director of Él Telar and has coordinated many literary workshops as well as writing for film and television and editing for the magazine Poesía. He is a member of the editorial board for Los Universitarios y Cartapacios and a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.
Sicilia has also been a professor of literature, aesthetics and screenwriting at the University La Salle of Cuernavaca and was the director for the now defunct magazine Ixtus. He currently directs the magazine Conspiratio, from which he engages various philosophical, artistic and literary topics. In 2009 he was awarded the National Aguascalientes Prize for Poetry, one of the most important awards for Mexican poetry.
Read some of his poems and a commentary on his work from translator David Shook here.
BRIAN TEARE is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Fund for Poetry, the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society. He was also a 2015 Pew Fellow in the Arts. He’s the author of five full-length books, The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda-Award-winning Pleasure, Kingsley Tufts finalist Companion Grasses, and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. He’s also published seven chapbooks, including Paradise Was Typeset, Helplessness, [ black sun crown ], and SORE EROS. In 2018, DoubleCross Press will publish Headlands Quadrats, a new chapbook, and in 2019 Nightboat Books will publish Brian’s sixth book, Doomstead Days.
After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, he’s now an Associate Professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books. Brian is available for readings, lectures, workshops, and classroom visits. Should you have any questions, please browse the website, then contact b_teare@yahoo.com for more information.
TRUTH THOMAS is a singer-songwriter and poet born in Knoxville, Tennessee and raised in Washington, DC. He is the founder of Cherry Castle Publishing and studied creative writing at Howard University under Dr. Tony Medina. Thomas earned his MFA in poetry at New England College. His collections include: Party of Black, A Day of Presence, Bottle of Life, My TV is Not the Boss of Me (a children’s book, illustrated by Cory Thomas) and Speak Water, winner of the 2013 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. He serves on the editorial board of Tidal Basin Review and is a former writer-in-residence for the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo). His poems have appeared in over 100 publications, including The 100 Best African American Poems (edited by Nikki Giovanni).
SARAH VAP is the author of six books of poetry and poetics. She is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, and her most recent collection, Viability (Penguin 2016), was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Jo Bang. Her other books include Arco Iris (Saturnalia Books, 2012) and End of a Sentimental Journey (Noemi Press, 2013).
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS is a Chicago, Illinois native. He is the author of the book of poems Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016). He’s also co-authored a book of poems and conversations called Prime (Sibling Rivalry Press). He is a Cave Canem graduate and received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, West Branch and others. Phillip received his MFA in Writing from the Washington University in St. Louis. He is the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry and the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.
MONIKA ZOBEL is a poet whose writing has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Redivider, DIAGRAM, Beloit Poetry Journal, Mid-American Review, Guernica Magazine, West Branch, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. Her book, An Instrument for Leaving, was selected by Dorothea Lasky for the 2013 Slope Editions Book Prize. A Senior Editor at The California Journal of Poetics and Fulbright alumna, Zobel currently lives in Bremen, Germany.