ANITHA AHMED earned her MFA from Boston University in 2019, where she was awarded the Florence E. Randall Graduate Fiction Prize. Her short stories have appeared in CALYX, Bodega, and Bat City Review, and her poetry has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Currently, she lives in Los Angeles, where she is a resident physician at LAC+USC Medical Center.
YASMEEN ALKISHAWI is a Palestinian-Venezuelan American Muslim. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida. She is forthcoming in Indiana Review, The Florida Review, and Peregrine Journal.
DARIUS ATEFAT-PECKHAM is an Iranian-American poet and essayist. His work has appeared in The Texas Review, Zone 3, Nimrod, Brevity, Crab Orchard Review, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. In 2018, Atefat-Peckham was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet.
His work has recently appeared in the anthology My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press). Atefat-Peckham currently studies creative writing at Harvard College.
SAMANTHA BARRON lives and writes in Queens, New York. She is pursuing an MFA from Columbia, where she is a De Alba Fiction fellow and teaches an undergraduate writing workshop.
ELIZABETH HART BERGSTROM’s work appears in Indiana Review, Juked, The New York Times, PANK, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. She’s a queer, disabled writer who was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. You can find more of her writing at lizbergstrom.com.
KRISTENE KAYE BROWN is a mental health social worker. She earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been featured on NPR and published most recently in New South, Nimrod, Ploughshares, Salt Hill, and others. She lives and works in Kansas City.
LYN LI CHE is from Malaysia. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, BOAAT, Waxwing, River Styx, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and others. She currently lives in New York City, where she works in tech strategy.
CHRISTIAN J. COLLIER is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Grist Journal, Apogee Journal, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2020 ProForma Contest and the 2019-2020 Seven Hills Review Poetry Contest.
RISË KEVALSHAR COLLINS studies creative writing at Boise State
University, where she has also served on the editorial staff of Idaho Review.
She earned a BFA in Drama at Carnegie-Mellon University, and an MSW, with emphasis in political and clinical social work, at University of Houston. Risë was a member of the original Broadway production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf by Notzake Shange. Rise’s play, Incandescent Tones, has been produced Off-Broadway and in repertory theatre. Her essays have appeared in Idaho Statesman, The Blue Review, Boise Weekly, Arbiter, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction was selected as a finalist for North American Review’s Terry Tempest Williams Prize. Recently, Risë was interviewed by Marcia Franklin and featured on the Idaho Public Television online series “The 180.”
JAMES DUNLAP is an Arkansas poet. He studied poetry at University of Arkansas and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Nashville Review, The Journal, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook, Hunter and He Dog Up a Holler from Swamp Editions.
STEPHANIE GLAZIER’s poems and critical prose have appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Iraq Literary Review, and in Reading and Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations. Her manuscript Of Fish & Countrywas a finalist in the 2020 Perugia Press Prize. Glazier has been a Lambda Literary Fellow, is a Room Project member, holds an MFA from Antioch University LA and serves as the poetry editor for Gertrude Press. She lives and works in Detroit, Michigan.
METTE HARRISON holds a PhD in Germanic literature from Princeton university. She is a multitiple Ironman triathlete and All-American. She is the author of the national bestseller The Bishop’s Wife. She is at www.metteivieharrison.com.
JUSTIN HUNT grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. His work has won several awards and appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The Florida Review, Bellingham Review, Chautauqua, Southword (Ireland), Arts & Letters, The Atlanta Review and Spoon River Poetry Review, among other journals and publications. Hunt’s memoir, Dominoes Are Played at Joe’s Place, was a finalist in the 2018 William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.
DAVID HUTCHESON is a poet from Rocky Mount, North Carolina. He has an MFA from Hunter College and was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, No Tokens, Everyday Genius, and other journals. He lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
SPENCER HUPP is a poet and critic from Little Rock, Arkansas. His recent work appears in the New Criterion, Sugar House and the Sewanee Review, where he was an assistant editor for three years. He currently works as an MFA candidate in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
ANU KANDIKUPPA’s essays, short stories, and flash fiction have appeared in CALYX, Epiphany, Salt Hill, The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, The Rumpus, The Offing, and other journals and have received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, and Best Microfiction and Best of the Net anthologies. Anu worked as an economics consultant in a former life and lives in Boston, where she was the Gish Jen Emerging Writers’ Fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston. Among other degrees, she holds an MFA in Writing from Warren Wilson College. Her website is www.anukandikuppa.com.
AMANDA LARSON is a writer from New Jersey, and an MFA candidate in Poetry at New York University. Her manuscript, Gut, was selected by Jericho Brown as the winner of the Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize and is forthcoming in October of 2021. She works as the Interviews Editor of Washington Square Review, and she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
YUXI LIN is a Chinese American writer, AAWW Margins Fellow, and winner of the Breakout 8 Writers Prize. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, The Washington Post, The Southern Review, Epiphany, The Electric Literature, Cosmonauts Avenue, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She graduated magna cum laude from Davidson College and received her MFA from New York University, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. She lives and teaches in New York.
ANNELL LÓPEZ is a Dominican immigrant. A Tin House Scholarship Finalist, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Hobart, New Orleans Review, Cagibi, and elsewhere. Annell is an Assistant Fiction Editor for New Orleans Review. She is working on a collection of short stories. Follow her: @annellthebookbabe on Instagram and @AnnellLopez2 on Twitter.
MICHAEL MCALLISTER lives in western Massachusetts and has work published or soon appearing in The Normal School, Brevity, and The New York Times‘ Modern Love column. He has an MFA from Columbia University where he was nonfiction editor of Columbia Journal, and is working on a book-length memoir. For nearly two decades he’s blogged at dogpoet.com
THOMAS RENJILIAN is a queer writer and PhD student in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California. He received his BA from Vassar College and MFA from Oregon State University. His work has appeared in Joyland, DIAGRAM, The Journal, Thrush, Cimarron Review and elsewhere. An editor for Ricochet Editions and Joyland Magazine, he lives in Los Angeles.
KATIE SCHMID’s book of poems, Nowhere, is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press in Fall 2021. Her novel manuscript was a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize
SRESHTHA SEN is a poet from Delhi and one of the founding editors of The Shoreline Review, an online journal for and by South Asian poets. She studied Literatures in English at Delhi University and completed her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Their work can be found published or forthcoming in Apogee, bitch media, BOAAT, Hyperallergic, Hyphen, The Margins, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. They were the 2017-18 Readings and Workshops fellow at Poets & Writers and currently teach in Las Vegas where they’re finishing their PhD in poetry.
Credit: Shazlie Khan
ERIN SLAUGHTER is editor/co-founder of The Hunger, and author of The Sorrow Festival (CLASH Books, 2022) and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, PANK, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from north Texas, she is a PhD candidate at Florida State University, where she serves as Nonfiction Editor for the Southeast Review and co-hosts the Jerome Stern Reading Series. You can find her online at erin-slaughter.com.
JOHNNA ST CYR is a poet from New England. She earned her MFA at the University of New Hampshire where she taught composition and poetry courses. While at UNH, she served as the poetry editor for the literary journal, Barnstorm.Her poetry has recently appeared in Sugar House Review and Gulf Stream.
LARISA SVIRSKY is a philosopher working at The Ohio State University. She was a finalist for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, TYPO, Foundry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere.
DUJIE TAHAT is a Filipino-Jordanian immigrant living in Washington state. They are the author of Here I Am O My God, selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, and Salat, as winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award. Their poems have been published in Poetry, Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Along with Luther Hughes and Gabrielle Bates, they cohost The Poet Salon.
JANELLE TAN was born in Singapore and lives in Brooklyn. She earned a BA from Smith College and an MFA in poetry from NYU, where she taught creative writing and was Web Editor for Washington Square Review. Her work is forthcoming in The Southampton Review, Winter Tangerine, Nat. Brut, The Boiler, and elsewhere. She is a Brooklyn Poets fellow and Assistant Interviews Editor at Singapore Unbound.
INNAS TSUROIYA is a poet and writer living in Indonesia. Her work appeared in Guernica, Wax Nine Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Running Dog, The Rumpus, IFFR, among others. She has received a Best of the Net nomination and served as a reader for PANK.
YUN WEI received her MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College and studied at Georgetown University and London School of Economics. Her awards include the Geneva Literary Prizes and Himan Brown Poetry Fellowship. Her poetry and fiction appear in Shenandoah, Summerset Review, Poetry Northwest, Wigleaf, Word Riot, and other journals. She works in global health in Switzerland, where she relies on chocolate and tears to survive mountain sports. Find her at pomegranateway.blogspot.com
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