Contributors

Amanda Chiado is the author of Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has most recently appeared in RHINO, The Pinch Journal, The Offing and many others. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart & Best of the Net. She is the Director of Arts Education at the San Benito County Arts Council, is a California Poet in the Schools, and edits for Jersey Devil Press. www.amandachiado.com.

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Judith Fox is a poet and finalist for the 2023 Bellevue Literary Review John & Eileen Allman’s Poetry Prize and BLR’s Spring 2022 Poetry Prize. Two of her poems are semifinalists in the 2024 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize. Her poems also appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Poet Lore, Rappahannock Review, The Madison Review, Notre Dame Review, Sugar House and elsewhere. Fox is also a fine art photographer whose photographs are in museums and global collections.

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Hadley Franklin has an MFA from New York University’s Creative Writing Program, and she was the 2023 winner of the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in The London Magazine, Joyland, Matter, Cagibi, Narrative, and others. She lives in Brooklyn. 

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Claire Hero’s short fiction and poetry have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Moon City Review, Prairie Fire, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere.

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Heather Jessen has poems appearing or forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Pangyrus, and elsewhere and is a finalist for the Charles Simic poetry prize. A former resident of Australia, she lives in Connecticut.

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Liana Kapelke-Dale (she/her) is a queer poet, ATA Certified Translator (Spanish to English), mixed-media artist, and non-practicing attorney. She is the author of the full-length collection Seeking the Pink (Kelsay Books) as well as two poetry chapbooks. Her poetry and translations have been featured in myriad journals and are recent or forthcoming in Poet Lore, The New England Review, and The Scop, among others. Liana lives in Milwaukee, WI.

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Rachel Kaufman is a poet, teacher, and PhD candidate in Latin American and Jewish history at UCLA. She writes archival poetry (including her first poetry book, Many to Remember, Dos Madres Press, 2021) and crafts historical narratives through poetic forms. Her new poetry manuscript emerges from the language and myth of the Talmud and reaches towards the possibilities and impossibilities of desire. Her writing has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rethinking History, and Colonial Latin American Review. She was a 2023 Helene Wurlitzer poet-in-residence and a Fulbright-Hays Scholar. See rachel-kaufman.com for more.

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Joshua Kulseth earned his B.A. in English from Clemson University, his M.F.A. in poetry from Hunter College, and his Ph.D. in poetry from Texas Tech University. He has co-authored two books of non-fiction and criticism—Agony: Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and the Ancient Greeks and W.H. Auden at Work: The Craft of Revision—and his first book of poetry, Leaving Troy, will be available in July of 2025. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Franciscan University of Steubenville.

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Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum (WTAW Press, 2023) and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here (MG Press, 2017). His most recent work appears or will appear in the Bennington Review, BOMB, december magazine, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. He’s a 2023-25 Rural Regenerator Fellow through Springboard for the Arts and serves as editor of Cutleaf.

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Xiaoly Li is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant (2022) recipient. Her poetry collection, Every Single Bird Rising (FutureCycle Press, April 2023), was a Zone 3 Press Book Award finalist. Her poetry is featured, or anthologized, in Verse Daily, Salamander, Saranac Review, Spillway, PANK, Chautauqua, Rhino, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for: Best New Poets, three times a Pushcart Prize, four times Best of the Net. Her website: xiaolyli.art.

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Abby Melick (she/her) is a New York-based writer, translator, and educator. She holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA in Creative Fiction and Translation from Columbia University, where she is currently a lecturer in the undergraduate University Writing program. Her short stories have been published in Flash Fiction Magazine and Brink Literary Magazine. She grew up in Washington DC.

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Jessi Jeanne Reath studied Creative Writing and Music at Florida State University. Her poems can be found in The Kudzu Review, Slipstream, and Alluvian, amongst others. She also has a poem forthcoming in the Atlanta Review. She currently lives on the Space Coast in Florida. @jessijeannepoet on Instagram.

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Kris Whorton’s new poetry collection, Everyday Omens, will be released in March 2026 by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her first collection, Alchemy, was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2023. Her poems, stories, essays, and articles have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Driftwood Press, Scarlet Leaf Review, Get Out! and Chatter. Whorton teaches writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

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Kevin Wranovix grew up in Memphis, TN. His fiction has been featured in Atticus Review and Oxford American. “What the Ice Cannot Preserve” is his first piece of published nonfiction. He now lives in Princeton, NJ.

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Nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net, Emily Zasada’s short stories have appeared in Orca, A Literary Journal, Qwerty, Menacing Hedge, The MacGuffin, Litro, Your Impossible Voice, The Forge Literary Magazine, Straylight Literary Magazine, and many others. A graduate of Towson University and originally from the Baltimore area, she now lives in Northern Virginia. Visit her website at www.emilyzasada.com.