Spring 2020

Robin Vuchnich is an artist, graphic designer, and educator. Her professional practice includes visual art as well as user experience, book, and new media design. She has worked as a creative director, visual artist, user experience lead, and assistant professor of practice at North Carolina State University. Her work has been published by Communication Arts, PRINT Magazine, MasterClass, and the AIGA. Vuchnich’s latest work-in-progress, which includes several images featured in this issue, is a multi-media installation that leverages digitized versions of Henry David Thoreau’s pressed plant specimens to consider scientific data about climate change and create a visceral connection to the natural world’s beauty at a time of environmental crisis.

"Book of Mild Regrets" — Mary Biddinger’s latest poetry collection is Partial Genius (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). Poems have recently appeared in Court Green, POETRY, Tupelo Quarterly, and Waxwing, among others. She is a professor of English at the University of Akron, and edits the Akron Series in Poetry. Biddinger has received awards or fellowships from the Cleveland Arts Prize, Ohio Arts Council, and NEA. 

“& the white girl tells me i need to marry a Latino man so that my kids can be the world” — Em Dial is a queer, triracial poet and educator born and raised in the Bay Area. She is an alum of the Stanford Spoken Word Collective and slam team, as well as the Youth Speaks Artist Corps. They have received the Hoefer Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Writing from Stanford University and Best Poet Award at the 2017 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational.

Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of eighteen books including Not All Saints, winner of the 2019 Bitter Oleander Library of Poetry Prize. The Second O of Sorrow received both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Housatonic Book Award from Western Connecticut State University. He works as a care giver and med tech for various disabled populations in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Aricka Foreman is an American poet, essayist and digital curator from Detroit, Michigan. Author of the chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber and Salt Body Shimmer, she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has appeared in RHINO, Buzzfeed, James Franco Review, THRUSH, and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, among others. She serves on the Board of Directors for The Offing, and spends her time in Chicago, Illinois, experimenting with photography and video narratives.

John Gallaher’s current collection, Brand New Spacesuit, is published by BOA Editions, and poems appear in POETRY, New England Review, Crazyhorse, West Branch, and elsewhere.

“Immigrant Elegy for Ávila”— Mónica Gomery is a rabbi and poet, raised by her Venezuelan Jewish family in Boston and Caracas, and now living in Philadelphia. Her work explores queerness, diaspora, ancestry, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. She is the author of Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her poem “A poem with two memories of Venezuela” won the 2020 Minola Review Poetry Contest, judged by Doyali Islam. She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist in the Cutthroat Journal Joy Harjo Poetry Contest. Her poetry has been published in various journals, including most recently Frontier, Foglifter, Ninth Letter, Interim, Tinderbox, and Canthius.

Benjamin Gucciardi is the author of the chapbook I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets 2018, Indiana Review, Third Coast, and other journals. He is a winner of Iron Horse Literary Review’s 2019 Trifecta Poetry prize, the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize from Harpur Palate, and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize. Gucciardi works with refugee and immigrant youth in Oakland, California.

Clemonce Heard received his BFA in graphic communications from Northwestern State University and his MFA in creative writing from Oklahoma State University. Heard is the 2019-2020 WICW Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow.

Shannon Hozinec lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work can be found in The Hunger, Thrush, Deluge, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.

“all the girls standing in the line for the bathroom” — Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit and is the author of the poetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020). A graduate of University of Michigan’s MFA in poetry, his work has found homes with Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Waxwing, and Iowa Review, among others.

Joseph Johnson teaches in New Meadows, Idaho. He received his MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and his work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Big Big Wednesday; Chicago Review; Forklift, Ohio; Pleiades; Storm Cellar; Washington Square Review; Yalobusha Review; and elsewhere.

Zoe Mays is a writer from Kansas whose poetry has appeared in Hobart, Little Patuxent Review, Zone 3, and elsewhere.

“Masculine Sonnet” — Sreshtha Sen is a writer from Delhi, India. She studied literatures in English from Delhi University and completed her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. Her work has been published in Arkansas International, bitch media, BOAAT, Glass Poetry, Hyperallergic, Hyphen, The Margins, The Shallow Ends, and elsewhere. Sen was the 2017-18 Readings/Workshops fellow at Poets & Writers and currently lives and teaches in Las Vegas, where she’s completing her PhD in poetry.

“salat during deportation proceedings” — Dujie Tahat is a Filipino-Jordanian immigrant living in Washington state. He is the author of Here I Am O My God, selected by Fady Joudah for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, and Salat, selected by Cornelius Eady as winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in POETRY, Sugar House Review, The Journal, Poetry NW, The Southeast Review, ZYZZVA, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Tahat has earned fellowships from Hugo House, Jack Straw Writing Program, and the Poetry Foundation, as well as a work-study scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. They serve as a poetry editor for Moss and Homology Lit and cohost The Poet Salon podcast. He got his start as a Seattle Poetry Slam Finalist, a collegiate grand slam champion, and Seattle Youth Speaks Grand Slam Champion, representing Seattle at HBO’s Brave New Voices.

“hearsay” — Renia White is a poet and writing instructor from the East Coast. She earned her BA from Howard University and her MFA from Cornell University, where she also taught. Her work has been recognized by the likes of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Sonora Review, and Indiana Review and also appears or is forthcoming in The Offing, Slice, Poetry Daily, Ruminate, Witness, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Lara Palmqvist is the recipient of a 2019 Elizabeth George Foundation grant and a 2019 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She was a 2017–2018 Fiction Fellow in the Loft Literary Center Mentor Series. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Washington Post, Ploughshares online, The Southampton Review, and Witness, among other publications. Her work has also been honored with awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Ox-Bow School of Art, Marble House Project, the Saari Residence in Finland, the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria, and the U.S. Fulbright Commission, through which she taught creative writing in Ukraine. Originally from New Mexico, she currently lives in Minnesota.

Joe Wilkins is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist and short-listed for the First Novel Award from the Center For Fiction. He is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and four collections of poetry, including When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award, and, most recently, Thieve. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Orion, and The Sun. He lives with his family in western Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield College.

Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collections Immigrant Model and Father Dirt, translator of Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star and Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper, and editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern. She is the recipient of two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, residency fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Le Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship to Romania.

Deborah Woodard is the author of Plato’s Bad Horse; Borrowed Tales; and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911. She has published several chapbooks, including Hunter Mnemonics, which was illustrated by artist Heide Hinrichs, and translated the poetry of Amelia Rosselli from Italian in The Dragonfly, A Selection of Poems: 1953-
1981; Hospital Series; and Obtuse Diary. Currently, she is translating Rosselli’s longest collection, Documento. Woodard teaches at Hugo House, a literary center in Seattle.

Jen Kasten is a writer in the Midwest. Her work also has appeared in Waccamaw.

Courtney Kersten is the author of Daughter in Retrograde: A Memoir. Her essays can be seen or are forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, The Normal School, River Teeth, Hotel Amerika, DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She won the Bellingham Review’s 2018 Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction; was a Fulbright Fellow to Riga, Latvia; and is a PhD candidate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Kersten is currently at work on a biography about the late superstar astrologer Linda Goodman.

Matthew Vollmer is the author of two story collections—Future Missionaries of America and Gateway to Paradise—as well as two collections of essays—inscriptions for headstones and Permanent Exhibit. He served with David Shields as co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. His work has appeared in venues such as The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, Ecotone, New England Review, DIAGRAM, Colorado Review, The Normal School, Willow Springs, The Antioch Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, Carolina Quarterly, Oxford American, The Sun, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays. Vollmer teaches creative writing and literature in the English Department at Virginia Tech, where he is an associate professor.