César Dávila Andrade (Cuenca, 1918—Caracas, 1967) was an Ecuadorian poet, short fiction writer, and essayist. He was known as El Fakir for both his physical appearance and the mystical and esoteric concerns of his work. His chronicle of atrocities and forced labor under Spanish rule, “Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas,” is widely acclaimed, both critically and popularly, as a key text of 20th century Ecuadorian poetry. His telluric masterpiece, “Feral Cathedral” (1951), appeared almost contemporaneously with Pablo Neruda’s “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” in Canto General (1950). Had “Feral Cathedral” achieved more than scant diffusion on its publication in Venezuela, it may have garnered a share of the fame and accolades that Neruda’s poem has justly earned.
Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This Is the Age We End Discovery (March 2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She has received fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, City Artists Corps, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, CantoMundo and Queens Council on the Arts. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, among others. Her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC. In May 2022, Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace” for a campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, which appeared on Paramount Network, MTV Networks, The Smithsonian Channel, VH1 and many others. In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full-length poetry collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020), which she began in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday in 2019. In January 2023, she performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day, as part “We Are Here: Songs From The Holocaust.”
Sébastien Luc Butler is a Poe/Faulkner fellow in poetry at the University of Virginia. His writing has been featured in The Michigan Daily, The RC Review, and is forthcoming from Southern Indiana Review. Sebastien is the recipient of the 2021 Hopwood Award for Poetry from the University of Michigan. He hails from Dexter, Michigan and currently resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Willow James Claire (James O’Leary) is a trans poet from Arizona. Their work has been nominated for both the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has appeared in such journals as Frontier, Protean, The Indianapolis Review, Foglifter, and more. Willow holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and currently serves as a poetry reader for ANMLY.
Katie Condon is the author of Praying Naked, winner of the 2018 Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. Her new poems appear in or are forthcoming from the New Yorker, American Poetry Review and the Academy of American Poets’ anthology 100 Poems that Matter. Katie is an assistant professor of English at Southern Methodist University.
Maggie Graber is a queer poet from the Midwest and the author of Swan Hammer (MSU Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and a nominee for a 2023 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award. Her work has appeared in South Dakota Review, RHINO, The Louisville Review, Southern Indiana Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Oxford, MS, where she is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi. She loves photosynthesis.
Amanda Gunn’s debut poetry collection is Things I Didn’t Do With This Body, published by Copper Canyon Press (2023). Her poetry appears recently in Poetry, Narrative Magazine, and LARB Quarterly Journal. She is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an Iranian-American multimedia artist, writer, and journalist. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Passages North, The Cortland Review, Salamander, RHINO, Salt Hill, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief at Mud Season Review and a contributing writer and critic at MovieWeb. She is a six-time Best of the Net nominee, two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and runner-up for the Arthur Flowers Flash Fiction Prize. Her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com
Brett Hanley is a Poetry Editor for Southeast Review. She holds an MFA from McNeese State and is a PhD candidate at Florida State. Their work is forthcoming or has recently been published in West Branch, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Puerto del Sol, THE BOILER, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She was a semi-finalist for the 2022 92Y Discovery Contest and has received support from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Joel Hans was once called a saguaro cactus in disguise. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Story, West Branch, No Tokens, The Journal, Booth, and others. He edits Astrolabe, a literary journal in the form of a dynamic universe, and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. He lives in Tucson, Arizona with his family, and can be found online on Twitter @joelhans or at joelhans.com.
Brian Henry is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Permanent State (Threadsuns, 2020), and the prose book Things Are Completely Simple: Poetry and Translation (Parlor, 2022). He has translated Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices (Harcourt, 2008), Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers (BOA Editions, 2015), and five books by Aleš Šteger. His work has received numerous honors, including two NEA fellowships, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Howard Foundation fellowship, and the Best Translated Book Award.
Eve Kenneally is a Brooklyn-based writer, etc. Eve’s poems have appeared in THRUSH, Peach Mag, Salt Hill, and other places.
Alexa Luborsky is a writer of Western Armenian and Eastern European Jewish descent. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, and West Branch, among others. She was runner-up for the 2022 Quarterly West annual poetry prize. Currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Virginia, she is the interviews editor at Poetry Northwest. You can find more of her work at alexaluborsky.com.
Maya Marshall is the author of the poetry collection All the Blood Involved in Love. She cofounded underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. Her writing has been published in Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Best New Poets, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Adelphi University.
Weijia Pan is a poet and translator from Shanghai, China. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, from AGNI, Georgia Review, Copper Nickel, Boulevard, and elsewhere. A winner of the Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry, he is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Houston.
Mira Rosenthal is the author of Territorial, a Pitt Poetry Series selection, and The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and residencies at Hedgebrook and MacDowell, she is an associate professor of creative writing at Cal Poly. She also translates contemporary Polish poetry.
Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) published more than 50 books of poetry in Slovenia. Translated into over 25 languages, his poetry received numerous awards, including the Jenko Prize, the Prešeren Prize, the European Prize for Poetry, and the Mladost Prize. In the 1990s, he served for several years as the Cultural Attaché for the Slovenian Embassy in New York, and later held visiting professorships at various universities in the U.S.
Jonathan Simkins is the translator of El Creacionismo by Vicente Huidobro (The Lune), The Treasure of the Llanganates by Paúl Puma (Pumaeditores), and Feral Cathedral: Selected Poetry of César Dávila Andrade (in progress). His translations have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, Nashville Review, Western Humanities Review, and others.
Philip James Shaw creates communications on behalf of organizations dedicated to equity and access in health and education. They write and paint and live with their partner and dog child in Port Townsend, Washington.
A singer, songwriter, poet, and essayist, Ephraim Scott Sommers is the author of two books: Someone You Love Is Still Alive (2019) and The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire (2017). For more words and music, please visit: http://www.ephraimscottsommers.com.
Jace Raymond Smellie earned his MFA in poetry at George Mason University. Originally from Pocatello, Idaho, Jace is a descendent of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. He was awarded a 2021 MFA Travel Fellowship from The Alan Cheuse Center for International Writers, and his recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Passages North, Ocean State Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere.
Chris Stuck is the author of Give My Love to the Savages: Stories, published in July 2021 by Amistad/HarperCollins. He was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Oregon Book Award, and is a Pushcart Prize winner. His work has been published in various literary journals.
Avia Tadmor was born in Jerusalem. Her poetry received support from Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop Series, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, New England Review, The Adroit Journal, Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. In 2022, Avia was named a Gregory Djanikian Scholar by the Adroit Journal. She is a Clinical Associate Professor at New York University’s Expository Writing Program.
Born in Puerto Rico, John Yohe has worked as a wildland firefighter, wilderness ranger and fire lookout. Best of the Net nominee x2. Notable Essay List for Best American Essays 2021 and 2022. @thejohnyohe www.johnyohe.weebly.com
Hua Xi is a writer and artist. They have written poetry for several years and recently began writing short stories.
Danielle Batalion Ola is a Filipina storyteller, born and raised on the island of Kaua’i. She is a 2019 Kundiman Mentorship Lab Fellow and a 2020 Tin House Scholar. When she’s not hammering away at her own work, you can find her editing essays over at No Tokens. Her stories have been featured in Epiphany Magazine, AAWW’s The Margins, The Common, and elsewhere.