ISSUE FOURTEEN: ALL THE WORDS

CONTRIBUTOR BIOS

AUSTIN ARAUJO is a writer from northwest Arkansas. He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. His first book of poems, At the Park on the Edge Country (Mad Creek Books, 2025), won the Charles B. Wheeler Prize.

RAE ARMANTROUT is the author of numerous books, most recently Go Figure (Wesleyan, 2024) and Finalists (Wesleyan, 2022). Wobble (Wesleyan, 2018), was a National Book Award finalist.

AARON BAKER is the author of three collections of poetry: Mission Work (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), Posthumous Noon (Gunpowder Press, 2018), and a book-length poem, American Experiment, forthcoming from Texas Review Press. He divides his time between Chicago and Tucson and teaches at Loyola University Chicago.

DAVID BAKER is the author or editor of twenty books of poetry and prose about poetry, most recently Whale Fall (W. W. Norton, 2022). 

TYLER BARTON is a writer and artist living in Saranac Lake, New York. His books include Eternal Night at the Nature Museum (Sarabande) and The Quiet Part Loud (Split/Lip). His stories have appeared in Electric Literature, The Iowa Review, and The Kenyon Review, and have twice been listed at Distinguished in the Best American Short Stories anthology.

MICAH BATEMAN is an assistant professor of library and information science at the University of Iowa. Winner of the Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poetry Award, he has served as a poetry editor for River Styx.

CAL BEDIENT, Professor Emeritus in the English Department at UCLA, has published five critical books, including The Wasteland and its Protagonist: He Do the Police in Different Voices (University of Chicago Press), and five books of poetry, the most recent being The Breathing Place (Omnidawn, 2020). He co-edits Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry & Opinion.

ELIZABETH HART BERGSTROM has published stories, essays, and poems in Michigan Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, The New York Times Passages North, and Wigleaf. She's a queer, chronically ill writer who lives in Vermont on Abenaki land.

JOHN BERRYMAN (1914–1972) was an American poet and scholar. He won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs in 1965 and the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, a continuation of the Dream Songs, in 1969. Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, edited by Shane McCrae, is forthcoming with FSG in December 2025.

DANIEL BORZUTZKY is the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, which received the 2016 National Book Award, Lake Michigan; Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018; and The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (Coffee House Press, 2024). His translation of Paula Ilabaca Nuñez's The Loose Pearl received the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. 

TR BRADY is a poet and fiber artist from Arkansas who received their MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Their work has appeared in The Arkansas International, New England Review, Poetry Daily, and Tin House. The co-founder and co-editor of Afternoon Visitor, they live in Moscow, Idaho.

SASHA BURSHTEYN is a 2022 winner of the 92Y Discovery Contest. Her work has been supported by National Geographic, the Watson Foundation, and NYU's Goldwater Fellowship, and appears in the Copper Nickel, Four Way Review, and Paris Review Daily.

SÉBASTIEN LUC BUTLER holds an MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was the poetry editor of Meridian. His work appears in Black Warrior Review, The Greensboro Review, Narrative Magazine, and Pleiades. Recipient of the Hopwood Award for Poetry and a finalist for the Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest, he serves as an editor at West Trade Review. Hailing from Michigan, he resides in Brooklyn.

WILLIAM WARD BUTLER is the poet laureate of Los Gatos, California. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Life History (Ghost City Press). A poetry reader for TriQuarterly, he is co-editor-in-chief of Frozen Sea.

ELIOT CARDINAUX is a poet, pianist, composer, and translator working at the intersection of the lyric and improvised music, and the author of On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres, 2023).

IZZY CASEY has published poems in Bat City Review, Columbia Review, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, New York Tyrant, and The Yale Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature & the Arts. She lives in New York City.

CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Telepathologies (Saturnalia, 2017); Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket, 2021); and It’s Important I Remember (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2026). He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, and Poetry.

YONGYU CHEN lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they are a PhD candidate in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard. Their work has appeared in Chicago Review, Cleveland Review of Books, Gulf Coast, and Poetry.

GEORGE CHOUNDAS is a Cuban and Greek-American writer. His debut story collection, The Making Sense of Things (2018), won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and his debut essay collection, Until All You See Is Sky (2023), won the EastOver Prize for Nonfiction.

EMMELINE CLEIN is the author of a debut essay collection, Dead Weight (Knopf, 2024) and the chapbook Toxic (Choo Choo Press, 2022). Her writing has appeared in Catapult, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, VICE, and The Yale Review.

COLBY COTTON is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His work appears in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Born and raised in upstate New York, he lives in Los Angeles, California.

DOUGLAS CULHANE (cover art) is a Senior Lecturer in Art and the History of Art at Amherst College. He lives in Churchtown, New York.

JON DAVIS is the author of, most recently, Fearless Now and Nameless (Grid Books, 2025) and Above the Bejeweled City (Grid Books, 2021). He has received a Lannan Literary Award, the Lavan Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.

WILLIAM VIRGIL DAVIS has been published widely worldwide. His most recent book of poetry is Dismantlements of Silence: Poems Selected and New (Texas Review Press, 2015). His first, One Way to Reconstruct the Scene, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

CHELSEA B. DESAUTELS is the author of A Dangerous Place (Sarabande, 2021), a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She has received fellowships from the Anderson Center at Tower View, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Inprint, Tin House Summer Writing Workshops, and Yaddo. She lives with her family in Minneapolis.

JASON DE STEFANO is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. His poems have appeared in Fence, Lana Turner, and Prelude.

MAGGIE DEITZ is author of the poetry collections Perennial Fall (Chicago, 2006) and That Kind of Happy (Chicago, 2016). Her new book is If You Would Let Me (Four Way, 2026). She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. 

JONATHAN LOUIS DUCKWORTH received his MFA from Florida International University and is a PhD student at the University of North Texas. His work appears in Barrelhouse, Bayou, Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, Southwest Review, Superstition Review, and Tupelo Quarterly.

STEVIE EDWARDS is a Lecturer at Clemson University and Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review. They are the author of Quiet Armor, Sadness Workshop, Humanly, and Good Grief. Their poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, and The Southern Review.

AARON FAGAN is the author of four poetry collections, including A Better Place Is Hard to Find (The Song Cave, 2020) and Pretty Soon (Pilot Press, 2023). Recent poems have appeared in Granta, Harper's, Liberties, The New Republic, and Raritan.

STEVE FELLNER lives in Brockport, New York.

JEN FRANTZ is a college dropout from Ohio. Her poems appear in DIAGRAM, The Drift, and Fence. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was Poetry Editor of The Iowa Review.

ELTON GLASER has published nine full-length collections of poetry, most recently Ghost Variations (Pittsburgh, 2023).

D.C. GONZALES-PRIETO lives in New Jersey. His work appears in Colorado Review, The Hollins Critic, Sonora Review, Quarterly West, and Washington Square Review. This is his third appearance in Bennington Review.

JENNY GRASSL is a poet and visual artist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first book is Magicholia (A Taos Press, 2024).

JOE HALL is based in Buffalo. His books of poetry include Fugue & Strike and Pigafetta Is My Wife. According to The Boston Globe, “Joe Hall’s poems move between a fist-pounding urgency, the fire and squelch of this moment of our endtime, and a vulnerability hushed and gentle as a nightgown on a laundry line.”

JEFF HARDIN was born in Hardin County, Tennessee, an eighth-generation descendant of the county's founder. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark and No Other Kind of World. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize, and his poems have appeared in such journals as Hudson Review, The New Republic, North American Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Southern Review, and Southwest Review. He is a professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee, and editor of the online journal One. 

JEFFREY HECKER is author of Rumble Seat (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011) and the chapbooks Hornbook, Instructions for the Orgy, and Ark Aft. Recent work appears in Posit, South Dakota Review, and Yalobusha Review. A fourth-generation Hawaiian-American, he teaches at The Muse Writers Center and reads for Quarterly West.

TOM HOWARD lives in Arlington, Virginia. His short story collection Fierce Pretty Things (Indiana University Press) won the Blue Light Books Prize in Fiction. He received his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and his fiction has appeared in Booth, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, and Ninth Letter.

JORDAN HUBRICH received both her BA and MFA from the University of Kentucky and now lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her fiction has also appeared in One Story.

PAUL ILECHKO is a British American poet and songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, New Jersey. His work appears in The Atlanta Review, The Inflectionist Review, The Night Heron Barks, Permafrost, and Southward. His first book is Fragmentation and Volta (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 2025).

LUCAS JORGENSEN is a poet and educator from Cleveland. He has an MFA from New York University and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas. He was recognized as a winner of the 2023 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, and his work has been featured in LitHub, The Massachusetts Review, and Poetry.

KIRSTEN KASCHOCK is the author of five poetry books. Coffee House Press published her debut speculative novel, Sleight in 2011, and a second novel is forthcoming from Chapter House Publishing. She has recently transplanted herself to Baltimore, where she awaits bloom.

DAVID KIRBY is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. Entertainment Weekly has called Kirby’s poetry one of “5 Reasons to Live." Currently he is on the editorial board of Alice James Books.

MATTHEW KLANE is co-founder of Flim Forum Press and co-curator of Salon Salvage, a poetry and performance series inside of Weathered Wood in Troy, New York. His books of poetry include Hist (w/ James Belflower, Calamari 2022), Canyons (w/ James Belflower, Flimb Press 2016), Che (Stockport Flats 2013) and B (Stockport Flats 2008). An e-chapbook, from Of the Day, is online at Delete Press, and an ebook, My, is online at Fence Digital.

DANIEL KLEIFGEN is a writer who has taught in inner-city San Antonio and the United Arab Emirates. For the past few years, he has been traveling with his fiancée in Latin America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, while working on a novel and collection of short stories. He has recently moved to Shanghai, where he teaches in a private school.

PETER KLINE is the author of two poetry collections, Mirrorforms (Parlor Press) and Deviants (SFASU Press). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and resident of the Hemingway House, Amy Clampitt House, and James Merrill House, he teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford.

VIRGINIA KONCHAN is the author of five books of poetry, including Requiem (Carnegie Mellon, 2025) and Bel Canto (Carnegie Mellon, 2022), as well as a short story collection, Anatomical Gift. She is also the coeditor of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2023), Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Believer, The New Republic, and The New Yorker.

CARLONE KURIEN is a Malayali-American poet from South Florida. Her work has garnered support and recognition from MacDowell, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowship, and Poetry Society UK. A Tennessee Williams Scholar in Poetry for the 2025 Sewanee Writers' Conference, her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry London, RHINO, Sixth Finch, The Florida Review, The Cincinnati Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. You can learn more at carolenekurien.com.

ARYN KYLE is the author of the novel The God of Animals and the short story collection Boys and Girls Like You and Me. She lives in New York City.

TIMOTHY LIU, a reader of occult esoterica, lives in the Hudson Valley and teaches at SUNY New Paltz and Vassar College. His latest book of poems is Down Low and Lowdown: Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues (Barrow Street, 2023).

IAN U LOCKABY, a poet and translator who lives in New Orleans, is the author of Defensible Space/if a crow— (Omnidawn, 2024), winner of the Omnidawn Chapbook Contest, and A Seam of Electricity (Ghost Proposal, 2025). His work appears in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Ecotone, Fence, and Poetry Northwest. He edits the online journal mercury firs.

ALEXA LUBORSKY is a writer and multimedia artist of Western Armenian and Jewish descent. Her poems and hybrid works have appeared or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets University Prize Series, Adroit, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, and West Branch, among others. You can find out more at alexaluborsky.com.

MAJA LUKIC received an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her work appears in The Adroit Journal, A Public Space, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and Sixth Finch. She lives in Brooklyn.

CATE LYCURGUS has had work in Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. She has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences and placed second in Narrative’s 2022 poetry contest. She lives in San Jose, California, where she conducts interviews for 32 Poems and teaches professional writing. 

DAVID STUART MACLEAN is the author of the memoir The Answer to the Riddle is Me (Houghton Mifflin, 2014) and the novel How I Learned to Hate in Ohio (Abrams, 2021). He co-founded the long-running Poison Pen Reading Series in Houston, Texas. He lives and teaches in Chicago.

ANGIE MACRI is the author of Sunset Cue (Bordighera, 2022), winner of the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize; and Underwater Panther (Southeast Missouri State University, 2015), winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize. An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she lives in Hot Springs.

JOHANNA MAGIN is an American-born researcher and writer based in Paris, France, who has  won the 2024 Francine Ringold Award in poetry, and whose poems have appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Poetry Wales, and Wild Roof Journal.

JUSTIN MARKS is a co-founder of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press, and lives in New York City with his family. His most recent books are, If This Should Reach You in Time (Barrelhouse, 2022) and The Comedown, (Publishing Genius, 2021).

TED MATHYS is the author of four books of poetry including, most recently, Gold Cure (Coffee House Press, 2020). A recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Poetry Society of America, he lives in Saint Louis and teaches at Saint Louis University. 

AIREA D. MATTHEWS is a professor at Bryn Mawr College, where she co-directs the creative writing program. A Guggenheim fellow and Philadelphia’s former Poet Laureate, she is the author of two books of poems: Simulacra, which won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and Bread and Circus (Scribner, 2024), winner of the 2024 LA Times Book Prize.

JILL MCDONOUGH is the recipient of Lannan, NEA, Cullman Center, and Stegner fellowships, and  a three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her most recent book is American Treasure (Alice James, 2022). She directs the MFA program at UMass-Boston and started a program offering College Reading and Writing in two Boston jails.

KEVIN MCLELLAN is the author of Sky. Pond. Mouth., winner of the 2024 Granite State Poetry Prize; in other words you/, winner of the 2022 Hilary Tham Capital Collection; Ornitheology; Tributary; and Round Trip; and the book objects Hemispheres and [box]. 

ERIKA MEITNER is the author of six books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022). She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she directs the MFA program.

PETER MYERS is the author of the chapbooks Brade Lands (above/ground press) and The Hangnail (Belladonna*). His reviews and essays have been featured in Chicago Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Annulet, and elsewhere.

OLATUNDE OSINAIKE is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, and software developer originally from the West Side of Chicago. He is the author of Tender Headed (Akashic Books, 2023), winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series. His work has received support from Poets & Writers, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. He lives in Atlanta.

AZA PACE is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of North Texas. Her poems appear in The Adroit Journal, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, New Ohio Review, The Southern Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her Terrible Splendor (Willow Springs Books, 2025) won the Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize.

RANDALL POTTS is the author of two poetry collections, Trickster (University of Iowa, 2014) and Collision Center (O Books, 1994), as well as a chapbook, Recant (A Revision) (Leave Books, 1994). They identify as nonbinary and live in Bellingham, Washington.

JUSTIN QUARRY has written for The Chronicle of Higher Education,The Guardian, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, and Salon. He lives in Nashville and teaches at Vanderbilt University.

MICHAEL QUATTRONE is the author of Rhinoceroses (New School Chapbook Award, 2007). His work is included in The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008) and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2013). Recent poems appear in New York Quarterly, Poet Lore, and Salamander.

SUPRITHA RAJAN is an associate professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her recent poems appear in Colorado Review, New American Writing, Poetry Northwest, and Threepenny Review.

SUSAN RICH is the author of six books of poetry including, most recently, Blue Atlas (Red Hen, 2024). The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, Artists Trust, and the Fulbright Foundation, she lives in Seattle and directs Poets on the Coast, a Weekend Writing Retreat for Women. 

LAURENCE ROSS is a writer and teacher in Baltimore, MD. His essays and art writing appear in Bluestem, Bmore Art, Brevity, The Georgia Review, Hyperallergic, The Offending Adam, and Pelican Bomb.

HENK ROSSOUW is the author of Xamissa (Fordham University Press, 2018). His poems appear in The Paris Review and Poetry. He is an associate professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he co-directs the creative writing program. 

MARY RUEFLE is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Book (Wave, 2023). Dunce (Wave, 2019) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the LA Times Book Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave, 2012), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and, from 2019 to 2024, served as the ninth Vermont State Poet Laureate.

BRIAN SCHWARTZ has published stories and essays in Blackbird, Harvard Review, and TIMBER, and in the anthology Inheriting the War. For several years he wrote the sports column A Fan's Notes at The Rumpus. Since 2003, he has been teaching in NYU's Expository Writing Program.

NATALIE SHAPERO is the author, most recently, of the poetry collections Big Deal (Copper Canyon, 2025) and Popular Longing (Copper Canyon, 2021). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review. She lives in Los Angeles. 

MARTHA SILANO (1961-2025) was the author of eight poetry collections, including Terminal Surreal (Acre Books, 2025), about her journey with ALS, Last Train to Paradise: New and Selected Poems (Saturnalia Books, 2025), and This One We Call Ours (Lynx House Press, 2024), winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize. Her poems appeared in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry. Her awards included North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award. 

DELILAH SILBERMAN is a writer from Brooklyn. She has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and works as a tutor and editor. Her poems appear in Conjunctions, Poetry Daily, and Washington Square Review.

JORDAN STEMPLEMAN is the author of nine books of poetry, including Cover Songs (The Blue Turn, 2022); Wallop (Magic Helicopter, 2015), and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter, 2012). He edits The Continental Review, Windfall Room, and Sprung Formal, and since 2011, he has run the Common Sense Reading Series in Kansas City, Missouri.

TIMMY STRAW, a writer, musician, and translator from Oregon, is the author of The Thomas Salto (Fonograf Editions, 2023). Their poems appear in Annulet, Chicago Review, and The Paris Review. A Comp Lit PhD candidate at UPenn, they live in Philadelphia. 

YERRA SUGARMAN has received a NationalEndowment for the Arts Fellowship, PEN American Center’s Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, and a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Award. Her most recent book of poems is Aunt Bird (Four Way, 2022), winner of  the American Book Fest’s 2022 Best Book Award for General Poetry and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the New England Poetry Club’s Motton Book Prize.

BRIAN SWANN is the author of, most recently, a book of poetry, Imago (Johns Hopkins, 2023) and two books of prose: Ya-Honk! Goes the Wild Gander (Mad Hat Press, 2023) and From the First Five (Mad Hat Press, 2025).

LAUREN SWIFT is a writer and editor in Sacramento. Her work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, The Pinch, Poets.org, The Rumpus, and The 2River View. 

JULIA THACKER is the recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the NEA. Her poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Poetry International, and Southern Humanities Review. In 2024, she was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts.

MATTHEW TUCKNER received his MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and is currently a PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at the University of Utah. His debut collection of poems is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Four Way, 2025). His chapbook Extinction Studies won the 2023 Sixth Finch Chapbook Prize.

CHRIS VASANTKUMAR teaches anthropology on the north shore of Sydney, Australia, where he lives with his partner, two sons, and Clancy the chocolate labrador somewhere on the edges of unceded Garigal, Dharug, and Gayamaygal land. His scholarly work has been published in numerous academic journals. His poetry appears in Plume Poetry Journal, BoomerLitMag, and Cordite Poetry Review and will be published in RHINO in 2026.

LAURA VILLAREAL is a poet and book critic whose debut collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving, (Wisconsin, 2022) received awards from Texas Institute of Letters and the Writers’ League of Texas. Her writing has appeared in AGNI, Guernica, and Shenandoah.

JASMINE DREAME WAGNER lives in New York and is writing a novel. Her work has recently appeared in AGNI, Georgia Review, LA Review of Books, and New American Writing.

DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. A recent Amy Lowell Travelling Scholar, she is the author of two collections of poetry, Lazarus Species (Milkweed, 2025) and Philomath (Milkweed, 2021), and the novella Hold Harmless (Ploughshares Solos, 2025). Philomath, a National Poetry Series selection, was awarded the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize for Best First Book.

MICHAEL WATERS is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow who lives without a cell phone in Ocean, New Jersey. He numerous books include Sinnerman (Etruscan, 2023), Caw (BOA Editions, 2020), The Dean of Discipline (Pittsburgh, 2018), The Bicycle and the Soul: Prose on Poetry (Tiger Bark, 2024) and a co-edited anthology, Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020).

BETH WEINSTOCK is a poet and physician from Columbus, Ohio who holds an MFA in poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and has been published recently in Cutleaf Journal, Greensboro Review, The MacGuffin, and Rhino Poetry. She was a finalist for the 2021 Rhino Poetry/Founders’ Prize and the 2022 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Prize. She is the Executive Director of BirdieLight, a fentanyl education nonprofit she founded in 2021 to honor her son Eli.

JOHN DERMOT WOODS is a writer and cartoonist living in Brooklyn. His books include Mortals (Radix Media) and The Baltimore Atrocities (Coffee House). His comics and stories have appeared in The Believer, DIAGRAM,  The Indiana Review, and New York Magazine. He is a professor of creative writing at Nassau Community College.

THEODORE WOROZBYT is the author of numerous books, including Tuesday Marriage Death, The Dauber Wings, Letters of Transit, Smaller Than Death, Echo’s Recipe, and The Rhino Narrative. Recent work appears in Conjunctions, Epoch, The Kenyon Review, Pithead Chapel, and the anthology, Gracious: Poems from the 21st Century South.

XIADI ZHAI is from Boston, Massachusetts. She received her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has work in Court Green, Quarterly West, and Reed Magazine.