Abdulkareem Abdulkareem is a Nigerian writer and linguist. He is the author of Loss Is a Door, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New-Generation African Poets, a Chapbook Box Set (Akashic Books, 2025). His works appear or are forthcoming in The Nation, National Museum of Language, Poetry, Harvard’s Transition Magazine, Waxwing, Southern Humanities Review, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. He lives in Tuscaloosa where he is studying for an MFA in creative writing at the University of Alabama. He is the 2025 poetry editor for Black Warrior Review.

Lauren Acampora is the author of The Wonder Garden (Grove, 2015), The Paper Wasp (Grove, 2019), The Hundred Waters (Grove, 2022), and the forthcoming collection The Animal Room (Grove, 2026), of which “Shelter” is a part. Her books have won or been nominated for the GLCA New Writers Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Story Prize, and the New England Book Award. Her work has also appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, One Story, Missouri Review, Story, Guernica, and The Best American Short Stories 2025.

J. P. Allen is a poet and translator based in Durham, North Carolina. His poems appear in Narrative, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere. His translations appear in Modern Poetry in Translation, The Offing, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere.

Alissa M. Barr is a writer and registered nurse. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Missouri Review, West Branch, Muzzle Magazine, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is the 2025 runner-up for Missouri Review’s Perkoff Prize. She holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where she received the Kathryn Sedberry Poetry Prize.

Traci Brimhall is a professor of creative writing at Kansas State University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon, 2024), as well as the forthcoming essay collection The Grief Artist (Sarabande, 2026). Her poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Parks Service, the Guggenheim Museum, and Purdue University Archives and Special Collections to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart. She’s the current poet laureate for the state of Kansas.

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award and a recipient of a 2024 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Currently, she is the 2025–2027 Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Robin Crookall’s work merges sculpture and photography to explore the uncanny intersections of reality, illusion, and constructed space. She earned her MFA from New York University (2016) and her BFA in Ceramics from the University of Washington (2007). Her practice has been recognized through numerous awards and residencies, including Lighthouse Works, Lightwork, Abbott Watts, Dear Dave, Yaddo, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. She’s exhibited at Morris Adjmi Architects, Real Art Ways, Art Basil Miami, The Headlands Center for the Arts, and Gallery 4Culture.

Lauren Eggert-Crowe is the author of four poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Florida Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sugar House Review, Gigantic Sequins, and Puerto Del Sol, among others. She has written book reviews, interviews, and essays for Salon, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Millions. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona and has been awarded residencies at Ragdale and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Emily Lyons Flamm’s writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Grist, Crab Orchard Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and other venues. She lives in Maryland.

Catherine Goldhammer is a poet who lives in Rhode Island. Her poetry has appeared in The Threepenny Review and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

David Hansen’s stories have appeared in Fence, Conjunctions, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. He was a 2024 MacDowell fellow, and he lives in upstate New York.

Robin Hemley has published sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, How to Change History: A Salvage Project (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). In 2028, Bloomsbury will publish Turning Life into Literature: The Truths of Memoir, Fiction, and Autofiction, the follow-up to his popular Turning Life into Fiction, in print for thirty years. He is the former director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa and is the Parsons University Professor at Long Island University, Brooklyn. He is the founder of the international conference NonfictioNOW and the president of Authorsatlarge.com. You can subscribe to his Substack at robinhemley.substack.com.
Chelsea Christine Hill’s recent poetry appears in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poetry London, The Adroit Journal, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at the University of Illinois and is a current doctoral student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Mely Kiyak is an acclaimed German writer, winner of the Theodor Wolff Prize, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, and the Heinrich Mann Prize from Germany’s Academy of Arts. She is the author of Frausein (2020), Werden sie uns mit FlixBus deportieren? (2022), and Herr Kiyak dachte, jetzt fängt der schöne Teil des Lebens an (2024), all from C. Hanser Verlag Munich; Thomas Mann. Deutsche Hörer! (2025) from S. Fischer Verlag Frankfurt; and Dieser Garten (2024) and Gute Momente (2025) from mikrotext Berlin. She also writes plays and monologues and curates salons for the German stage.

Elizabeth Lee is an MFA graduate of the University of Michigan. She holds a BA from Columbia University and works as a software engineer. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Electric Literature, Witness, Bellevue Literary Review, and Quarterly West. She is currently working on a novel.

Sandra Lim is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection The Curious Thing (W. W. Norton, 2021). She is a recipient of the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a Distinguished University Professor at UMass Lowell, where she teaches literature and creative writing.

Patricia Lockwood is the author of the poetry collection Agate Head / Stone Soup (Penguin Poets, 2026) and five other books. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Randall Mann is the author of six poetry collections, including Deal: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). He teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in San Francisco.

José Orduña earned an MFA at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. His first book, The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement, published by Beacon Press in 2016, explores his experience as a Mexican immigrant living in a post-9/11 United States. You can find his work in Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, and The Nation, among other publications, and on his website: joseorduna.com.

Oscar Oswald is an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico Highlands University. His first book, Irredenta (Nightboat Books, 2021), explored the visionary polemics of the pastoral mode. He manages the recently revived New Mexico Review and has also served as assistant editor at Noemi Press and as poetry editor of Witness. His poems have been published in Antioch Review, Seneca Review, Interim, EPOCH, New American Writing, Fence, Colorado Review, Lana Turner Journal, Denver Quarterly, Annulet, and VOLT, among other outlets. He has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

William Pierce’s fiction has appeared in Granta, Ecotone, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is editor of AGNI.

Liliana Ponce is a poet and scholar of Japanese literature and writing. She has published five collections of poetry in Argentina, including her award-winning debut collection, Trama Continua (1976). Her poetry has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Antología de la poesía Argentina (Casa de las Américas, Cuba, 1999) and the canonizing volume 200 años de poesía Argentina (Alfaguara, Argentina, 2010). In 2025, her collected poetry, Boomerang Naturae: Poesía Reunida (1976–2022), was published by Editorial Emecé in Buenos Aires.

Michael Martin Shea is a poet, translator, editor, and literary critic. His translation of Liliana Ponce’s Theory of the Voice and Dream was published by World Poetry Books in 2025 and was named a finalist for the 2026 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He is the author of numerous chapbooks of poetry, including most recently I’m Sorry But None of This Is My Fault (Essay Press, 2025). His own writing has appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Guernica, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Poetry, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Fellow to Argentina, he holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Ranbir Sidhu’s memoir No one gets out of here alive (HarperCollins India) will appear in 2026, along with a reissue of his first two books. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a NYFA Fellowship and is the author of six books, including most recently Night in Delhi (Westland/Context, 2024) and Dark Star (Westland/Context, 2022). His work appears in The Baffler, Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, Fence, Zyzzyva, Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Other Voices, The Literary Review, Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Vice. He lives in Athens, Greece.

Hasanthika Sirisena’s essay collection, Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State Press, 2021), won the Gournay Prize and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

Lindsay Starck was born in Wisconsin and raised in the Milwaukee Public Library. She is the author of the novels Noah’s Wife (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016) and Monsters We Have Made (Penguin Random House, 2023), a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and winner of the Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award. Her short prose has appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, and The Southern Review, among other places; her story “Baikal,” published in New England Review, won a Pushcart Prize. Most of “The Sunshine Protection Act” was composed in Cairo, though she currently writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she lives with her husband, daughter, and cattle dog.

David Staudt has published stories, poems, and personal essays widely in literary magazines and anthologies over forty-five years, most recently in EPOCH, Lullwater Review, Deep Wild, and Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State University Press, 2025). He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times. His poetry collection, The Gifts and Thefts (Backwaters Press, 2001), was awarded the Backwaters Prize. Between service in the Navy and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he earned an MFA from Cornell, where he was awarded the Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Award.

Clementina Suárez (1902–1991) has been called “the legendary matriarch of Honduran letters.” Her 1930 book, Bleeding Heart, was the first published book of poetry by a Honduran woman. Over the course of her decades-long literary career, she published twelve books and won the Ramón Rosa Literature Prize, Honduras’s highest literary honor. She also lived in Mexico and El Salvador, cultivating artistic communities across genres and borders.

Kyle Francis Williams is a writer from Long Island living in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, Joyland, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. His debut novel is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.

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