Contributors’ Notes

Katie Berta lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, and The Rumpus, among other magazines. You can find her book reviews in American Poetry Review, West Branch, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has received a residency from the Millay Colony and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. She has her PHD in poetry from Ohio University.

Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared or are forthcoming in newyorker. com, Harpers, Ploughshares, Mcsweeney’s, The Paris Review, and others. She received the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in fiction for her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. She is founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories, How to Wrestle a Girl, will be published fall of 2021. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

Diana Cejas is a pediatric neurologist and writer in Durham, North Carolina. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in medical publications including The Journal of the American Medical Association and Neurology. Works of creative nonfiction and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Passages North, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and others. She is on Twitter @Dianacejasmd. Currently, she is working on a collection of essays that describe her life as both physician and patient.

Bailey Cohen-vera writes. He is the organizer of the Strange Tools Writer’s Workshop and a Wiley Birkhofer Fellow in Poetry at NYU. His website is baileycohenpoetry.weebly.com.

Michael Dhyne holds an MFA from the University of Virginia. His work has been supported by the Community of Writers and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he was a 2019 work-study scholar. Recent poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Nashville Review, Puerto Del Sol, and The Rumpus, among others. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Rita Dove is a former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and recipient of both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts.

Her next poetry book, Playlist for the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. She teaches poetry at the University of Virginia.

Jenny Ferguson (she/her) is Michif (on her father’s side) and Canadian settler (on her mother’s side), an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice with a PHD. She believes writing, teaching, and beading are political acts. The Summer of Bitter & Sweet, her debut YA novel, is forthcoming from Heartdrum/ Harpercollins.

Chilean writer Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) was a major figure of twentieth century avant-garde poetry. Founder of the literary movement known as Creacionismo, he was a multilingual poet, playwright, novelist, war correspondent, screenwriter, and candidate for the presidency of Chile.

Ben Lasman is a writer based in New York whose fiction has appeared in Granta, Tin House, Wired, and Zyzzyva.

Bronte Lim is a writer and researcher. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with her cat Belle. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Quarterly Review and Split Lip Magazine.

Maija Mäkinen is a bilingual, Finnish-born writer whose stories and essays have been featured in Porter House Review, The Bare Life Review, SAND Journal, and others. She is the winner of the University of Cambridge Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize for her novel in progress and holds an MFA from Boston University.

Tracie Morris is writer/editor of seven books and is a poet, professor, vocalist, voice teacher, and theorist. She holds an MFA in poetry from CUNY Hunter College, a PHD from NYU, and studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She became an Atlantic Center for the Arts Master Artist in 2018 and was the 2018-2019 WPR Fellow at Harvard University. Tracie is currently the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Amanda Peery-wolf is a poet and editor living in New York City. Her work has been published in the Colorado Review and she has been a featured poet at the Inspired Word NYC and the Bowery Poetry Club.

Jodi Perry moved to Osage, Iowa from New Mexico six years ago, after visiting all of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties in search of the perfect small

town. She says, “My paintings are inspired by the amazing, beautiful Iowa landscapes.”

Brian Ascalon Roley has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, the University of Cambridge, Cornell University, the Ohio Arts Council, the Association of Asian American Studies, the Djerassi Foundation, Ragdale, the VCCA, and others. His books include American Son (W.W. Norton), a New York Times Notable Book, and The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal and Other Stories (Northwestern University Press). He is currently Professor of English at Miami University of Ohio. More at: www. brianroley.com.

Sarah Shotland is the author of the novel Junkette, and a playwright whose work has been produced in theaters nationally and internationally. She is the cofounder and program director of Words Without Walls program and teaches at Chatham University.

Jonathan Simkins is the translator of El Creacionismo by Vicente Huidobro (The Lune, forthcoming); the translator of The Treasure of the Llanganates (PUMAEDITORES, 2017), a play by Paúl Puma; and the author of two chapbooks of poetry. His translations have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Nashville Review, Vestiges, Western Humanities Review, and many others.

Kate Osana Simonian is an Armenian-australian writer of essays and fiction. She hails from Sydney and completed her English PHD at Texas Tech in 2020. Her work has been published in places such as Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Chicago Tribune, and Best Australian Stories, and she has won various honors, including the Nelson Algren Award and a John Steinbeck Fellowship. She currently teaches at California State University, San Bernardino, where she’s finishing the final draft of her first novel. Check her out at katesimonian.com.

Jeddie Sophronius was born in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Laura Price Steele is a writer and editor. Though originally from Colorado, she now lives in Wilmington, North Carolina where she earned her MFA from UNCW. She has been the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Contest in nonfiction as well as the Montana Prize in Fiction. Her work has been published or is forthcoming from Cutbank, Ploughshares, So to Speak, and Shenandoah, among others. Currently she is working on a novel. You can find her at Laurapricesteele.com.

Clancy Tripp is a Midwest-based writer, humorist, and teacher. She lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio where she is currently pursuing her MFA at The Ohio State University. She can be found on Twitter @Theunrealtripp or on her website at www.clancytripp.com.

Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote (The Ohio State University Press, 2013) and Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens (Tupelo Press, forthcoming 2021). She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Best American Poetry, and The New Yorker. She is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois.

Mike White’s second collection, Addendum to a Miracle, was awarded the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. His work has appeared previously in The Iowa Review, as well as in The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He teaches at the University of Utah.

Candice Wuehle is the author of three collections of poetry, including Death Industrial Complex (Action Books, 2020), Fidelitoria: Fixed or Fluxed (11:11 Press, 2021) and BOUND (Inside the Castle, 2018). Her work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. She earned an MA in Literature from The University of Minnesota, an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PHD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Kansas. Her work has been honored with a Chancellor’s Fellowship from the University of Kansas.