‘Pemi Aguda was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. She is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. Her story “24, Alhaji Williams Street,” published in Zoetrope: All-Story, was named a finalist for the ASME in Fiction. She has published work at Granta.com and ASF.com, and she has a story forthcoming in Ploughshares and One Story and at Tor.com. In May she was awarded the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award for a work-in-progress for her partial novel, The Suicide Mothers, judged by Ian Rankin, Sarah Perry, and Max Porter.
Philipe AbiYouness is a Lebanese-American poet and educator. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fugue, Muzzle, Porter House Review, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. In 2019 he was named a Brooklyn Poets Fellow and honorable mention in the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition. He is currently an MFA candidate at Rutgers University, Newark. You can find him on Twitter at @phil_eep.
Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection, Ugly Music (YesYes, 2019), was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship; and received her MFA at NYU where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. Her work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. For more information visit her website, here.
Ayesha Asad is from Dallas, Texas. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in PANK, Cosmonauts Avenue, Sundog Lit, DIAGRAM, Menacing Hedge, Q/A Poetry, Qu Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Her writing has been recognized by Creative Writing Ink Journal and the Robert Bone Memorial Creative Writing Prize. She studies Literature and Biology at the University of Texas at Dallas. In her free time, she likes to dream. She was born in 2001.
K.B. Carle lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the Associate Editor at Fractured Lit. and Editor at FlashBack Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Passages North, Porcupine Literary, Apiary Magazine, Jellyfish Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. She can be found online, here or on Twitter @kbcarle.
K-Ming Chang / 張欣明 is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her debut novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020) was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her micro-chapbook BONE HOUSE, a queer retelling of Wuthering Heights, is forthcoming from Bull City Press in June 2021, and her short story collection, RESIDENT ALIENS, is forthcoming from One World. More of her work can be found at her website, here.
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. She currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is the Mendota Lecturer in Poetry. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, POETRY, Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Samantha Xiao Cody is a queer, half-Chinese writer pursuing her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She recently won the Masters Review 2019 Winter Short Story Award and was a runner-up in the Missouri Review’s 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize, and has work published in Split Lip Magazine, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. She has a degree in Physics from Princeton University and previously lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where she taught Math and Physics at a project-based-learning high school.
Catharina Coenen is a first-generation immigrant to the Northwestern “chimney” of Pennsylvania, where she teaches biology at Allegheny College. Her creative work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Southampton Review Online, Chattahoochee Review, Cincinnati Review, Terrain, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Appalachian Review’s 2019 Denny Plattner Creative Nonfiction Prize, a 2020 Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science as Story Fellowship, and a Hedgebrook Residency that will hopefully still happen in 2021. She is currently completing an essay collection on the effects of fascism and WWII across three generations of her German family.
Tere Dávila (b. San Juan) is the recipient of two Puerto Rican National Prizes: for her novel, Nenísimas, and the short story collection Aquí están las instrucciones, both published in 2018. She has also published three other short-fiction collections, children’s books, and books on Puerto Rican culture. Her short stories have been translated and featured in international anthologies and literary magazines. In 2017 she received Puerto Rico’s New Voices Award, and in 2015 her short story “El fondillo maravilloso” was adapted into an award-winning short film.
David M. de León is a Puerto Rican writer and academic from New Jersey. His debut poetry collection The Cats of Old San Juan is forthcoming from [PANK] Books. Poetry and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, DIAGRAM, Fence Magazine, [PANK], Up the Staircase, Acentos, Pleiades, At Length, Strange Horizons, Bat City Review, 2River View, and others. David was a Tin House Summer Scholar and received aid from the Fine Arts Work Center. Currently, he is completing a Ph.D. in English at Yale University, where he serves as an assistant editor at The Yale Review. He is also a playwright and theater artist. You can find more at his website, here.
Tarik Dobbs is an Arab American, queer writer born in Dearborn, MI, USA. Dobbs’s poems appear now in AGNI Magazine, American Poetry Review, & American Journal of Poetry. They are presently a Poetry Editor at Poetry Online (poetry.onl) & Great River Review. Dobbs’s poetry chapbook, Dancing on the Tarmac, selected by G. Calvocoressi, is forthcoming from Yemassee Journal at UofSC. Find them online, here or on Twitter: @mxrlevant.
Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist living between her hometown, Cairo, and New York City. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University, and is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Elkamel’s poems have appeared in The Common, Michigan Quarterly Review, Four Way Review, The Boiler, Memorious, wildness, Nimrod International Journal, and The Rumpus, among other publications. Her work has been featured as part of the anthologies Best New Poets 2020, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me, and 20.35 Africa: Volume II. She was named a 2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar by The Adroit Journal, and a finalist in Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest in the same year. To read more of her poems, visit her website, here.
Golden (they/them) is a black gender-nonconforming trans-femme photographer and poet raised in Hampton, VA, currently residing in Boston, MA. Golden is the recipient of a Pink Door Fellowship (2017/2019), an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Luminaries Fellowship (2019), the Frontier Award for New Poets (2019), and a Pushcart Prize nomination (wildness, 2019 & Glass Poetry, 2020). Their work has been featured on/at the Shade Journal, The Offing, wildness, Button Poetry, Buzzfeed, i-D, Interview Magazine, & elsewhere. Golden holds a BFA in Photography from New York University (2018) and is currently a City of Boston Artist-in-Residence (2020-2021). Instagram: goldenthem_. Twitter: goldenthem. Or find their work at their website, here.
Rebecca Hanssens-Reed is a translator and writer from Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in World Literature Today, Conjunctions, The Offing, The New England Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was also a Provost’s Postgraduate Visiting Writer.
Natasha King is a Vietnamese American writer and nature enthusiast. Her poetry has appeared in Okay Donkey, Constellate Literary Journal, Ghost City Review, and others. She spends her spare time writing, prowling, and thinking about the ocean. She can be found on Twitter as @pelagic_natasha.
Keegan Lawler is a writer currently living in Washington State with his partner, their two basset hounds, and their cat. His writing has been published in or is forthcoming from the Offing, The Los Angeles Review, Homology Lit, and the Home is Where You Queer Your Heart anthology from Foglifter Press. Find him online, here.
Kyle Liang is the son of Taiwanese and Malaysian immigrants. He is the author of the chapbook How to Build a House (Swan Scythe Press, 2018), and his work has appeared in Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Anomaly, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His poems have been nominated for the Best New Poets and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Kyle lives in New York, NY, where he works as an internal medicine physician assistant. Find him online, here.
Kyle Carrero Lopez was born to Cuban parents in New Jersey. He is the author of the forthcoming chapbook MUSCLE MEMORY, winner of the 2021 PANK Little Book contest. He co-founded LEGACY, a Brooklyn-based production collective by and for Black queer artists. Kyle’s recent poems are published in POETRY, The Nation, Bear Review, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere.
Rhonda Lott (cover art contributor) is an artist, coder, and writer based in Knoxville, Tennessee. As a lifelong lover of the arts and sciences, she holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Springfield and a doctorate in creative writing from Texas Tech University. Her poetry has appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Whiskey Island Magazine, among others. She has contributed cover art to Best of the Net for twelve years and counting. Find more about her work, here.
Combining elements of the architectural and the memorial, mónica teresa ortiz connects landscapes and burials not to hold onto the past, but so that through memory and haunting, poetics travel beyond our individual experience of them to discover instead, a collective one. They explore the relationships between necropolitics, geopolitics, and history. Born and raised in Texas, ortiz is the author of muted blood & autobiography of a semiromantic anarchist. Twitter: @elgallosalvaje
Brittany Rogers is a poet, mother, educator, and native Detroiter. She has work published in Vinyl Poetry and Prose, The Offing, Tinderbox Poetry, and The BreakBeat Poets: Black Girl Magic Anthology. Brittany is a fellow of VONA/ Voices, The Watering Hole, Poetry Incubator, and Pink Door Writing Retreat. She is Co-Editor in Chief for Muzzle Magazine and a MFA candidate at Randolph College.
Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Anacortes, Washington. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and an MA from Bowling Green State University. Her second full-length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize and will be released in spring 2022 by Blair. In May 2021, Bear Gallery (Fairbanks, Alaska) will exhibit Caitlin and Megan Perra’s collaborative project “The Ten-Oh-Two”—poems and visual art on the Porcupine Caribou Herd. You can find her online, here.
Grace Q. Song is a Chinese-American writer residing in New York. Her poetry and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Storm Cellar, SmokeLong Quarterly, Passages North, PANK, The Journal, and elsewhere. A high school senior, she enjoys listening to ABBA and Joe Hisaishi. She will be attending Columbia University in fall 2021.
Eileen Winn is an MFA candidate at Florida Atlantic University, as well as the associate managing editor at Swamp Ape Review. They are also now a poetry editor for Alien Magazine. You can find more of their work at Bone & Ink Press, in the Breakup Anthology at Purpled Palm Press, and in the latest issue of The Shore. They learned how to rollerblade backwards during the quarantine and without purple pens, much of their work would not exist.
Olivia Worden was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in Massachusetts. Recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is a multi-genre writer and has taught creative writing at the Westchester County Correctional Facility, The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, and Pace University. Her essay “Held by Strangers” was selected by Melissa Febos for the 2019 Pigeon Pages Essay Contest and was selected as one of Pigeon Pages Best of the Nest for 2020. Her work has appeared in CutBank, Post Road, Pilgrimage, Pigeon Pages and other publications.
Bessie Flores Zaldívar is a writer and poet from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at Virginia Tech. Her work has appeared in PANK, Palette Poetry, F(r)iction, The Pinch, The Acentos Review and elsewhere. Bessie is a Tin House 2020 scholar and her chapbook, Rain Revolutions, is forthcoming with Long Day Press. Read more of her work here.