Lauren Barbato’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, CRAFT, The Common, The Hopkins Review, Blackbird, North American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and American Literary Review, among others. She has received grants and recognition from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the Community of Writers, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and has been in residence at Jentel Artist Residency, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. A PhD candidate in religion at Temple University, she teaches gender studies at the University of Delaware and researches Catholic nuns and reproductive politics.
Sarah Chess is an artist based in San Francisco who transcribes marks over and over to create surfaces that are difficult to parse out. She creates drawings that are avoidant in nature: they resist an immediate reading to create an indecipherable surface. The density and accumulation demand a level of dedication and patience to sit with—associations to other surfaces will slowly reveal themselves in time (the definition of a ‘slow burn’).
Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher who studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of Tributaries, American Book Award winner, Instruments of the True Measure, Washington State Book Award winner, and Severalty. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee and she lives in Washington with her family.
B. Do (they/them) is a writer from Cần Thơ, Vietnam. Their work can be found in The Rumpus. You can find them @bnanayoshimodo on Twitter.
Angie Ellis lives on Vancouver Island where she is writing a collection of linked stories, which will include “The Sisters.” Her first novel, A Snake and a Feathered Bird, came out in 2025, and her other work can be found in Narrative, Epiphany, Story, and others. She is very grateful to have received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council. www.angieellisauthor.com
Katie Field is a fiction writer from the Gulf Coast. They have a PhD in Comparative Literature, and their writing has received support from the University of Texas at Austin, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the Key West Literary Seminar, among others. They live in Austin, but their heart is in the Gulf of Mexico. They are at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.
Carrie George is a co-editor of Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park Through Poetry (Kent State University Press). Her chapbook, Unbecoming, won the 2024 Flume Press chapbook prize. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere.
Shaunté Glover is a visual storyteller and interdisciplinary artist based in Phoenix, Arizona. Her work explores Black narratives through sculpture, installation, photography, and video, centering themes of memory, identity, queerness, and representation. Since 2020, Glover has presented solo exhibitions throughout the Valley of the Sun at Eye Lounge, Practical Art, Sagrado Galleria, and Visions Gallery. She has exhibited extensively throughout the Southwest in group exhibitions and was selected for the Arizona Biennial 2024 at Tucson Museum of Art, where she was awarded the 2024 Contemporary Art Society Award of Excellence. In 2025, her work was featured in both Southwest Contemporary and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She is a recipient of the 2024 Artist to Work grant from Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture and the inaugural recipient of the 2025 Sette/Cohn Artist Award, facilitated through the Phoenix Art Museum. Glover holds a BFA from the Arizona State University in Photography.
Shyama Golden is a Sri Lankan American artist whose work uses world-building and narrative to reveal the constructed nature of identity. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, and Micki Meng in San Francisco. Her work is held in international public and private collections including the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Dangxia Art Space in Beijing, and the Craig Robins Collection in Miami.
Elizabeth Higgins holds an MFA from Oregon State University–Cascades and is a co-founding editor of the online journal Tethered Literary. Elizabeth’s work can be found or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Redivider, Press Pause, Trace Fossils Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Footnote: A Literary Journal of History. Elizabeth’s hybrid project Unfit to be at Large: Fragments from the Life of Helen Fischer received the 2024 Work-in-Progress prize from Unleash Press.
Kira K. Homsher is a writer from Philadelphia, currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati. Her work has received support from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Taft Research Center, and has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Indiana Review, Passages North, The Offing, Longreads, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Find her at kirahomsher.com.
Jaqi Howard is a digital artist, animator, and graphic designer who explores her love of aesthetics through color and movement. When not drawing, she finds other ways to express herself, including writing, painting, or crocheting. She currently works at Disney, pursuing her passion for animation through development and production management.
Suze Kay is a pastry chef in New Jersey. She’s happy you found her here and invites you to read more of her work on her website, www.suzekay.com.
Anna Kirby resurrects forgotten faces. Working from the remnants of other people’s libraries, she assembles composite portraits from mismatched photographs, illustrations, and paintings — then transforms them with oil paint, adding makeup and face paint in colors that have no interest in being subtle. The result is a figure that never existed, yet feels achingly real. Her work is rooted in the emotional realities of female experience: PTSD, abuse, child loss, infertility, and the contested terrain of identity. The portraits are expressive and unflinching, capturing a range of emotion from quiet discomfort to defiant resilience.
Hiokit Lao is a 31-year-old self-taught artist from NYC. She draws inspiration from her culturally diverse upbringing across Macao, Shanghai, and New York. Through surreal, abstract, and vibrant pieces, she aims to create meaningful art that instills hope and positivity.
An arts journalist and professor for decades, Camille LeFevre now writes poetry and creative nonfiction from the unceded lands of the Hisatsinom, Yavapai, and Apache in Northern Arizona. Her work appears in The Dodge, Poets for Science, wildscape.literary, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Metphrastics, Fugue, Electric Lit, Brevity Blog, and other publications. Her first poetry chapbook, Sandstone and Kin, will be published in October 2026.
Mike Liu (he/they) is an emerging writer and poet from Toronto, eager to prove that accountants can be interesting too. Their writing seeks to capture the beauty within the ordinary. His poetry has been featured in Zhagaram Literary, Moss Puppy Magazine, Cosmic Daffodil, and Sam Fifty Four Literary. He is a Lead Editor for White Wall Review.
Meghan Miraglia is a poet and educator from Boston, Massachusetts. A recent Robert Pinsky Global Fellow, Meghan earned her M.F.A. from Boston University. Her poetry and reviews appear or are forthcoming in The Oxford Review of Books, Santa Clara Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and others. “Jockey” received an Editor’s Choice award from Arkana.
Sreeja Naskar is a young poet based in India. Her work has appeared in Poems India, ONE ART, Ink Sweat and Tears, Ghudsavar Literary Magazine, The Chakkar, The /tƐmz/ Review, and elsewhere. When not writing, she’s either watching sad films or talking to her houseplants.
Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout. Their debut poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press, 2024), won the 2025 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize, among other honors. They were the 2025 Commissioned Writer for Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, and they have recently completed a PhD in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin.
Ziqr Peehu is grieving, yearning, and hoping. Their works have appeared in places like Scholastic, Rattle, and Trampset, among others.
Sofia Sears is a writer originally from Los Angeles whose cross-genre work has been featured in Waxwing, Sonora Review, the LA Times, and others. They are currently based in Chicago and at work on a debut novel about girlhood and desert monsters. You can find them at sofsears.me.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a NeuroQueer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from OKC. Their work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, and in BLEACH!. Currently, Merrick is pursuing their MFA at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where they serve as the Poetry Editor of Grist and as the host of the Creative Writing department’s reading series, Chiasmus. They are also Associate Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved.
Miye Sugino is a student at Yale. Her art and writing engage topics of memory, history, and faith, and have been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and the Japanese American National Museum. She lives in Los Angeles.
Mia You is the author of the poetry collections I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press) and Festival (Belladonna*). She teaches anglophone literature at Utrecht University and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute. She lives in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Shehrazade Zafar-Arif is a British-Pakistani writer, journalist, and theatre critic. She grew up in Karachi and is now based in London. She has had work published in Fiery Scribe Review, Peatsmoke Journal, CRAFT Literary, Stanchion, Litro, FeelsZine, Untitled: Voices, FEED Lit Mag, and the Grimm Retold anthology. She sits on the editorial team of CRAFT and has been shortlisted for the Book Edit Writers’ Prize and the Bloomsbury Mentorship Programme.