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Paris Fithian is an illustrator and fine artist currently based in her home state of Indiana. She works with both digital and traditional media, often using self-portraiture to illustrate a single moment—like the climax or falling action—of a larger narrative. Drawing inspiration from creative writing, the supernatural, and suspenseful media, her art is interested in the humanity of action.

Adedayo Agarau is a 2023 Cave Canem fellow, a 2022 Robert Hayden Scholarship fellow, and a recipient of the 2022 Stanley Awards for International  Research at the University of Iowa. He obtained his MFA at the Iowa Writers’  Workshop. His poems have been featured by Poetry Society of America and published in POETRY, World Literature Today, Tab Journal, Anomaly, Frontier, Iowa Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbooks Origin of Names and The Arrival of Rain. Adedayo is the editor-in-chief at Agbowó, a magazine of African literature and arts.

Raymond Antrobus MBE FRSL was born in Hackney, London, to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of Shapes & Disfigurements; To Sweeten Bitter; The Perseverance; All The Names Given; and Signs, Music (Picador/Tin House, 2024). In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. Other accolades include the Ted Hughes Award, Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, PBS Winter Choice, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Somerset Maugham Award, and The Guardian Poetry Book of the Year 2018. Antrobus was awarded the 2018 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, judged by Ocean Vuong, for his poem “Sound Machine.”

Megan Blankenship is a writer living in the Ozark Mountains. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Arkansas. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, and other journals. In 2018, she spent six months living alone in an off-grid cabin in the Pacific Northwest as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident.

Tyree Daye was raised in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of the poetry collections a little bump in the earth (Copper Canyon Press, 2024); Cardinal; and River Hymns, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. A Cave Canem fellow, a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, and recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, he was the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received an Amy Clampitt Residency. Daye is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

Mag Gabbert is the author of Sex Depression Animals, selected by Kathy Fagan as the winner of the 2021 Charles B. Wheeler Prize in Poetry. She is the recipient of a Discovery Award from 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Idyllwild Arts, and Poetry at Round Top. Her work can be found in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, Copper Nickel, Guernica, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Gabbert has an MFA from UC Riverside and a PhD from Texas Tech. She lives in Dallas, Texas, and teaches at Southern Methodist University.

Twice selected for Best New Poets, Jen Jabaily-Blackburn’s most recent work is forthcoming or appeared in Arkansas International, Palette Poetry, Salamander, Fugue, Banshee, On the Seawall, and Couplet Poetry. Her first book of poems, Girl in a Bear Suit, is the winner of the 2023 Elixir Press Annual Poetry Prize and forthcoming in 2024. She lives in Western Massachusetts with her family, where she is program and outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

John James is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, as well as two chapbooks, most recently Winter, Glossolalia. His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, PEN Poetry Series, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. James holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia and is completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley

Matthew Kelsey is from Glens Falls, New York. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Narrative, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Writers Week fellowship from Idyllwild Arts. Kelsey has taught for the Kenyon Review Young Writers Program, and currently lives in Chicago.

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for twenty-one years. She is author of Cold Thief Place, which won the 2023 Alice James Award and the chapbook The Ghost Wife. She was a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her poems appear in 32 Poems, Gettysburg Review, Hyperallergic, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Currently Lin co-organizes the Undocupoets, which raises consciousness about the structural barriers that undocumented poets face.

Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, The Tupelo Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of literary journals, among them Valparaiso Poetry Review, Phoebe, American Journal of Poetry, Delmarva Review, and Tusculum Review.

Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize, and the chapbook Bed. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Oak Morse lives in Houston, Texas, where he teaches creative writing and theatre and leads a youth poetry troop, the Phoenix Fire-Spitters. He was the winner of the 2017 Magpie Award for Poetry in Pulp Literature, a finalist for the 2023 Honeybee Poetry Award, and a semi-finalist for the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. A Warren Wilson MFA graduate, Morse has received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, Twelve Literary Arts, and Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay, as well as a Stars in the Classroom honor from the Houston Texans. His work appears in Black Warrior Review, Obsidian, Tupelo, Nimrod, Terrain.org, and Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, among others.

Harryette Mullen’s latest books are Open Leaves/poems from earth (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, 2023) and Her Silver-Tongued Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), a critical edition of her poetry. A new collection, Regaining Unconsciousness, is scheduled for release in 2025 from Graywolf Press. Others include Recyclopedia, winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Mullen teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA.

Anzhelina Polonskaya was born in Malakhovka, a small town near Moscow. Since 1998, she has been a member of the Moscow Union of Writers, and in 2003 became a member of the Russian PEN Centre. Polonskaya has published translations in Iowa Review, AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and Kenyon Review, among others. Her latest collection, Take Me to Stavange, was published by University of Pittsburgh Press.

Supritha Rajan is presently associate professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her most recent poems have been published in Threepenny Review, Colorado Review, Bennington Review, New American Writing, and elsewhere.

Jasmine Reid is a twice trans poet of flowers. She is the author of Deus Ex Nigrum, an MFA graduate from Cornell University, and recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and Poets House. Her work has been published or is  forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, and TriQuarterly, among others.

Natalie Shapero is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Popular Longing; her next book is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2025. She lives in Los Angeles.

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of over ten books, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and Paradise Close: A Novel. Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Prize for Poetry, and an NEH Distinguished Professorship. Spaar’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize Anthology series, and in POETRY, Boston Review, IMAGE, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia, where she founded the Area Program in Poetry Writing in 2000 and for many years served as director of the MFA Program.

Jaclyn Dwyer earned an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and PhD in creative writing from Florida State University. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Blackbird, The Pinch, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Her poetry collection, The Bride Aflame, was published by Black Lawrence Press. Dwyer lives in Thibodaux, Louisiana, with her husband and four small children.

Matthew Fiander’s fiction has appeared in Story, Mid-American Review, Willow Springs, The Massachusetts Review, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. He was a longtime music writer and editor for PopMatters and other outlets. His debut novel, Ringing in Your Ears, was published by Main Street Rag/Mint Hill Books. Fiander currently lives and works in Winston Salem, North Carolina.

Richard Holinger’s work has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, Southern Review, Hobart, Chautauqua, and Cimarron Review. Books include North of Crivitz (poetry) and Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (essays). He has taught English and creative writing on several academic levels, holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Illinois Chicago, and lives northwest of Chicago where an occasional fox, deer, turkey, blue heron, and eagle pass through.

Damien Roos received his MFA in creative writing from The New School and has recently completed his first novel, Church of the New Light. His work has appeared in such outlets as New South Journal, Gravel, and The Colorado Review. Roos lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his wife and two pets.

Sam Simas is a queer Luso-American writer and translator. His stories have appeared in Copper Nickel, Hunger Mountain, Puerto del Sol, Sycamore Review, and other literary magazines. His writing has won Copper Nickel’s Editor’s Prize for Prose, as well as first-place in CRAFT Literary’s First Chapters Contest. He is a PhD candidate in fiction at the University of Cincinnati and the fiction editor for the Ocean State Review.

Tom Sokolowski completed an MFA at the University of Central Florida. He’s currently a PhD candidate at Florida State University, and his fiction is featured or forthcoming in The Masters Review, Prime Number Magazine, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. A veteran of the Florida Army National Guard, he lives in Tallahassee and is married to the poet Olivia M Sokolowski.

Sarah Walker was the 2017 Dennis Lehane Fiction Fellow at the Solstice MFA creative writing program. Her work has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Cleaver, Colorado Review, CutBank, Maudlin House, and New Limestone Review, among others. She was a finalist for the 2022 Robert Day Fiction Award and the 2023 Iron Horse Long Story Prize. Her fiction has been supported by the Tin House Workshop and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.