ISSUE 116 CONTRIBUTORS
Rebecca Boyle is from China, Maine, and graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, River Styx, Sixth Finch, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others.
Will Cordeiro has work published in 32 Poems, AGNI, Best New Poets, Pleiades, and The Threepenny Review. Will is the author of Trap Street (Able Muse, 2021) and Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024) as well as coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024) and, forthcoming, The New Foundations of Creative Writing (Bloomsbury, 2027). Will coedits Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.
hello, i'm d.h. croasdill. this year i'm 33 years old, & next year i'll be 34.
Kelly Gray is the author of Instructions for the Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021), Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarter Press, 2022, IPPY Gold Medal recipient), The Mating Calls //of the// Specter (Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize, 2023), Our Sodden Bond (MAYDAY, 2025), and Dilapitatia (Moon Tide Press, 2025). Gray's writing has appeared or will appear in Ploughshares, Boulevard, ZYZZYVA, and AGNI, among other places. In 2004, she founded Books & Barns, a reading series that takes place in busted-up barns along the edges of estuaries in Northern California. Gray lives with her family in a cabin in the woods and in addition to her four other jobs, teaches poetry in rural public schools.
Carter Groves holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri - Kansas City. A winner of the 2025 AWP Intro Journals Award, his work has appeared in Witness and New Letters.
David Hamilton is a student at Marymount University studying Digital Writing and Narrative Design.
Gabrielle Grace Hogan (she/her) received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been published by TriQuarterly, The Journal, Salamander, and others, and has been supported by the Ragdale Foundation, Tin House Workshop, and the Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences. She has published two chapbooks, Soft Obliteration (Ghost City Press 2020), and Love Me With the Fierce Horse Of Your Heart (Ursus Americanus Press 2023). She is a Team Writer for Autostraddle and an Assistant Poetry Editor for Foglifter. Find more information on her website, gabriellegracehogan.com. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Tyler Michael Jacobs is the author of The Weight of Drought (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2025) and Building Brownville (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022). His words have appeared or are forthcoming in Grist, Phoebe, Passages North, Variant Literature, Plainsongs, Sierra Nevada Review, and elsewhere. His poems have also been featured on Nebraska Public Media’s Friday LIVE. He received his MFA from Bowling Green State University.
Fatima Jafar is a writer from Karachi, currently based in Northern California. She is a 2024-2026 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in 2023. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review, The Cortland Review, The Drift, Wasafiri, and elsewhere. She is working on her first full-length manuscript, ALL MY TREASURES.
Holly Karapetkova is a Poet Laureate Emerita of Arlington, Virginia, and recipient of a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Her third book, Dear Empire, won the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize and was just published by Gunpowder Press. She teaches at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia.
Chris Ketchum is from Moscow, Idaho. He received an MFA from Vanderbilt University and is a doctoral candidate at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is an editor of Beyond Bars, a literary magazine that publishes poetry and prose by writers who have been impacted by incarceration. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere.
Mel Lake is a writer from Denver, Colorado whose fiction and essays have appeared online and in the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers 2022 anthology. Mel was a 2024 Colorado Gold Literary Awards Contest finalist in both Women’s Fiction/Romance and Sci-Fi/Fantasy. In addition to writing, she co-hosts a women’s comic book club, cosplays, swims, and enjoys the outdoors. Find Mel at mel-lake.com or on Instagram @melofsometrades.
Kevin Mulligan lives in Lawrence, Kansas. His fiction has appeared in Tampa Review and NOON.
Heather Neidlinger is currently a 3rd year poetry MFA candidate at Western Kentucky University. Born in Washington D.C. and raised for a time in Maryland, she now calls Bowling Green, Kentucky home. Her writing often centers at the crossroads of memories and nature. She placed in the 2025 Intro Journal Writing Contest held by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and has poems published or forthcoming in Pinch, The Passionfruit Review, The Words Faire, and Red Flag Poetry.
Chiwenite Onyekwelu is a Nigerian poet and pharmacist. He is the author of the debut poetry chapbook, “Exiled” (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2025). His poems appear in Hudson Review, Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the 2025 Evaristo Prize for African Poetry and the Black Warrior Review Summer Poetry Contest. He won the 2024 After the End Poetry Prize organized at Oxford University, Prism International’s Pacific Spirit Poetry Contest, as well as the Hudson Review Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize. He has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize. Chiwenite holds a Bachelor of Pharmacy (B. Pharm) from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria.
Bex Pachl is a MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at George Mason University and the Nonfiction Editor of So to Speak. Their work has recently appeared in Permafrost Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, and JAKE. They are working on a memoir exploring themes of place, monuments and memory in the American West. You can find them on Instagram at @books4bex.
Mandira Pattnaik's work appears in The Rumpus, The McNeese Review and The Cincinnati Review, among others. Her writing has been nominated eight times for the Pushcart and twice included in Wigleaf's Top 50 List. Mandira's short story was listed in the top 200 of 2025 Commonwealth Prize. Collections include "Girls Who Don't Cry" (2023), "Where We Set Our Easel" (2023), "Glass/Fire" (2024) and “White Hot Moon” (forthcoming). Her recent work/publications can be found at mandirapattnaik.com.
Ruby Simoneau is a writer from Minnesota. Her work has appeared in The Hyacinth Review, Snowflake Magazine, Poor Ezra's Almanac, among others.
Aidan Strong is a Los Angeles-based artist and game maker. His practice employs technology to foster genuine human interaction in direct opposition to systems only interested in nebulous "user engagement." Strong holds a BS in Mathematics from UCLA and is now pursuing an MFA in Design Media Arts there. His work has been featured in Indiepocalypse, Y-Combinator's Hacker News, and shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize.
Marshall Woodward is a writer and researcher from Texas whose work appears in or is forthcoming from Annulet, Antiphony, Fence, The Indiana Review, The Indianapolis Review, postmedieval, The Seneca Review and Waxwing. He recently graduated from the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program (MFA) where he worked as a poetry editor for the journal Gulf Coast.
Ziyi Yan (闫梓祎) is a student at Princeton University. Her work is published or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, The Harvard Advocate, Poetry Northwest, Rust & Moth, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. The founder of The Dawn Review, Ziyi was the 2024-2025 Youth Poet Laureate of Connecticut. Website: https://ziyiyan.carrd.co/