ISSUE 117 CONTRIBUTORS
Assemay is from Kazakhstan and writes about impacted cultures (i.e., Kazakh) in impactful languages (i.e., English). She is currently in the MFA for Poets and Writers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “August” is her first published story.
Shlagha Borah is from Assam, India. She is a 2026-2027 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Her work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, AGNI, Shenandoah, Epoch, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She is the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary and Deputy Editor at The Offing. She’s a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist. Her work has been supported by Tin House, Brooklyn Poets, The Hambidge Center, The Peter Bullough Foundation, VCCA, among others. Her work is available at www.shlaghaborah.com.
J. Camp Brown has been the George Bennett Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter, a Grisham Fellow at Ole Miss, an Arkansas Arts Council Fellow, and a Walton Fellow at the University of Arkansas. His writing has appeared in The New England Review, Copper Nickel, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere.
Z. T. Corley is a Tennessee-based poet with roots in Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi. She recently graduated from Austin Peay State University with her B.A. in English and plans to continue her education as an M.F.A. Candidate at Georgia College & State University in Fall 2026. She is a recipient of the 2026 AWP Intro Journal Awards. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Roanoke Review, Revolute, Callaloo, Outskirts, January House Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a poetry collection and a nonfiction project while serving as a reader for Callaloo.
Ella Flores is a creative writing PhD student at Binghamton University, is the Editor-in-Chief of Harpur Palate, interview editor for The Shore Poetry, and has work appearing or forthcoming in, So to Speak, Cider Press Review, Radar Poetry, The National Poetry Review, FOLIO and others.
Carmen Fought (she/her) teaches linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The 2River View, Driftwood Press Anthology, Hypertext, RHINO, River Heron Review, and elsewhere. Her poem “North by Her Compass” won a finalist prize in the Lascaux Review Poetry Contest 2024. Her favorite hobbies are rescuing dogs from shelters and wine from bottles.
Juliet Kahn is a writer and editor living in Boston. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Epoch, Fairy Tale Review, Uncanny Magazine, and Hunger Mountain, among other outlets.
David Koehn is the author of three books of poetry: Twine, Scatterplot, and Sur. He also co- edited Compendium, revisiting Donald Justice’s approach to prosody. His work has been published in journals including Ballast, Diagram, Gargoyle, Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, North American Review, Lana Turner, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, The Rumpus, Smartish Pace, Swing, Thimble, Zyzzyva, and many others. He holds a BA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from the University of Florida, and he teaches composition and creative writing at San José State University.
Josh Luckenbach’s recent poems have appeared in The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, RHINO, and elsewhere. He serves as Web Editor for the Coalition for Community Writing.
Anna McCarthy teaches Cinema Studies at NYU. Her fiction has appeared in The London Reader, and online in the journals Cagibi, Pacifica Literary Review, Short Fiction, and Litro. She's published a number of academic books and articles, and currently edits the digital journal Social Text Online.
Nicholas Montemarano is the author of five books, most recently a memoir, If There Are Any Heavens (Persea Books, 2022). His short stories have appeared widely in magazines such as Esquire, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story, have been awarded a Pushcart Prize, and have been honored as Distinguished Stories four times in The Best American Short Stories. Recent poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, Copper Nickel, Bennington Review, Smartish Pace, and The Best American Poetry 2025. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, he lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he is the Alumni Professor of Creative Writing and Belles Lettres at Franklin & Marshall College.
John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Alaska Quarterly Review, Smartish Pace, American Poetry Review, swamp pink and 32 Poems. A 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, he also won the Indiana Review Poetry Contest and his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is a professor of English at Salisbury University and an editor of The Shore Poetry.
Tanner Stening is a writer and journalist based in Boston. His work has appeared in The Drift, Chicago Review, Fence, Poetry Northwest, The Brooklyn Review, The Metropolitan Review, Rattle, RHINO, and elsewhere. He works in editorial at Northeastern University.
David Joez Villaverde received an MFA from the University of Michigan where he was a Helen Zell Fellow. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, Adroit, Fence, New England Review, AGNI, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A CantoMundo Fellow, he has been recognized by The American Academy of Poets, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Black Warrior Review. He lives in New York and can be found at schadenfreudeanslip.com
Mathew Weitman’s debut poetry collection, The Campus Novel: Poems, is forthcoming with Tupelo Press. His work appears in Copper Nickel, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the AWP Kurt Brown Award, the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry, and has received residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, UCROSS, and Millay Arts. He is co-editor and co-translator of Rolando Cárdenas: On the Life and Work of a Chilean Master (Pleiades Press, 2026).
Tom Whalen's books include The President in Her Towers, Dolls (a Portuguese translation of which appeared in 2024 from Edições Cutelo), and two translations of short prose by Robert Walser, Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories and Little Snow Landscape (NYRB Classics). After two decades in southwest Germany he now lives beside an estuary on the Louisiana Gulf Coast.
Robert Wilson’s poems have most recently appeared in Assignment Magazine and SoFloPoJo. His latest chapbook, Seasonal Affective Disorder, was released by Bottlecap Press last autumn. He lives beside the ocean in Cape Haze, Florida.
Ellen June Wright’s watercolors have appeared in SCARS Anthology, Long River Review, Abstract Magazine TV, Kelsey Review and West Trestle Review and were included in the 2024 and 2025 Newark Arts Festival and featured at the Hackensack Performing Arts Center in NJ. To see more visit: https://8-ellen-wright.pixels.com/