Contributors

Marveon Berry is a Black writer from a small Southern town. Marveon is concerned with the social impacts of the war on drugs, and the usage of AAVE in literature. His influences are Jazz, Rap, R&B, Soul, and Punk music, and his hobbies include, upcycling jeans, writing, reading, and working out.

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Adrian Carswell is a Ngāti Porou writer from Aotearoa/New Zealand, currently resident in the United Kingdom. He holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge and works as a Senior Production Manager in television. When not writing, he can usually be found at his desk, frustrated by his lack of writing.

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Campbell Christensen is a Fulbright UKSI Scholar, writer and visual artist from Oklahoma. Her work explores womanhood, queerness, performance, and the body through lyrical language and image-making. She is interested in poetry as a research practice and a mode of cultural documentation.

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Dinah Cox has written and published three books of short stories: The Paper Anniversary (Elixir, 2024), The Canary Keeper (PANK Books, 2019), and Remarkable (BOA Editions, 2016). New work appears or is forthcoming in Redivider, Cincinnati Review online, Another Chicago Magazine, Midwest Review, Talking River Review, and Novel Slices. She lives and works in her hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma.

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Sara Ries Dziekonski was Runner-Up for the Press 53 Award for Poetry for her most recent collection, Today’s Specials, which was selected as a finalist for the Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award for a book of poetry published in 2024. Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Slipstream, Potomac Review, SWWIM Every Day, Connecticut River Review, and LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, among others.

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Based in Conway, Arkansas, Audrey Eggensperger writes creative nonfiction centered on family and relationships, exploring the tensions and tenderness that shape connection. Though prose is her primary form, she also writes poetry that echoes the same themes of memory and intimacy. Her work seeks the moments where beauty and fracture meet.

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Rochelle Germond holds an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. Her work has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Gulf Coast, and Sierra Nevada Review, among others. She is also the author of Confession of a Heliophiliac (Choeofpleirn Press), which was a finalist in the 2024 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest. Originally from Florida, she currently lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband and their extensive collection of coffee mugs.

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Maryam A. Ghafoor is a queer, Muslim Pakistani-American poet from Illinois. Her poems appear in journals such as American Poetry Review, Foundry, Barnstorm, Salamander, and Mid-American Review. She was longlisted for the 2025 Granum Prize and is a finalist for the 2025 St. Lawrence Book Award. You can follow her on Instagram @mghafoor795.

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Karin Gottshall’s two collections are Crocus and The River Won’t Hold You. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Four Way Review, The Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Gottshall lives in Vermont and teaches at Middlebury College.

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Mariam Janad is a graduate student, educator, and photographer from Syria now based in North Georgia. She enjoys writing about the exploration of identity through memory. Her favorite things are literacy education, peppermint tea, and the light of her communities. You can read more of her work on Instagram as @signedmariam or Substack as @mariamjanad.

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Jimmy Kindree (he/him) is a queer writer and teacher. He comes from Minnesota and now lives with his husband and daughter in western Norway. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ecotone, Electric Literature, Raritan, The Hopkins Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He also spins yarn and knits with it, makes pottery, cheese, and bread, and plays the banjo.

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Ryan King writes fiction, films, and plays. He’s originally from Texas and now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. He’s been published in Mount Hope Magazine and was recently an honorable mention for the 2025 Zoetrope: All-Story competition.This is his second published story - thank you, Jabberwock! He wrote the screenplay for Black Flies (released as Asphalt City), which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, after being selected for the Black List of Hollywood’s favorite unproduced screenplays.

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E. R. Lutken worked on the Navajo Nation as a physician for many years, then taught science and math in rural Colorado for a few more. Her poetry collection, “Manifold: poetry of mathematics” (3: A Taos Press, 2021) won the New Mexico First Book Award for 2022. Recently she edited her father’s memoir A Thousand Places Left Behind: One Soldier’s Account of Jungle Warfare in WWII Burma (University Press of Mississippi, 2023).

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Laney Nielson is a writer in the Boston area whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Tusculum Review, Sweet Lit, and Connecticut River Review. Her short fiction was named a semifinalist in the 2021 Southeast Review’s World’s Best Short-Short Story. She’s published one middle grade novel and is a past recipient of the Cynthia Leitich Smith Mentorship. For more information, please visit LaneyNielson.com.

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Grace Sandoval is a writer from Santa Fe, New Mexico, whose work is rooted in landscape, memory, and connection to place. Drawing from the Southwest, Sandoval finds joy in blending nature and poetry to explore relationships to land and is especially interested in how nature poetry holds space for grief, resilience, and sense of hope within the elements it explores.