POETRY
Rosebud Ben-Oni: “Efes Wrestling with the Poet Who Won’t Look Away” and “Poet Wrestling with Neutrinos She {Allegedly} Cannot Feel”
Recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and CantoMundo, Rosebud Ben-Oni’s most recent collection, turn around, BRXGHT XYXS, was selected as Agape Editions’ EDITORS’ CHOICE (2019). She writes for The Kenyon Review blog. Her work appears in Poetry, APR, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, among others; her poem, “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark,” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC and published by The Kenyon Review Online. Find her at 7TrainLove.org.
W. Todd Kaneko: “Horses’ Mouths,” “Looking Outside Airplane Windows,” and “All the Things that Make Heaven and Earth”
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor, 2014) and This is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press, Forthcoming 2020), and co-author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). A Kundiman fellow, he is co-editor of the literary magazine Waxwing and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he teaches at Grand Valley State University.
Tina Carlson: “In the Embassy of Silence”
Tina Carlson is a poet and a psychiatric healthcare provider. Her poems have appeared in many journals and blogs. She was featured in the 2017 Nov/Dec Poets & Writers ‘5 over 50.’ Her book Ground, Wind, This Body (UNM Press) was published in March 2017. She recently completed a collaborative manuscript called We are Meant To Carry Water with Katherine DiBella Seluja and Stella Reed which will be published early by 3: A Taos Press.
Amelia Martens: “Morning Walk: September 11, 2018”
Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016), and four poetry chapbooks, including Ursa Minor (elsewhere magazine, 2018). She is the recipient of a 2019 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council; her work has also been supported by the Kentucky Foundation for Women and a SAF fellowship to Rivendell Writer’s Colony. She is mom to two awesome daughters.
Theophilus Kwek: “Transformations”
Theophilus Kwek has published five volumes of poetry, including The First Five Storms, which won the New Poets Prize. He has also won the Interpreters’ House Poetry Prize and Berfrois Poetry Prize, and has been shortlisted twice for the Singapore Literature Prize. His poems, translations and essays have appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Irish Examiner, The Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Mekong Review, and elsewhere. He serves as co-editor of Oxford Poetry, and writes widely about issues of history, policy and migration.
John A. Nieves: “Long Dash”
John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Review, Cincinnati Review, and Copper Nickel. He won the Indiana Review Poetry Contest and his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is assistant professor of English at Salisbury University. He received his M.A. from University of South Florida and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri.
Lizzy Fox: “Fashion—1860” and “On Power”
Lizzy Fox is a poet and educator with an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she now works as Associate Director for the MFA in Writing & Publishing program. Her poetry appears in The Greensboro Review (spring 2019) and has received the Laura J. Spooner Prize and the Corrine Eastman Davis Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of Vermont. In addition to her own writing, she teaches poetry and recitation in partnership with schools and arts nonprofits across the northeast, as well as online. www.lizzyfoxpoetry.com.
Lupe Méndez: “The Arkema Plant—Crosby, TX”
Lupe Méndez is a Poet/Educator/Activist, CantoMundo, Macondo & Emerging Poet Incubator Fellow and co-founder of the Librotraficante Caravan. He is the founder of Tintero Projects and works with emerging Latinx writers and other writers of color within the Texas Gulf Coast Region, with Houston as its hub. His publishing credits include prose work, flash fiction and poetry. His first collection of poetry, Why I Am Like Tequila, has just been selected for publication by Willow Books, due out by March of 2019.
Eloisa Amezcua: “I Haven’t Masturbated in Five Days for Fear of Crying” and “I Haven’t Masturbated in Five Days for Fear of Crying”
Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. Her debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón. A MacDowell fellow, she is the author of three chapbooks and founder/editor-in-chief of The Shallow Ends: A Journal of Poetry. Her poems and translations are published in New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and others. Eloisa lives in Columbus, OH and is the founder of Costura Creative.
Brad Rose: “No Tomorrow”
Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles and lives in Boston. He is the author of a collection of poetry and flash fiction, Pink X-Ray (Big Table Publishing, 2015, http://pinkx-ray.comand Amazon.com.) His two new books of poems, Momentary Turbulence and WordinEdgeWise, are forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. Brad has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, and once nominated for Best of the Net Anthology. His website is www.bradrosepoetry.com. Selected readings can be heard at: https://soundcloud.com/bradrose1
Jihyun Yun: “Benediction as Disdained Cuisine”
Jihyun Yun is a Korean-American poet from California. A Fulbright Research Fellow, she received her MFA from New York University in 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Ann Arbor where she is working on her first collection, Some are Always Hungry.
Paul Tran: “The Real Housewife of Orange County”
Paul Tran received a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. A Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in The Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis and Poetry Editor at The Offing Magazine, their work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere.
Jade Hurter: “Crystal Vision, with Chrysalis”
Jade Hurter is the author of the chapbook Slut Songs (Hyacinth Girl Press 2017), and her work has appeared in THRUSH, The Columbia Poetry Review, Glass, Passages North, New South, and elsewhere. She teaches English at the University of New Orleans.
Jake Skeets: “Drift(er)” and “Red Running into Water”
Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from the Navajo Nation and holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. He is a winner of the 2018 ‘Discovery’/Boston Review Poetry Prize. His first collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, won the 2018 National Poetry Series and will be published by Milkweed in 2019.
Lauren Espinoza: “Rio Grande River Valley Triptych”
Lauren Espinoza’s poetry has appeared in New Border Voices: An Anthology, The Acentos Review, As/Us, Pilgrimage, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere. Her manuscript, Before the Body, earned Honorable Mention in the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and the 2017 Pellicer-Frost Binational Poetry Prize. A CantoMundo Fellow raised in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, she is currently a Writers’ Studio Instructor and PhD student in Justice Studies at Arizona State University.
Gabriel Dozal: “The Border Simulator (Is This Language A Desert Also?)”
Gabriel Dozal is from El Paso, TX. He is an MFA candidate in poetry at The University of Arizona. He writes about the borderlands and has work in The Literary Review, Guernica, and forthcoming in The Iowa Review.
NONFICTION
Rita Banerjee: “Birth of Cool”
Rita Banerjee is the director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, and author of Echo in Four Beats, which was nominated for the 2019 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her writing appears in Poets & Writers, Nat Brut. LARB, and VIDA. She is the co-writer, with David Shields, of Burning Down the Louvre (2019), a film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the US and France.
Akiko Yosano (author): Excerpts from “Postpartum Confinement”
Akiko Yosano (1878-1942) was a pioneer of modern literature in Japan. A famous but impoverished poet and essayist, she had thirteen children and funded the first co-ed school in Japan with the aim of promoting gender equality. Her poetry, celebrated for its anti-war sentiment and sexually liberated feminism, is available in English translation.
Marissa Skeels (translator): Excerpts from “Postpartum Confinement”
Marissa Skeels is a Melbourne-based editor and translator who has lived in Fukushima, Kyoto, and Tokyo for several years. Her translations of Japanese literature are appearing in Overland, Inkwell, and Ezra.
FICTION
Michael Nye: “The Good Shepherd”
Michael Nye is the author of two books, the story collection Strategies Against Extinction and the novel All the Castles Burned. His writing has appeared in American Literary Review, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review, and The Normal School, among many others. He is the editor-in-chief of Story.
Tiphanie Yanique: “Extermination” 
Tiphanie Yanique is a Fulbright Scholar, a National Book Award 5 Under 35 awardee, winner of the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the United Kingdom’s 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection, the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and Pushcart Prize. Her books include Land of Love and Drowning, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, and Wife. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and is a professor at Wesleyan University.
Gabriela Denise Frank: “Muertos”
Gabriela Denise Frank is the author of CivitaVeritas: An Italian Fellowship Journey. A writer of fiction and essays, her work has appeared in True Story, Crab Creek Review, Gold Man Review, Lunch Ticket, The Rumpus, and Front Porch Journal. Her writing is supported by fellowships, residencies and grants from 4Culture, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Mineral School, The Civita Institute and Vermont Studio Center, where this story was composed. Special thanks to Sigrid Nunez who contributed critical feedback on “Muertos.”
Michael Martone: “Four Monologues from Winesburg, Indiana, a small town between For Wayne and South Bend and not that far from Warsaw”
Michael Martone‘s new books are Brooding and The Moon Over Wapakoneta: Fictions and Science Fictions From Indiana and Beyond. He lives in Tuscaloosa and teaches at the university there.
Mark Powell: “Narrowing”
Mark Powell is the author of five novels, most recently Small Treasons from Gallery/Simon and Schuster. His novel Firebird will be published in 2020. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Breadloaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and in 2014, he was a Fulbright fellow to Slovakia. He lives in the mountains of North Carolina where he directs the Creative Writing program at Appalachian State University.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
Margo Lemieux: “The Gift” 
Margo Lemieux has been involved in creative endeavors since the first grade when she got into trouble for “decorating” her workbook. After graduating from Boston University, she worked as a graphic designer, newspaper correspondent, children’s book author and illustrator, and other interesting things. Her book Full Worm Moon was described in the New York Times as “well-written.” Currently a professor at Lasell College, she has taught workshops in the Attleboro Arts Museum, Lake Mead National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Fuller Craft Museum, Hang Do Studio, Hanoi, Vietnam, and Rhode Island School of Design.
Noah Weisz: “The Otchka”
Noah Weisz received his M.F.A. in Fiction from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. He has been shortlisted for the international Bath Children’s Novel Award and a finalist for the Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Literature. His fiction for readers young and old can be found in Highlights, Lunch Ticket, F(r)iction, Cosmonauts Avenue, and other publications. Currently, he teaches creative writing at St. Edward’s University and elementary-school language arts in Austin, Texas. You can learn more at https://noahweisz.wordpress.com.
Yan Fécu: “The Repeating Island”
Yan Fécu is a Haitian-American scholar and writer. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and held a pre-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. She was a fellow at the VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts writing residency in 2017. She is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Beth Little: “Where Did You Go?”
Beth Little spent twelve years working as an English teacher in New Hampshire. She has two degrees in writing – a MLitt (fiction) from the University of St Andrews in Scotland and a MFA (Writing for Young People) from the Solstice MFA Program of Pine Manor College where she now works as Assistant Director of the program. Beth’s work has been published in the anthology Somebody’s Child: Stories About Adoption, Eastown Fiction, and the YA Review Network. She was awarded a SCBWI Magazine Merit Honor in 2016.