Volume 66, Issue 1

Contributors

SALAR ABDOH is a novelist, essayist, and translator. His books include The Poet Game, Opium, Tehran at Twilight, Tehran Noir, Out of Mesopotamia, and the most recent, A Nearby Country Called Love (2023). He is the director of creative writing at the City College of New York and lives between Tehran and New York City.

MICHAEL ALVAREZ is an artist from Los Angeles with a degree from the Art Center College of Design. His work has been shown across the United States and internationally.

SHASTRI AKELLA’s debut novel The Sea Elephants, published in 2023 by Flatiron Books (USA, Canada) and Penguin (India), was named a most anticipated debut by Good Morning America, LGBTQ Reads, Electric Literature, and others. Their writing was included in the 2024 Best American Short Fiction anthology by writer Lauren Groff. Their writing has appeared in Guernica, Fairy Tale Review, The Lounge, The Masters Review, Electric Literature, World Literature Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. They earned an MFA in creative writing and PhD. in comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Michigan State University.

RANA AL-TONSI is an Egyptian writer and poet. Born in Cairo in 1981, al-Tonsi is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently Index of Fear (Dar Al-Ain Publishing).
m. cynthia cheung is the author of Common Disaster (Acre Books). Her poems can be found in AGNI, Four Way Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and swamp pink, among others, and her work has been supported by an Idyllwild Arts Writers Week fellowship. She is a practicing physician in internal medicine and serves as a judge for Baylor College of Medicine’s annual Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Award.

WILSON ABBY COMEY is a writer and high school English teacher. His work has been featured in Flash Fiction Magazine, Variety Pack, Honeyguide Magazine, and I-70 Review. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and penned essays for The Washington Post and The New York Times. He lives in Washington, DC.

JACOB ISRAËL DE HAAN was a Dutch writer of Jewish descent who immigrated to Palestine in 1919 and was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1924.

MATT DONOVAN is the author of four books and two chapbooks, including, most recently, The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA). He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Donovan serves as director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College and lives in Amherst, MA. We Are Not Where We Are—a book of collaborative erasing of Thoreau’s Walden—will be published by Bull City Press in June 2025.

ARIEL DORFMAN is a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina, whose award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. His works include the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels The Suicide Museum, Widows, and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. His latest novel is Allegro, narrated by Mozart. He writes regularly for the New York Times, Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and CNN, among others. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s and The Three Penny Review, among others. He lives with his wife Angélica in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University

SARA ELKAMEL is a poet, journalist and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is the author of the chapbook “Field of No Justice” (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books).

JENNY GEORGE is the author of The Dream of Reason and After Image, both from Copper Canyon Press, as well as the chapbook * (Bull City Press). She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

JAKE GOLDWASSER is a writer and translator. His work can be found in the New England Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. His translation of the Dutch poet Judith Herzberg’s Landscape was published by Circumference Books.

MARYAM HAIDARI is from the Khuzestan province of Iran. She is the translator into Persian, from Arabic, of noted Arab poets such as Mahmoud Darwish and Sargon Boulus. She has also translated numerous Persian and Afghan poets, as well as Persian travel writers, into Arabic. She is the author of the collection Bab Muareb (A Door Ajar) and the 2018 recipient of the Arab world’s prestigious Ibn Battuta Prize for Travel Literature. Her latest book is Persian Carpets, a collection of modern Persian poetry translated into Arabic. She is also the Culture editor of the Arabic language journal Raseef 22 in Beirut, the premier journal of art, literature, history, and politics out of Beirut. She lives and works in Tehran, Iran.

KRIS(TEN) HERBERT is a fiction writer and translator from the Chicago area, currently based in Szeged, Hungary. She is a former graduate from the MFA in Creative Writing Program at University of California–Riverside, now a Fulbright Hungary Scholar at the University of Szeged. Her translations of contemporary Hungarian poetry have been published in the Los Angeles Review, Waxwing, New Delta Review, and Columbia Journal Online. Her translation of Rita Halász’s novel Deep Breath will be released by Catapult Books in May 2025.

ROBBIE HERBST is a Chicago-based writer and violinist. He’s at work on a novel.

JIM HICKS has served as an editor of the Massachusetts Review since 2010, mostly as executive editor. He has also served as both chair and graduate program director of the Program in Comparative Literature at UMass Amherst. He has twice been nominated for the University’s Distinguished Graduate Mentor award. His translations include Italo Calvino, Ananda Devi, Juan José Saer, Izet Sarajlić, Erri De Luca, and, most recently, Federica Marzi’s My Home Somewhere Else (Sandorf Passage.) His Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2013.

RAPHAEL JENKINS prefers to go by Ralph, as he feels it suits him better and he’s heard every Ninja Turtle joke ever uttered. He’s a native of Detroit, Michigan currently residing in Kentucky with his Boo-thang and their eight-year-old boy. He’s a chef by day and an essayist, poet, and screenwriter in his dreams. He, like Issa Rae, is rooting for everybody Black. He is three-time Best of the Net nominee, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a finalist for the 2021 Frontier Poetry Open Prize, and 2022 Periplus Collective Fellow, whose work is forthcoming or has been featured on his momma’s fridge, his close friends’ inboxes, Indiana Review, Colorado Review, Muzzle Magazine, Wildness, Foglifter, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere.

ELIZABETH KNAPP is the author of Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak, winner of the 2019 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, and The Spite House, winner of the 2010 De Novo Poetry Prize. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, North American Review, Pleiades, and The Sun. She teaches at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, and is a poetry editor for The Baltimore Review.

ANNA LEAHY’s books include the poetry collections If in Some Cataclysm, What Happened Was:, and Aperture and the nonfiction book Tumor. Her work has won top awards from Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood and appears at Aeon, Atlanta Review, The Atlantic, Bennington Review, BuzzFeed, Poetry, Scientific American, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She edits Tab Journal and has been a fellow at MacDowell and the American Library in Paris.

CAROLANN CAVIGLIA MADDEN’s work has appeared in Bennington Review, The Stinging Fly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Interim, PANK, and elsewhere. She is the granddaughter of immigrants, a military brat, and is currently an IRC funded postdoctoral researcher at Maynooth University. Her debut collection, Ritual Loss, was chosen by Desirée Alvarez for the 2024 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Award. She lives in Galway, Ireland.

ARRO MANDELL (they/he) is originally from Brooklyn. Their work can be found in the Southeast Review and the Georgia Review. He’s currently working on a farm in the Hudson Valley.
maria martin is a poet living in North Charleston, SC, where she works for the city coordinating arts-enrichment programs for public schools. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Pleiades, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere.

SANDRA MEEK is the author of six books of poems: Still, An Ecology of Elsewhere, and Road Scatter (Persea Books); Biogeography, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press); Burn, and Nomadic Foundations, as well as a chapbook, The Circumference of Arrival. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, Agni, Terrain.org, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Conjunctions, and The Iowa Review, among others. She served as director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit 2007-2019, and is co-founding editor of Ninebark Press, poetry editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College.

DANIEL MOYSAENKO is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, and critic. His work has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Harvard Review, and Chicago Review. Recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and Emory University Rose Fellowship, he has taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Florida State University, and Ursuline College. He lives in Ohio’s Chagrin Valley.

MEGHANA MYSORE, from Portland, Oregon, is an Indian American writer. A 2022–2023 Steinbeck Fellow, her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The Yale Review, Boston Review, Apogee, Michigan Quarterly Review, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, and more. Selected for the 2024 Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions, her writing has also been recognized by Tin House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Black Lawrence Press, The de Groot Foundation, and more. She is working on a novel and short story collection exploring grief, loss, longing, South Asian womanhood, and transformations.

JAKE PHILLIPS is a queer poet based in Rhode Island. He is a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal and was awarded a 2024 Make Art Grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. You can find his poetry published or forthcoming in AGNI, Nimrod International, The Penn Review, Salt Hill, swamp pink, and elsewhere.

ANNE SCHUCHMAN is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in academic and literary journals, including The Southern Review, The Saranac Review, and The Journal of Italian Translation. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian studies from NYU and an MFA in creative nonfiction and literary translation from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and her work has been recognized with awards from Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

SEJAL SHAH is the author of two books, most recently How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions (West Virginia University Press), a short story collection dedicated in part to journalist James Foley. The full text of “Dicot, Monocot” and more of Jim’s workshop comments are included in her book. Jim’s family later established the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation to promote journalist safety and to advocate for the return of American hostages. To learn more about Jim’s story, please visit JamesFoleyFoundation.org.

S.SHREYAS teaches anthropology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, ME.

MARK SPERO (he/they) is an MFA and MA candidate at the University of Montana. They received the 2021 Madeline DeFrees Prize, selected by Phillip B. Williams, from the Academy of American Poets, and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Community of Writers. Their work can also be found in the American Journal of Poetry and is forthcoming from Poetry Northwest.

J.S. WESTBROOK’s poems have appeared in Hopkins Review, New Criterion, Subtropics, and elsewhere. His book chapter “To Tinker with the Machinery of Death: Conceptual Poetry and Archival Justice” is forthcoming in Trespassing in the Archive (Lexington Books). He currently serves as assistant professor of English at the Kazakhstan Institute for Management, Economics, and Strategic Research.

JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), skycrape (WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translation from the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A thirty-five-time Pushcart nominee, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, poetry editor at Kelson Books, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.

PÉTER ZÁVADA was born in 1982 in Budapest. He has been publishing poems since 2009, which have appeared in the Hungarian literary journals Holmi, Jelenkor, Ex Symposion, and Litera, among others. His first collection of poems, Ahol Megszakad, was published by Libri in Budapest in 2012.

ANDREW ZHOU is a queer Chinese writer and medical device engineer who grew up in the Minneapolis area but currently resides in Boston. He holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Columbia University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Quarterly West, The Pinch, Chestnut Review, Bourbon Penn, Jabberwock Review, and elsewhere.