Volume 65, Issue 3

Contributors

GAROUS ABDOLMALEKIAN is an award-winning Iranian poet. His debut poetry col-lection in translated English, Lean Against The Late Hour, was published to wide critical acclaim in 2020. Abdolmalekian is the recipient of the 2023 Roddi Literature Prize for the Italian translation of his most recent book titled The Middle East: A Trilogy— War, Love, Solitude. He is currently the Po-etry Editor at Nashre-Cheshmeh Publishing House.

YOSANO AKIKO (1878-1942), née Hō Shō, is one of the leading figures of twenti-eth-century Japanese poetry. In her prolific career, she wrote more than 50,000 tanka, 600 poems, and numerous essays of social criticism. Also well-versed in classical literature, she translated The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese. Her early work was published in Myōjō (Bright Star), a literary magazine with Romanticist leanings, established in 1900 by her future husband, Yo-sano Tekkan. Her first collection of tanka, Midaregami (Tangled Hair), became noto-rious for her provocative, unflinching por-trayal of romantic passion. Akiko was also one of the founding members of a women’s college, the Bunka Gakuin, in 1921.

CHRISTIAN APPY is director of the Ells-berg Initiative for Peace and Democracy and a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he has received the Chancellor’s Medal, the Dis-tinguished Teaching Award, and the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award. He is the author of three books about the Vietnam War—American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (Viking), Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (Viking), and Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press). He is currently working on a book about Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

IFA BAYEZA is an award-winning play-wright, director, composer and educator. Her plays include the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award-win-ner Homer G & the Rhapsodies in The Fall of Detroit; String Theory; Welcome to Wan-daland; Infants of the Spring; the musicals: Charleston Olio; Bunk Johnson . . . a blues poem, Kid Zero; and The Till Trilogy (The Ballad of Emmett Till, That Summer in Sumner, and Benevolence), winner of the prestigious Roy Cockrum Award. Her debut novel, Some Sing, Some Cry, was co-authored with her sister Ntozake Shange. In 2018, Bayeza was the inaugural Humanist-in Residence at the National Endowment for the Humanities and receieved two commissions from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. A 2022 MacDowell fellow and 2024 Theatre Resident at the Kennedy Center, she is a graduate of Harvard University with an MFA in Theater from University of Massachusetts Amherst.

MAKELLA BREMS is a PhD candidate in Political Science and an MFA student in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame.

STEVEN BROOKS is a writer and English teacher based in Stockholm, where he lives with his partner, Holly, and their two chil-dren, Griffey and Chloé. Previous stories of his have been published in Passages North and Eclectica.

CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books), Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books), and It’s Important I Remember (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming). He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Granta, and elsewhere. He serves on the editorial board at Alice James Books.

AARON COLEMAN is the author of Red Wilderness (Four Way Books, forthcoming), Threat Come Close (Four Way Books) winner of the GLCA New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, the Fulbright Program, and the American Literary Translators Association. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Callaloo, The New York Times, Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a Day series. Aaron is currently the Postdoc-toral Fellow in Critical Translation Studies at the University of Michigan and will join the faculty as Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature in fall of 2024.

MÓNICA CRESPO is a Basque writer and a professor at the National University of Distance Education in Spain. She has participated in many workshops in Argentina, Spain, at Alessandro Baricco’s Scuola Holden in Turin, Italy, and at seminars on creative writing pedagogy organized by the European Association of Creative Writing Programmes. The Secret Mothers is her debut collection. She lives in Bilbao, Spain.

JESSICA CUELLO’s most recent book is Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press). Her book Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize, was honored with The Eugene Nassar Prize, The CNY Book Award, and a finalist nod for The Housatonic Book Award. Cuello is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works,) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press). Cuello has been awarded The 2022 Nina Riggs Poetry Prize, two CNY Book Awards, The 2016 Wash-ington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. She is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review and teaches French in CNY.

MARISSA DAVIS is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Poem-A-Day, Gulf Coast, Narrative, and Best New Poets, among other journals. Her translations are published or forthcoming in New England Review, Mid American Review, The Common, Rhino, American Chordata, Northwestern Review, and The Offing. Davis holds an MFA from New York University, and she was a 2023 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Fellow.

CHELSEA DINGMAN’s first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series (UGA Press). Her second book, through a small ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (UGA Press). Her third collection is I, Divided (LSU Press). She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press). She is pursuing her PhD at the University of Alberta. Her current work draws on research supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.

KATE EDWARDS is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She locates her research interests at the nexus of ecocriticism, nonhuman studies, and ethics.

STÉPHANIE FERRAT is a painter and poet from Aix-en-Provence, France, currently residing in the Var. In both her visual and literary art, she expresses a love for and devoted attention to the natural world. Books of her poetry have been published by La Lettre volée, Fissile, and L’atelier La Feugraie. Ferrat has combined her diverse artistic interests in creating her own small press, Les Mains, which publishes intricately illustrated books of poetry.

LUIZ GONZAGA PINTO DA GAMA, known commonly as Luiz Gama, is a towering figure in Afro-Brazilian history and a pioneer of its national literature. His major work of poetry, Primeiras Trovas Burlescas de Getulino (Getulino’s First Burlesque Ballads), first appeared in 1859 and has remained in print ever since. Gama also published essays under his own name and various pseudonyms, in addition to founding periodicals like Diabo Coxo (Crippled Devil) and O Cobrião (The Nuisance). An advocate for the enslaved and ruthless lampooner of Brazilian society, Gama has assumed a legendary status in Afro-Brazilian culture. Recently, the Projeto Luiz Gama has begun republishing his complete works across 11 volumes.

MARIE GOYETTE earned her MFA at University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she won the Graduate Prize in Fiction. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in StoryQuarterly (winner, 2024 Fiction Prize), Five South, North American Review, Feminist Studies, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. She is co-fiction editor of Literary Mama, and is at work on a novel.

ALAN GROSTEPHAN is the author of The Banana Wars and Bogotá, a novel chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best ten books of fiction in 2013 and longlisted for the Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize. He is also the editor and translator of Stories of Life and Death, a collection of writing by emerging Colombian writers. He holds an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine and is a professor at Agnes Scott College. He lived for years in Colombia where he travels extensively and is currently writing about work, dispossession, and land res-titution in Urabá. He resides in Decatur, Georgia and is married to the visual artist María Korol.

YULIIA ILIUKHA is a Ukrainian poet, writer, and journalist. She is the author of two novels, The Eastern Syndrome and Zero, the short story collection The Sky Catchers Teach Me to Dream, poetry collections Graphomaniac Poems and Das letzte Ahornblatt, and several children’s books. Iliukha has received many awards, including 128 LIT’s International Chapbook Prize 2023. She is a writer-in-residence at Internationales Haus der Autor:innen in Graz, Austria. Since 2014, when Russia unleashed war against Ukraine, she has been actively involved in volunteering. Together with her friend, she assembled over 500 individual tactical medical kits for Ukrainian soldiers.

JOLANDA INSANA (1937-2016) is the author of several volumes of poetry, beginning with Sciarra amara in 1977. In addition to writing poetry and teaching classics to high school students, Insana was also a prolific translator of Greek and Latin, including works by Sappho, Euripides, and Martial. Insana won the Viareggio Prize for poetry for La Stortura in 2002 and the Premio Pascoli Prize in 2009. Slashing Sounds (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) the first collection of her work to be published in English, has been translated by Catherine Theis.

YUI KAJITA is a literary translator, illustrator, and scholar with a PhD in English Literature from the University of Cambridge. Her translation of Shion Miura’s Kaze ga tsuyoku fuiteiru (Run With The Wind) is forthcoming from HarperVia in 2024.

LEYNA KROW is the author of the novel Fire Season, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the short story collection I’m Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking, a Believer Book Award finalist. “The Rabbit” is a part of her short story collection Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids, forthcoming in January 2025.

SETH LANINGA is a translator of poetry and fiction from Spanish. He is originally from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and lives in Austin, Texas, where he works in the public health field. Other poems by Mr. Maruri which he translated were published in the Fall 2021 Ilanot Review.

JOAN LARKIN’s sixth book of poems, Old Stranger, is forthcoming from Alice James Books. Previous books include My Body: New and Selected Poems and Blue Hanuman, both from Hanging Loose Press. Joan co-founded Out & Out Books during the 1970s feminist literary explosion. She translated Sor Juana’s Love Poems with Jaime Manrique and has edited four anthologies, including Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time with the late Carl Morse. Her honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award and fellowships from the NEA and the Academy of American Poets.

HANNA LELIV is a literary translator working between Ukrainian and English. She was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Iowa’s Literary Translation MFA program and mentee at the Emerging Translators Mentorship Program run by the UK National Center for Writing. In 2023-24, Hanna was a translator-in-residence at Princeton University.

ASHLEE LHAMON received her MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University and is the former Fiction Editor of the McNeese Review. Her work has previously appeared in Salamander Magazine, Hunger Mountain Review, Grist: A Journal of The Literary Arts, Nightmare Magazine, Cotton Xenomorph, and others.

CLARA MARINO holds an MA in Japanese and certificate in Translation & Interpreting Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include feminist and proletarian literatures, as well as new religious movements and professional wrestling.

VÍCTOR “CEPILLO” REGINO MARTÍNEZ was born in Montería, Colombia in 1968. In 1993, he made his professional boxing debut against Luis Bolaño. He retired in 2006. At the age of 49, on October 1, 2017, Regino was murdered by two gun-men outside a church in Montería.

JULIO MARURI was born in Santander, Spain in 1920. In 1957 he won Spain’s National Literature Prize for Obra Poética (Poetic Work). He was also an accomplished painter, and his work was widely displayed in Spain as well as France, where he spent many years teaching the craft to youth with special needs before returning to Spain to spend his final years in his native Santander, near to where many of his works are now held in the Archivo Lafuente private collection in Heras.

RYAN MIHALY  is the author of the chapbook of prose poems, B-Flat Clarinet Fingering Chart (New Michigan Press), which explores imaginative clarinet technique. He and Karolina Zapal have been translating Halina Poświatowska since 2018.

NKOSI NKULULEKO’s work is published in Chess Life Online, Ploughshares, Poem-A-Day, Poet Lore, The Offing, Oxford Poetry, and his square poems in ANMLY, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Nation. He is the winner of Michigan Quarterly Review’s Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Po-ets, and the recipient of fellowships from Poets House, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Callaloo, and the Watering Hole. He is anthologized in Bettering American Vol. 3 and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Nkosi is a chess, music, and poetry teacher from Harlem.

BIJAAN NOORMOHAMED is a poet and translator at Princeton University. He works on ancient Chinese translations of meta-physical and war poetry, particularly during the Tang-Song transition and the early Qing period. His translations and poetry have been featured in POETRY Magazine, the Oxonian Review, the Nashville Review, and The Marque.

BILLY O’CALLAGHAN, from Cork, Ireland, is the author of four novels and four short story collections, including My Coney Island Baby (Jonathan Cape), The Boatman and Other Stories (Cape) and the Irish bestseller, Life Sentences (Cape, 2021/Godine, 2022). Winner of the Irish Book Award and shortlisted for the COSTA Short Story Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s En-core Award and the Prix des Lecteurs, his work has been translated into 18 languages and his stories have appeared widely, in such journals as Agni, the Kenyon Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, the Saturday Evening Post, the Stinging Fly and Winter Papers. His latest novel, The Paper Man, was published by Jonathan Cape (Godine, U.S.) in 2023.

MIKE OUSLEY paints a direct commentary on Appalachian life and folk traditions, though their simplicity belies their depth. Ousley has painted since childhood, and though trained (MFA, University of Cincinnati), he foils Western European traditions with the folk style of his youth. Recent exhibitions include Nine Lives at Fortnight Institute, NY; From These Hills at the William King Museum of Art, VA, curated by Michael Rooks; and, Something on the Wind at Morehead State University, Morehead, KY. His work was featured in ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22, selected by Fabiola Alondra and Jane Harmon. Ousley has been a resident at the Huntington Museum of Art, studying with Alfred Leslie; Arc of Appalachia; and, North Mountain.

HALINA POŚWIATOWSKA (1935-1967) is one of Poland’s most beloved poets. According to her publisher, she is the second most read poet in Poland (after Wisława Szym-borska). Her life was marked by tragedy— during the Nazi invasion of her hometown, she developed a heart condition that would claim her life by age thirty-two. Knowing her life would be brief, she managed to publish three full-length poetry collections and a memoir during her lifetime; a fourth book of poems was published the year after she died. Her quiet, often untitled, lyrical poetry dwells on themes of love, death, art, and sexuality; she is considered one of the first female erotic poets in Poland. She traveled to the States in her twenties and earned a degree in philosophy from Smith College in 1961. Schools and streets have been named after her in Poland; musicians of all stripes continue to set her poems to music; and a museum dedicated to her life is operated by her brother in their hometown of Częstochowa.

ALBERTO SALCEDO RAMOS (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1963) is the author of various non-fiction works, including La eterna parranda (The Eternal Spree), De un hombre obligado a levantarse con el pie derecho (A Man Obliged to Get Up/Get Dressed with his Right Foot), Botellas de náufrago (Bottles from a Shipwreck) and El oro y la oscuridad (Gold and Darkness). A member of the journalistic foundation, Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, he has taught workshops in journalism in various countries. His work has also been included in numerous anthologies, both in Spain and other European countries.

NICHOLAS RINEHART is a scholar, critic, and translator based in New York City. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Harvard University and previously worked as a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in the Department of Eng-lish and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. His books, This Strange Commu-nion: Slave Testimony and Social Practice in the Afro-Atlantic World, and The Complete Afro-Cuban Slave Poets: Manzano, Frías, Echemendía, Cepeda, Roblejo, Díaz, are cur-rently under review.

ADRIE ROSE lives next to an orchard in western MA and is the editor of Nine Syllables Press. Her work has previously appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Baltimore Review, Nimrod, The Night Heron Barks, and more. Her chapbook I Will Write a Love Poem was released in 2023 with Porkbelly Press, and her chapbook Rupture was released with Gold Line Press in 2024. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2019 and 2023, a finalist for The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry in 2021, named a Highly Commended Poet for the International Gingko Prize in 2023, and won the 2023 Radar Coniston Prize. She won the Elizabeth Babcock Poetry Prize, the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize, and the Gertrude Posner Spencer Prize in 2021, and the Anne Bradstreet Prize, the Eleanor Cederstrom Prize, and the Mary Augusta Jordan Prize in 2022.

SIAVASH SAADLOU is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose work has been noted in the Best American Essays series. He is the winner of the 2024 Susan Atefat Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Constance Rooke Nonfiction Prize, and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation.

JAVIER SANDOVAL grew up in the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico and studied creative writing under Forrest Gander and John Wideman at Brown University. He now teaches at the University of Alabama where he also served as Poetry Editor of Black Warrior Review. His own work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Salamander, Massachusetts Review, and Indiana Review, and he’s been the recipient of Frontier Poetry’s Global Poetry Prize and swamp pink’s Indigenous Writers Award. His chapbook, Blue Moon Looming, will soon be published by CutBank. But mostly, he loves to smoke on the stoop with his lady.

MARGUERITE (MAGGIE) SHEFFER is a writer who lives in New Orleans. Her debut short story collection, The Man in the Banana Trees won the 2024 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. Her stories appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epiphany, The Offing, Smokelong Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, The Adroit Journal, and The Pinch, among other magazines.

D. P. SNYDER is a bilingual writer and literary translator from Spanish. Her work has appeared in Two Lines Journal, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Exile Quarterly, and World Literature Today, among others, as well as various anthologies. Her book-length translations are Meaty Pleasures by Mónica Lavín, Arrhythmias by Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, and Scary Story by Alberto Chimal. She lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

CATHERINE THEIS is the author of the poetry collection The Fraud of Good Sleep and the play MEDEA. Slashing Sounds, her translation of the Italian poet Jolanda Insana, is forthcoming Fall 2024 from the University of Chicago Press’ Phoenix Poets series. She teaches at the University of Southern California.

ZHANG XUN (1640-1695), né Sheng Bai, was a prestigious jinshi holder in Qing Emperor Kangxi’s court. Entranced with the natural world, Zhang carried out bureaucratic duties in China’s fertile south. There, drawn to its beauty, Zhang blended his love of nature with the observation of its human inhabitants in his masterful poetry collection, the Zhuye an wenji.

KAROLINA ZAPAL is the author of Notes for Mid-Birth (Inside the Castle), a hybrid work investigating the abortion rights movement in Poland, especially the Black Protests in 2016 and 2018; and Polalka (Spuyten Duyvil), a hybrid work of poetry and memoir concerning her emigration from Poland to the US as a child.