Residents & Scholars

Anthony Brown is a writer and educator living in Detroit, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Wayne State University. A former managing editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal and current staff reader for Cleaver Magazine, his short stories have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Storm Cellar Quarterly, and Malasaña.

Ava Pauline Emilione is a writer from Brooklyn. They are a 2025 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow who has written for The Nation, Salon, Them, FRUITSLICE, Salty, and Expat Press. They are also the founding Editor-in-Chief of Ebony Tomatoes Collective, a literary magazine for Black and queer writers. Ava lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn with their partner and 20 plants, where they are working on their debut novel.

Colton Kekoa Neves is a Native Hawaiian author who once believed his toy chest could fly him to new worlds and has been chasing that high ever since. He writes at the intersection of the earnest and the absurd with the vain hope to make you go “ohhh.” He is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, Viable Paradise, and is a Tin House Summer Scholar. His writing can be found in Apex Magazine and in future timelines where his other works may (or may not) be published. Currently, he survives the winters in Cambridge, MA with his husband and his cat by always thinking of spring.

Diana Heald is a Brooklyn-based writer at work on a memoir and cultural history of antidepressants. Her essays and criticism have been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Panorama Journal, Off Assignment, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She’s also spent the last two decades in the advertising industry, working as a brand and digital strategist.

Donavan Kamakani Albano is a queer Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet from Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi. A finalist for the 2026 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, his work appears in Poetry Northwest, Pasefika Presence, and Chapter House Journal.

Ema O’Connor is a writer, journalist, organizer, and born, raised, and prodigal New Yorker. She is the author of a forthcoming book of hybrid memoir-reportage about her decade reporting on the destruction of reproductive rights in the US, and her years embedded with the people providing community health care where the government and medical systems have failed; to be published by Crooked Media Reads, an imprint of Zando / Tin House. Ema has published 696 articles and essays on LGBTQ+ issues, immigration, and reproductive justice. Ema's reporting has forced CEOs to resign, triggered multiple federal investigations, and inspired proposed federal legislation.

Fareh Malik is a BIPOC author from Hamilton, Ontario, a seasoned spoken word and page poet, and an established artist. Fareh was named the 2022 RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award winner, the winner of the October Project Poetry Prize, and the 2023 winner of the Austin Clarke Prize for Literary Excellence. Fareh's debut book Streams that Lead Somewhere was published by Mawenzi House Publishers and won the Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry. Fareh was named a finalist for the 2021 Best of the Net anthology, the 2024 and 2026 ARC Poem of the Year, the 2023 & 2025 TWUC Prose Competitions, and the 2024 National Magazine Awards. His work was also included in Best Canadian Poetry 2025. He has had the privilege of working with writers like Omar El Akkad, Danez Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, and more. Fareh is currently working on his second book and exciting new projects.

February Spikener (they/she) is a Black femme poet from Detroit. She self-describes her work as “feral”: meaning, her work embraces the carnal and violent qualities of feral animals while reimagining beasthood as well as daughterhood. Ever inspired by their loved ones, their poems reflect how they navigate through the world and what it means to love and be loved. Her work has been supported by the McCormack Writing Center, Sundress Academy of the Arts, The Watering Hole, and the Stories Matter Foundation, and has been featured in Black Warrior Review, Muzzle Magazine, Poet Lore, among others. She lives in Chicago.

Ijanee Netter writes Southern Gothic fiction, influenced by her hometown of Springfield, Louisiana. She graduated from Belhaven University in 2025 with a BFA in Creative Writing. Now, she teaches elementary writing at Woodland Park Magnet School and is a teacher consultant for the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project.

Jasmine Weber is a writer, editor, and artist from Long Island living in Brooklyn, New York. Her criticism and essays have appeared in publications including Hyperallergic, Seen Journal, Essence Magazine, and Cultured Magazine. She is a recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism and the 2024 Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing. Her work has also been supported by the Storyknife Writers Retreat, the Center for Book Arts, and Triple Canopy. She is currently working on her first novel.

Kasey Peters is a queer writer from Nebraska. Their work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and fellowships the Vermont Studio Center and the Hambidge Center. Their writing is in Sewanee Review, The Rumpus, Grist, South Carolina Review, Booth, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and others. Peters works as an assistant fiction editor for Prairie Schooner. Before all that, they farmed for a decade.

Kathryn Campo Bowen is a Salvadoran American writer born and raised in Miami, Florida. She holds graduate degrees from UC Berkeley and UC Irvine, where she was a Schaeffer Fellow. Winner of the Sonora Review fiction prize and finalist for fiction prizes from the Missouri Review, Story, and the Sewanee Review, her short stories appear in The Florida Review, Sonora Review, and Salt Hill. Her work has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Tin House, and the Community of Writers. Presently living in Los Angeles, she is at work on a novel. Photo courtesy of Camille Misty.

Kira Compton is bad at writing bios, as well as several more important things. She'd love to hear your ghost story.  

Leah Mensch is an Iraqi-American writer, archivist, and creative literary scholar based in Tucson. Originally from Pittsburgh, they hold an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Arizona, where they’re working on a book length archival project about the late poet Kate Braverman. You can find their essays and poems published or forthcoming in the The Believer, Kenyon Review, Adroit, Guernica, The North American Review, and Ninth Letter, where they were the winner of the 2025 Nonfiction Prize.

L.F. Khouri is a Palestinian writer whose work explores war, memory, and the inheritance of silence. His fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translations appear or are forthcoming in journals including The Missouri Review, New England Review, The Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, River Teeth, The Massachusetts Review, The Adroit Journal, EPOCH Magazine, The Rumpus, Alaska Quarterly Review, Wigleaf, Brevity, and elsewhere. He is the winner of The Georgia Review Prose Prize 2026.

Marcus Clayton is a multigenre biracial Black and Costa Rican writer from South Gate, CA, and a current part-time professor for various English and Ethnic studies departments within the California State University system. He has an MFA in Poetry from Cal State Long Beach and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He has an inter-genre story collection titled ¡PÓNK! with Nightboat Books, a poetry chapbook called Nurture the Open Wounds with Glass Poetry Press, and is a 2026 finalist of the DAG Foundation Prize for Literature. Some work has appeared in the anthology Black Punk Now!, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Indiana Review, Passages North, and The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock. Outside of the writing and teaching worlds, he moonlights as a guitarist and shouts for Los Angeles punk band, tudors., and spends a lot of time at home tolerating his hyperactive pug named Darby Crash.

Mawiyah Patten is a Black queer writer, outdoor enthusiast, professional overthinker, cat guardian, and mixologist. She also considers herself a wonderful sister, daughter, and friend, and it must be true since no one has said otherwise.  Her life has taken her to both sides (and some might suggest, both extremes of life and politics) of the United States. She was born and raised in Southern California, and while she misses her family, the Pacific Ocean, and the food, her ancestry and curiosities about family, place, Blackness, and liberatory social movements called her to the South.  She made North Carolina her home in 2012. Since then, she has worked as a facilitator, trainer, and organizer around issues of race and gender equity. She has also led abortion access campaigns in the deep South and recently served as the co-director of the only 501(c)(4) organization in North Carolina dedicated to narrative strategy and creative electoral communications to POC voters.  Mawiyah’s experiences on the West Coast and in the U.S. South inform much of her writing. She uses writing as a way to explore themes of racial identity, nature and Black people’s relationship to outdoors, and community. She is currently working on her first book, a memoir where she challenges the perception of California as a sunny, liberal, and “post-racial” utopia, and dissects the often lauded “strong Black woman” trope. Her book also examines white surveillance, respectability politics, and spiritual and sexual deviance. 

Nastassia is a writer and photographer splitting life between Montreal and Mauritius. She reads and writes at the intersections of indenture, diasporic brownness and disability while cultivating a keen interest in the online zeitgeist. Some of her work has appeared in Le Mauricien and The Metric. She is at work on a short story collection exploring young adulthood in Mauritius.

Philipe AbiYouness is a Lebanese American poet from New Jersey. His work has been published in The Rumpus, New England Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark and has received support from Vermont Studio Center, Brooklyn Poets, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Poonam Dhir is a queer poet, playwright, Punjabi descendent, and settler from Tkaronto (Toronto) by way of Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal). Poonam’s interdisciplinary work explores identity, trauma, memory and the relationship between belief and belonging. They contemplate themes of migration, displacement and loss. Poonam completed an MFA at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop where they were an Iowa Arts Fellow. They were also a 2025 and 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow and a finalist for the 2021 PEN Canada New Voices Award, Poetry. They have been an editor and contributing editor at carte blanche, The Ex-Puritan, The Iowa Review and Arc Poetry Magazine. Find their latest work in The Capilano Review, Vallum, Contemporary Verse 2, PRISM International and Best New Poets. Find Poonam online @pnmdhir

QQ Yang is a poet and essayist born in Guangzhou, raised in Texas, and until recently, based in New York City. Her work has been recognized by The New York Times and published in Black Warrior Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. She was a finalist in the 2026 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize and Witness Literary Awards. A former museum tour guide, she holds a BA in History of Art & Architecture from Harvard University.

Reema Rao is a fiction writer from Chicago. She is currently at work on a short story collection, from which individual stories have received the Story Foundation Prize and the Larry Brown Short Story Award. Her writing is published or forthcoming in Story, Witness, The Los Angeles Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. She is an awardee of the 2026 Creative Accelerator Fund from the Illinois Arts Council, a 2026 Periplus Finalist, and a 2024-2025 Jennifer Weiner Fellow. Her work has also been supported by Tin House, the Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Storyknife Writers Retreat, and more. She lives with her husband, two little children, and dog.

Santana Shorty is a writer and poet from northern New Mexico. She received her BA from Stanford University and MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her writing has been published in New Mexico Magazine, El Palacio Magazine, and in the anthology Water Bodies: Love Letters to the Most Abundant Substance on Earth from Torrey House Press. Currently, she is working on her first novel. She is a member of the Navajo Nation and lives in Santa Fe.

Sarah Anjum Bari is a writer and editor from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She holds an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program, University of Iowa, and is the former Books & Literary Editor of Bangladesh's The Daily Star newspaper. Sarah's work spans criticism, memoir, and narrative journalism. It has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Wasafiri, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the Black Warrior Review, among others.

Selina Xu is a speculative fiction writer, AI policy researcher, and a former journalist covering China. Her recent writing can be found in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Ideas Letter, and TIME. She grew up in Singapore and is now based in New York.

Spencer Rieza-Morrison is a Filipino American writer based in New Jersey. He is a McCormack Writing Center scholar, Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow, and an alumnus of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was a finalist for the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award and a semifinalist for Story Magazine’s Foundation Prize. He received an MFA in Fiction from The New School. He started his own zine, writing about graffiti artists, skaters, boosters, and breakdancers. He is working on a multigenerational novel about Filipino propaganda artists during World War II and the Marcos dictatorship.

Tonya K^nikanlahtá:sa' Shenandoah (she/her) is a member of the Oneida Nation based in Upstate New York with her family. A UC Irvine MFA graduate of fiction, she is a recipient of fellowships and awards from VONA, Hambidge Center, the Community of Writers and Saltonstall with additional supports from WNDB and Tin House. Her work has appeared in Eunoia Review, One Hundred Word Story and Red Ink. She is completing the final revisions of her historical novel, The Caged Crow.

Violet Pitsker grew up in Santa Monica, CA, and currently lives in Portland, OR. In her free time, she enjoys playing the piano, performing comedy, and hosting themed parties. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College and a Master of Social Work from Portland State University. She is working to make her friends famous.

Desiree S. Evans spins tales for children, teens, and adults. Hailing from the bayous of South Louisiana, her stories often explore ancestral memory, folklore, and magic, and the intersections of history and horror through the lens of Black Southern girlhood. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in literary journals such as Callaloo, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of the Locus Award–winning anthology The Black Girl Survives in This One and a contributor to the young adult anthologies Cool. Awkward. Black. and Foreshadow: Stories to Celebrate the Magic of Reading and Writing YA.

Galen Bunting's writing has been published in Black Warrior Review, Minnesota Review, and Fabulist Magazine; his story "Watching Over Me" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is a Marion L. Brittain fellow in the Writing and Communication Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology and holds a PhD in English from Northeastern University. A 2026 Lambda Literary Fellow, he attended the 2026 Spring Young Adult McCormack Writing Workshop. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is finishing his debut novel, while working on a scholarly project about the First World War.

Jaimee Garbacik is a writer of young adult fiction and ethnographic nonfiction. They are the author of Gender & Sexuality For Beginners (For Beginners), and editor of the Ghosts of Seattle Past anthology (Chin Music Press), a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Jaimee has been a developmental book editor for NYTimes bestselling and Caldecott Award-winning authors since the aughts; they also coach writers and consult on manuscripts for Hugo House. A long-time mentor to unhoused teens and former programming chair for an all-ages music venue, Jaimee believes vehemently in the power of youth voice and setting guitar amplifiers to eleven. They are currently working on a YA novel about a marginally unhoused teen skateboarder.

Afabwaje Kurian is the author of the novel BEFORE THE MANGO RIPENS, which was a finalist for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2025 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and was also longlisted for the 2025 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Afabwaje received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica, McSweeney’s, Callaloo, The Bare Life Review, Joyland Magazine, and other publications. She has served as visiting faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and taught fiction at the University of Iowa and for the International Writing Program. While at MWC, Afabwaje will be working on a novel about a woman who flees from Nigeria to America to escape a short-lived polygamous past and her involvement in the murder of her co-wife. The novel will explore the woman’s regrets as she struggles to come to terms with her responsibility in the murder and her complicated past. Afabwaje hopes to experiment with structure and point of view.

Calley Marotta is a former K-12 special educator and current college professor. She teaches writing courses on topics ranging from disability to fashion. Her research and creative writing focus on literacy in the lives of essential workers including parents. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Maine Review, Mutha Magazine, and Atticus Review. She is currently working on a hybrid memoir titled Blame The Mother.  Blame the Mother follows a new writing professor and mother who is grappling with her young daughter’s rejection and the resulting shame when her child overattaches to her father. The book moves across time and genre speculating what caused the child’s rejection while interweaving feminist and disability justice research about attachment, care work, parenting culture, and institutions of motherhood. In separate chapters, the narrator uses speculative nonfiction to seek comfort through real figures that are not available to her in her real life. As the story unfolds and blame becomes less clear, the narrator’s husband, the father who is upheld as the obvious good parent, turns out to have a role to play in the family’s problems. But throughout the book, the question remains, will the mother find a way to make her daughter love her? Blame the Mother is an exploration of and challenge to a culture bent on blaming mothers for society’s ills and a call to reimagine mothering outside of maternal primacy.

Joheun (Jo) Lee (she/her) is a Korean-to-English literary translator and writer from South Korea. With roots in K-pop fandom, she is drawn to stories of desire, relationships, and identity, particularly by women and queer writers. Her translations include Lee Heejoo’s Holy Boy (Picador/HarperVia, 2026) and Amil’s The Forest Called You (Harvill Secker, 2026). Her translation of Lee Yuri's short story “The End of the World” appeared in The Exchanges, and she holds multiple LTI Korea and KPIPA sample translation grants. She will begin her Master’s in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Fall 2026. Jo lives with her partner and four cats in Shanghai, China. Cloud People by Lee Yuri (Munhakdongne, 2026) is a speculative novel set on a toxic pink cloud hovering above a wealthy Korean city. It is a vertical slum whose residents face forced demolition by a government-mandated "rainmaking ritual." The novel is narrated by Haneul, a twenty-year-old woman whose name means "sky," bitterly ironic for someone who cannot escape. Haneul works at a BBQ restaurant, gnawing leftover rib bones in the back while customers leave food untouched. Her father works construction, her mother cleans three houses a day, her grandfather's lungs are turning fibrous from the cloud itself, and her brother is still too young to work. The family holds together not out of love but necessity, each knowing they'll need the same mercy when their own turn comes. As the ritual approaches, Haneul loses her family one by one: to escape, prison, illness, and a desperate act on a livestream. Lee Yuri draws on Korea's tradition of romanticizing poverty—notably naming hilltop slums "moon neighborhoods" for their extreme elevation—and digs into the rot beneath. The pink cloud that looks like cotton candy turns out to be poison that destroys a family.

Kate Wisel is the author of Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, winner of the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Min Jin Lee. She also worked as a research assistant on the book Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly. Her fiction can be found in places that include Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Redivider (as winner of the Beacon Street Prize), Terrain as winner of the 2024 Editor’s Prize, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America and The Best Small Fictions 2019. She was a Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She teaches in Milwaukee and is represented by Stephanie Delman at Trellis Literary Management. For film/TV, she is represented by Hilary Zaitz Michael at WME. Gold Chain is about love and theft. These stories catch women who steal: gold necklaces, Pez Dispensers, nail polish, pens, grapes, memories, love, time. These stories spin obsessively around questions of womanhood, addiction, capitalism, and modern-day feminine survival, ultimately asking if our desires as women are even our own.

Michelle Zhou is a fiction writer based in the United States. She writes literary speculative fiction in English, her second language, having come to the form through Edgar Allan Poe at sixteen. Her debut novel, The Canvas Radius, traces a hereditary compulsion across three generations of Victorian and contemporary London. She works in quantitative finance and writes in the margins of that life — until now. The Canvas Radius is a literary speculative novel by Michelle Zhou spanning three generations of a family marked by an involuntary sensitivity to wrongness — the inability to leave a crooked painting, a misaligned threshold, an error in a room's logic uncorrected. The novel traces this compulsion from Victorian London, where painter Thomas Mellor spends twenty-four years circling an alley before crossing into a city built entirely from paint, to the present day, where his descendant Elias Moore enters the same city and begins to learn its rules. The city operates on a precise mechanism: each deliberate correction transfers paint to the hands at a measurable rate, accumulating toward a threshold from which no one returns intact. Inside, Elias navigates a population of people at different stages of absorption. Outside, his partner Kelly follows the trail of Elias's family line backward through three generations, finding every threshold the city offers but remaining outside. The novel is structured in three stages — the city as puzzle, the city as world, the city as mirror — and moves between Elias's interior and Kelly's parallel search with the precision of a system designed to hold two people permanently apart. It ends without reunion.

Simone Zapata is a poet, editor, and educator based in Oakland, CA. Her writing can be found in Beloit Poetry Journal, Foglifter, Dilettante Army, and Brink Literary Journal, where she served as the inaugural Emerging Writer Fellow in Hybrid Writing. Her work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from Hedgebrook, Banff Centre, Community of Writers, and Miami Book Fair. She holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and organizes with the SF/Bay Area chapter of the Editorial Freelancers Association. Voices Under Water is a hybrid poetry manuscript that centers the speaker’s aunt, who had schizophrenia and died suddenly of colon cancer in 2018. Incorporating medical records, interviews, divination, and printmaking, the project traces the speaker’s efforts to reconcile her identity in the wake of familial rupture. As the manuscript unfolds, the speaker develops a series of large-scale block prints adapted from her aunt’s final CT scans, which evidenced that the cancer had metastasized beyond the possibility of treatment. By inhabiting shifting frames of reference, Voices Under Water troubles the boundary between self and other in its attempts to reckon with an absence that resists dis/closure.

Victoria Newton Ford is a poet and essayist from Memphis, Tennessee. Her writing explores fungibility, violence, haunting, and intimacy. She has received support from Crosstown Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, TORCH Literary Arts, MacDowell, and more. Victoria is an inaugural 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow, administered by Haymarket Books. She is currently working on her first manuscript and documentary, which examine slavery as an ever-present haunting in the lives of Black mothers and their children. While at MWC, Victoria will work on poems and essays exploring her family’s connection to a 19th century abolitionist plantation in Memphis, known as Nashoba. This manuscript maps the narrative of her mother's captivity onto a longer, recursive narrative of Blackness, sexual violence, and Southern haunting that has never fully ended.

Abigail Pak (she/her) is a queer, California-based writer in the MFA program at the University of California, Riverside. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a dabbler in bird enthusiasm. Lately, her work has centered around breath (or the lack of), nondeath, and transmutation. When not in class or writing, she loves to spend time with family and friends, her little white dog, and her partner.

Adèle Jeanne-Rose holds an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where their thesis manuscript received the MFA Writing Fellowship Award through a blind jury process, with commendation by Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award–winning poet and translator. They are a 2026 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar in Poetry, a 2026 Wassaic Project Artist Resident, and a 2025–2026 Scholar-in-Residence at the Newberry Library, and were also selected for AWP’s Writer-to-Writer Mentorship Program. Their work has appeared in peer-reviewed academic and poetic-critical journals, including Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, and has been presented at venues such as the Furious Flower Poetry Conference IV. Their practice centers an African Amerindian-Caribbean queer ecological and decolonial poetic inquiry into the psychic and material afterlives of Atlantic slavery, moving across the interlinked geographies of the Caribbean and the Americas. Interweaving archival fragments, Creole languages, and ancestral knowledge, their work articulates a grammar of resistance, memory, and lineal continuity. The work unfolds as a liturgical sequence shaped through invocation, repetition, and syncretic language, contributing to queer and eco-queer poetics of the Caribbean and the Americas while foregrounding French Caribbean realities often erased or flattened within metropolitan frameworks, with queer desire operating not as theme but as a cosmological principle structuring relation, time, and voice. Reimagining land, sea, and voice as counter-archives, the poetry invokes them as generative sites of remembrance, repair, epistemic renewal, and erotic-spiritual sovereignty. Through invocation, repetition, and syncretic language, their work treats poetry as a living system—one capable of sustaining memory, desire, ancestry, and futurity. Adèle Jeanne-Rose is a poet and interdisciplinary artist-scholar.

Chii Ọganihu was born in Enugu, Nigeria. Their short fiction and poetry have appeared in McSweeney’s, Banshee, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her work was also shortlisted for the 2025 Dream Foundry Writing Contest. Ọganihu is a Brooklyn Poets fellow, a writing fellow at Seventh Wave, and a fiction scholar at the McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House Workshop). She has also received support from Off Assignment and Ubwali Magazine. Ọganihu is at work on multiple projects.

Christian Yeo Xuan is a writer based in Singapore by way of Beirut and Paris. His work has been published or is forthcoming in EPOCH, ANMLY Indiana Review, The Missouri Review, The Madison Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Oxford Poetry, among others. He has placed or been a finalist for the Washington Square Review New Voices Award, the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, the National Poetry Competition, the Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship for Emerging Writers, and the Bridport Prize. A Fall '25 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, he has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, Tin House, and the Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown. He is the forthcoming author of So Rain, winner of the 2025 Sundress Chapbook Competition.

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, Fence, New England Review, AGNI, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A CantoMundo Fellow, he has received honors from The American Academy of Poets, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Black Warrior Review. He lives in New York.

Dipanjali Roy is a writer from New Delhi, India. She has been a recipient of the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize For Poetry, placed at The Rialto Nature & Place Poetry Competition, longlisted by the Sappho Prize for Women Poets, and featured in The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, among others. Her poems appear in Equatorial, Wet Grain, SPAM Zine, Abridged, SAND Berlin, Gutter Magazine, Prototype, wildness, LUMIN, Wasafiri, and others. Her work has most recently been performed at the Jaipur Literature Festival London, hosted by the British Library.

Elizabeth Upshur (she/her) is a Black Southern writer living on Tsalaguwetiyi Land. She serves her literary community as a Contributing Editor at The Seventh Wave. Her writing on the Black female body, ecopoetics, and animal/human boundaries lives at Augur, Sweet Tea Dichtomy, and others. She has workshopped at Bread Loaf Translators, Mendocino, and is currently attending the McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House) to work on her manuscript in progress, zombiemaster. Her flash fiction piece, “motherfucker” was selected by Maurice Ruffin for the Gigantic Sequins Prize, and her Buffy inspired poem “Ribcage” is a 2026 Editors Choice at Arkana Magazine. She is currently working on a suite of poems about the wise woman properties of honey, and an essay examining agency and consent while learning bachata sensual as first a follow, and now as a lead. She can be found @elizawriteswords.

Farrah Khan is an author, advocate, and textile artist residing in Tkaronto (Toronto). Her work explores consent as a practice of joy, justice, and community care. Farrah is the author of Caring for Yourself is a Radical Act and co-edited the graphic novel Heartbeats: The IZZAT Project. Farrah’s writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and Refinery 29. Currently, she is writing a narrative non-fiction book and a queer romance. Her short films have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the British Film Institute's London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. Farrah has received the Governor General's Commemoration of the Persons Case Award, the Canadian Council of Muslim Women Who Inspire Award and the YWCA Toronto Woman of Distinction Award. Farrah’s favourite daily activity is living-room dance parties with her spouse, son, and cat, Jellybean.

Jake Johnson (they/them) is a trans and non-binary writer from Northern California. They have an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, and at the moment they are an adjunct professor in the UC Davis International Center, where they teach specialized classes about US society and culture to exchange students. Currently, they're at work on a speculative/fabulist trans short story collection about bodies and their consequences as well as a novel, which is a contemporary and literary dark academia sequel to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla. When they aren't writing, they can often be found walking their delightful dog Hazel or rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They are on Instagram @jakoblyntkd and will probably start a Substack at an unspecified point in the near-ish future.

Jie V. Cohen is a mixed, intersex writer and author of poetry chapbook VENUS LIMBS ('25, Thirty West Publishing). They are a 2026 Tin House Scholar, a 2025 LAMBDA Literary fellow, and have received fellowships from Kenyon Review, Mount Holyoke College, and others. They were longlisted for the 2024 DISQUIET Prize. Their work has been recognized in DIAGRAM, The Offing, The Minnesota Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Strange Horizons, The Ex-Puritan, Singapore Unbound, POETS.org, and others. Their poem THE FUTURE received a Best of the Net award in 2023. They are the first place winner of the 2024 Singapore Poetry Prize and second place winner of the 2025 Singapore Poetry Prize. Their poem "Gaia Sings the Body Electric" was nominated for the Best New Poetry prize in 2025. Their poem "The Argument I" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2025. www.jievenuscohen.com

Mic Jones is a poet. Read them in Antiphony, Motor Dance Journal, Peripheral Review, The Poetry Project, Simulacrum Magazine, Hobart, CV2, & beyond. Mic curates Cross-Pollinations, a reading series by the League of Canadian Poets. They are the co-creator of Devotional Chaos, the reading group, Piss Press, & Undisciplined, an inter-arts collaborative that produces readings, exhibitions, zines, workshops, & residencies. They have facilitated workshops on trans-medium collaboration, somatic sonnet writing, trash as archive, the New York School & the New Narrative. Mic's writing has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, The Poetry Project, The Shipman Agency, & Naropa’s School of Disembodied Poetics. They live in Tkaronto with a blue & brown eyed dog named Steve.

Mishma is a writer and translator from Colombo, Sri Lanka. She is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BRINK, Bombay Lit Mag, Teen Vogue and elsewhere. She is currently working on a linked collection of surrealist fiction centered around the Sri Lankan Civil War.

Nnamdi Vin-Anuonye is a Nigerian writer and lawyer. A McCormack Writing Center Scholar, his fiction has appeared in Isele and is forthcoming elsewhere. His work has been longlisted for The Masters Review Summer Short Story Award and shortlisted for the JF Powers Prize for Short Fiction. He lives and writes in Lagos, Nigeria. You can find him on Instagram at @callmennam.

Oodie Moffett Taliaferro is a trans Nez Perce poet and birdwatcher residing on S’Klallam Territory in Washington State by way of East Texas. In their work, they explore matrilineal healing, cultural and ecological preservation, and native sovereignty. They were a 2026 McCormack Writing Center scholar, 2025 The Heart of It Writing Retreat fellow, and a 2025 Abode Press Summer Writing Workshop fellow. They believe in global interspecies liberation from settler colonialism.

Pervin Saket was a 2024 writer-in-residence at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, and a 2025 Obermann International Fellow. She is the Editor-at-Large at The Bombay Literary Magazine, and has served as the Literature Curator of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in India. Pervin was the inaugural Fellow for the Yosef Wosk Vancouver Manuscript Intensive 2021. She has been awarded or shortlisted for the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, the Tiferet Poetry Prize, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize and the Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize. Her second poetry collection ‘A Theory of Knots’ is forthcoming from Seagull Books and University of Chicago Press (2026).

Rae is a Cherokee writer, born to a family of Cherokees forced to walk to Indian Territory and German-Americans who settled during the land run. Her work examines the intersections of Cherokee identity, language, and the contemporary Indigenous experience. Rae's writing has been published by the Fork Apple Press, The College Hill Independent, and is featured on the NDN Girls Book Club website. Her work has been supported by the Oklahoma Fashion Alliance, McCormack Writing Center, Four Mothers Collective, and Verses Literacy & Arts Event. She is currently based in Tulsa and occasionally writes under the nom de plume Kilo.

Ruby Macomber (she/they) is uri of the shores of Itu'ti'u, the flowers of Taveuni and the mighty tentacles of Te Pū o Te Wheke (Ngāpuhi/Ngāti Hine). A poet, youth development practitioner for Ngā Rangatahi Toa, and community organiser, Ruby is the former curator of both the New Zealand Young Writers’ Festival and STREETSIDE for the Auckland Writers’ Festival. From 2020-2025, she facilitated creative writing programmes for groups in prisons across New Zealand with Te Kāhui. Her work features in journals and anthologies across Aotearoa, with a primary critical and creative focus on anti-carceral indigenous feminism. My Moana Girls (2024) is her debut chapbook, published by ngā pukapuka pekapeka.

Shantell Powell is a swamp hag and elder goth raised in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid. She’s a graduate of the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, the LGBTQ+ novel immersive at GrubStreet, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity's horror residency, and the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. A Brave New Weird winner and an Aurora finalist, her writing is in Augur, The Deadlands, Nightmare, The Malahat Review, and more. When she’s not writing, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods.

Sohini Basak is a writer of fiction, poetry, and the in-between. Her first poetry collection We Live in the Newness of Small Differences was awarded the inaugural International Beverly Manuscript Prize and published in the UK in2018. Other prizes and honours include the Charles Wallace India Trust Writing Fellowship at the University of Kent (2016), a Desperate Literature Short Fiction shortlist (2025), a Speculative Literature Foundation Gulliver Travel Grant (2024), a Vijay Nambisan Sangam House fellowship (2022), a Toto Funds the Arts writing award (2017), and a Malcolm Bradbury Grant for Poetry (2015). She is working on her first novel and currently serves as the poetry editor at Words Without Borders. Website: sohinibasak.com

Sonal Singh is a fiction writer and a scholarship recipient at the McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House Workshop). Her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly and examines identity, reinvention, and belonging, drawing on time spent living in India, the U.K., and the U.S.

Taqwa is a Palestinian-American aspiring writer and immigration attorney. She currently represents refugees from all over the world seeking protection from persecution and family reunification. She was an Immigrant Justice Corp Fellow, where she represented immigrants detained by ICE in Immigration Court. She holds both a  J.D. and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. She just began her writing journey last year, after becoming a mom to twins and watching them observe unfamiliar surroundings with such awe and wonder. She writes creative non-fiction and fiction, exploring themes of grief, family, identity, homecoming, and motherhood.

Ulysses Mugavazi is a trans writer from Zimbabwe, living on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ peoples. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and served as Editor in Chief of PRISM international and Senior Editor at Kugali Media. Ulysses was a recipient of the Mozilla Foundation’s 2023 Creative Media Awards and the keynote speaker at the 2024 Science Fiction Foundation’s Annual Conference. He writes about love, masculinity, inherited trauma, and queerness while exploring the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. His work has been published in Skew and shortlisted for The Malahat Review's Open Season Awards.

A Philadelphia native, victoria stitt is a writer thinking about palimpsests, poetic lineage, and heartache. Their poems have been nominated for Best New Poetry, Best of the Net, and have appeared in Poetry Daily, the Michigan Quarterly Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and others. They have been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Storyknife, earning a scholarship at the latter. They were named a finalist for the Sewanee Review Poetry Contest in 2025 and received their MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. Currently, victoria teaches English to high schoolers at a boarding school in New Jersey, aiming to instill in their students a love of language.

Young Rader lives and writes in Berlin. His work appears in the Chicago Review, Gulf Coast, Little Star, New England Review, New World Writing, Passages North, Smokelong Quarterly, swamp pink, and elsewhere. His stories have been shortlisted for the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize and the Berlin Writing Prize. He is the 2023 winner of the Calvino Prize and a 2026 finalist for the FSG Writer’s Fellowship. He is at work on a novel.

A.D. Lauren-Abunassar is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and journalist. Her work has appeared in POETRY, Narrative, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Boulevard, and elsewhere. Her first book, Coriolis, was winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. She was a 2025 NEA fellow in poetry. A.D. Lauren-Abunassar will be working on a hybrid lyric poetry manuscript, “In Dreams I am Always a Horse,” which is a study of diasporic identity-making, retelling the immigration of Lauren-Abunassar’s family from Palestine to the U.S. With poems spanning a wide range of forms— including embedded video and sound poems, textual maps, and self-erasures— the project will grapple with notions of inheritance and how one must grapple constantly with history lost and preserved. How is meaning made, identity forged, often in the aftermath of violence or journeys that have been forced by the reach of colonial violence? How might dream and archive serve as forms of ancestral wellness practice? These questions are at the heart of “In Dreams I am Always a Horse,” as is the question of how storytelling might function as a way to resist erasure.

Cassidy McFadzean is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Crying Dress (House of Anansi, 2024). Her fiction has appeared in Joyland, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and Dead Writers (Invisible Publishing, 2025) and an excerpt from her new poetry manuscript was featured as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week. Cassidy was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College, and now lives in Toronto. She was the 2024-2025 Writer-in-Residence at Sheridan College and is the 2025-2026 Poet-in-Residence at Arc Poetry Magazine.

Farheen Raparthi is a writer and artist based in Virginia. She holds an MFA in fiction from George Mason University, where she was awarded a Thesis Fellowship. Her writing has received support from Ragdale and has been published in The Georgia Review. She is currently at work on a novel.

Ho-Ming So Denduangrudee lives in Truckee, CA.

Jason is a Bay Area writer whose work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and won the 2024 PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers. He has been awarded a McCormack Writing Center Residency, participated in the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and was a semifinalist for the American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize. Jason currently works in Medicare marketing with hopes of reducing the amount of paperwork beneficiaries receive and is writing a novel-in-stories about an absurd journey through recovery.

José García Escobar is a journalist, fiction writer, translator, and former Fulbright scholar from Guatemala. He got his MFA in creative writing from The New School. His writing has appeared in The Evergreen Review, Guernica, and The Guardian. He’s a two-time Dart Center fellow. He took part in 2024’s Tin House Winter Workshop. He is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Central American region. He has translated into Spanish ‘Solito’ by Javier Zamora and ‘I’m Not Broken’ by Jesse Leon. In 2023, both got honorable mentions from the International Latino Book Awards for Best Nonfiction Book Translation – English to Spanish.

Liana Fu 傅嘉恩 is a queer writer and zinemaker from Chicago. As an interdisciplinary artist inspired by the Cantonese diasporic archive, she plays with photography, collage, and printmaking to explore intimacy, process, and nostalgia. Her writing is supported by Lambda Literary, Tin House, and the Illinois Arts Council. Her current project, Blueprint of a Burning House, was longlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize, shortlisted for the Disquiet Prize, and awarded by the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. You can find her work in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Margins, Hyphen Magazine, Glass Poetry, and elsewhere.

Dakota Abercrombie is a 2S Ojibwe author beginning a journey out of the academic space into a reconciling with interpersonal expression, generational changes and long awaited language revival. Their time as a writer has varied from analytical survival, passionate journalism surrounding local marginalized communities, mixed media zines and poems emerging from the crevices of their daily intake. Dakota hopes to soon venture more deeply into community connection through poetic means and actions.

Irene Jiang is a former journalist and circus groupie with roots in the Pacific Northwest. Her work appears in the North American Review, Pinch, Uncharted, The New York Times, and more. She has received support from One Story, The Mount and Straw Dogs Writers Guild, and Fulbright. She lives in Los Angeles with her partner and their plants. 

Noreen Ocampo is a Filipino American writer and poet from metro Atlanta. She is the author of two chapbooks, including There Are No Filipinos in Mississippi (Porkbelly Press, 2025) and Not Flowers, which won the 2021 Variant Literature Microchap Contest. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Southeast Review, The Margins, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in English from Emory University and earned her MFA from the University of Mississippi in 2025.

Paula Blower is a Brazilian writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, WA. She studied Communication (Advertising) in Brasília and worked as an advertising writer before pursuing contemporary art at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Holding a degree in Fashion Design, she has exhibited in São Paulo, Amsterdam, and Madrid. Paula studies creative writing at Clark College, where she assists the Columbia Writers Series, and her fiction has won multiple 2025 Hawkins and McCordic awards.

Tanya Tyler (she/her) is Diné from Tséʼałnáoztʼiʼí, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. She graduated with honors from the University of New Mexico with a Bachelor of Arts and double majored in English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work has been published in Conceptions Southwest, Yellow Medicine Review and The Diné Artisans & Authors Capacity Building Institute Anthology. She is a second-year student in the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She serves as the Nonfiction Editor for Chapter House Journal at IAIA. She currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Travis Eisenbise’s writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Joyland, Masters Review Anthology X, Denver Quarterly, storySouth, and The Cancer Book: 101 Stories of Courage, Support and Love. He is the Associate Director of Programs and Finance at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Prior to Sewanee, Travis spent 16 years in Brooklyn, NY raising funds and support for national reproductive health and environmental organizations. His writing has been supported by Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is originally from Soddy-Daisy, TN.

Trinity Toft is a writer and psychotherapist whose work is grounded in a deep attunement to the interior lives of others—both real and imagined. Her debut short story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in Transfer Magazine, 20 Lbs. of Headlights, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, OR with her family, and is at work on a novel about a group of teenage girls transformed by water.

Yeldana Talgatkyzy is a Kazakh writer residing in NYC. She has received fellowships from Under the Volcano and Brooklyn Poets, and has been awarded the Bullock Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets and the Benjamin B. Wainwright Prize in fiction. She recently received her BA from Williams College, where she was awarded the Hubbard Hutchinson fellowship in writing. She is interested in how memory lives, individually and nationally.

Ama Josephine Budge is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, scholar and pleasure activist whose praxis navigates that which she has termed “Intimate Ecologies” to explore Blackness, erotics and the more-than-human in queer and speculative ways toward interspecies futures. Ama is an Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London, an MFA tutor at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and a Research Associate at VIAD (University of Johannesburg). She was recently awarded a PhD is Psychosocial Studies from Birkbeck University of London and is currently working on her first novel, a speculative meditation on sentient trees, queer erotics and isolation, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy & Science Fiction Writers of Colour.

Beste Filiz (she/her) was born in Istanbul, a city where two continents meet. She was a child asylum seeker and refugee at three years old when her family was forced to flee Türkiye to London, England. She is now a Turkish-British-American writer for young people. She received her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University in 2025. She is a recipient of the 2023 Walter Dean Myers Grant from We Need Diverse Books and a mentee in the 2025 We Need Diverse Books Mentorship Program. She lives in Northern California with her non-binary partner and three cats.

Brenna Yellowthunder is Diné, Hočak, and Standing Rock Lakota from Flagstaff, AZ and Black River Falls, WI. They are an award winning writer with publications in Saving Earth Magazine, the Timberline Review, and more forthcoming. They are a recipient of the Kay Snow Award for Fiction, the Michael Collier Scholarship to the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, and the LGBTQ Fellowship for Spring Residencies 2025 at the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Brenna’s upcoming novel, 10,000 Moon Could Never Be Enough was longlisted for the First Pages Prize in Fiction 2024, and an honorable mention in CRAFT First Chapters Contest 2024. Brenna lives in Oregon with their partner. They began their career fighting environmental racism in their tribal homelands from the age of 13. Since then, Brenna has focused their work on uplifting voices that often go unheard. This includes work in grassroots organizing with movements, museum consultation on behalf of Native communities, and a passion for working with Native youth. They hold a BA in Art History & Visual Culture Studies from Whitman College, with a focus on Tribal Museums and the Politics of Display.

J.K. Tsosie is a member of the Navajo Nation — Bitterwater Clan, born for the Many Goats Clan. His work. His work has appeared in Shō Poetry Journal, the Yellow Medicine Review, and the Indiana Review. He is a recipient of the Oberon Herbert Prize, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, and the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets. His work examines the engineered historical narratives of the Indigenous Americans through the neo-western trope — of redemption, moral ambiguity, vast and desolate landscapes, and the pursuit of justice. He resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Tiwa Territory) where he is completing an MD/PhD at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.

Magenta (she/they) is a Black queer writer, teaching artist and multidimensional artist from Brooklyn, NY. Their art is curious about shapeshifting, Black diasporic myths, love, horror, afrosurrealism and the elasticity of Black femme and nonbinary embodiment. Magenta is published (under their government, Alisha Acquaye) in Carve Magazine, The Iowa Review, Plentitudes Journal, Allure, Teen Vogue, and more places. As a teaching artist, Magenta curates imaginative writing spaces for Black writers to explore different realms within themselves. Magenta is a 2023 recipient of NYSCA’s Support for Artists Grant and has participated in The Bandung Residency, The Free Black Women's Library: Obsidian, StoryKnife Writers Retreat, Tin House and Rhode Island Writers Colony. Magenta loves to curate playlists, watch cartoons, bake pastries, dance in nature and talk to trees.

Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat and the author of Fablemaker (Gaudy Boy, 2025). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has published three poetry chapbooks: Monsoon Daughter (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022); Unsprung (Newfound, 2023); and Burma Girl (Gold Line Press, 2026). She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

Born and raised in Tokyo, M.E. Macuaga is a Japanese Bolivian storyteller, puzzle nerd, and third-generation (at least!) speculative fiction fan. Her diverse work can be read in The Cincinnati Review, Epiphany, Seventh Wave, HAD, Luna Station Quarterly, Marvel Comics, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships and support from communities including Tin House, VONA, Ragdale, Hedgebrook, Storyknife, and International Thriller Writers. A finalist for the SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship, the NYC Midnight competitions, and The Florida Review Editors’ Award in Creative Nonfiction, among others, M.E. holds a Creative Writing BA from Stanford University and an MFA from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She lives in California with three sweet humans and two cats, Mimi and Potato; find her at curiousstoryprods.com, @memi_writes, and @memi-writes.bsky.social.

Naqiya Motiwalla is an organizer, fiber artist, and stray cat lover based in Brooklyn, NY. She's been writing poetry and failed novel drafts since childhood. Naqiya is also the founder of Khilna Collective (@khilnacollective), a fiber arts mutual aid initiative. She finds herself drawn to stories that have touches of fantasy, absurdism, and the radical acceptance of it all.

Sammi Chiyao is a PhD candidate at Stanford University, originally from Boston. Her work has previously appeared in Peatsmoke and received the 2025 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She has been supported by Tin House, Kundiman, the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference, and Seventh Wave.

Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose memoir excerpt, “My Mom Told Me,” was selected as a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays series. His short stories, essays, and works of translation have appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, and American Literary Review, among other journals. He is the winner of the 2024 McNally Robinson Booksellers Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2024 Susan Atefat Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation. He was also a 2024 National Magazine Award finalist in Canada and one of the two runners-up in the 2025 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. His writing has received support from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and Vermont Studio Center.