Contributors

 

Adrianne Bonilla Stankus is a graduate of Columbia’s School of the Arts. In her second year, she received the Henfield Prize for the opening pages of her novel, Astral Cemetery. Astral Cemetery is an anti-sentimental exploration of girlhood, death, poetry, Latin American identity, and soccer. Her work can be found in Tin House Online and The Acentos Review. She is from Queens, New York, and currently lives in Buenos Aires, where she teaches classes on literature and writing.

Claire Calderón is an Oakland-based writer and curator at work on her first novel. An alum of Hedgebrook, VONA, Tin House, and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto Fellowship, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and is the manager of The Ruby, a creative hub for women and non-binary artists in San Francisco.

Chia-Lun Chang is the author of One Day We Become Whites (ND/SA, 2016). Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in New York City.

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her debut novel Bestiary is forthcoming from One World / Random House on September 8, 2020. More of her work can be found at kmingchang.com.

S. Brook Corfman is the author of the poetry collections Luxury, Blue Lace, chosen by Richard Siken for the 2018 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, and My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites, forthcoming in 2020 from Fordham University Press as the winner of their POL Prize, chosen by Cathy Park Hong. They are also the author of two chapbooks, a poetry editor at Pinwheel, and the winner of the 2019 Tupelo Quarterly Open Prose Prize, judged by Danielle Dutton. @sbrookcorfman & sbrookcorfman.com.

Alexis Aceves Garcia is a writer, researcher, and visual artist living in San Diego, CA. They are currently working on a hybrid poetry manuscript about queering the family archive, trans temporality, and desire.

Shamecca Harris is a creative writer and teaching artist born and raised in Harlem, New York City. Her essays, reportage, and experimental writing have appeared in The Rumpus, Global Citizen, and Utterance Journal, among others. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at The City College of New York where she currently teaches English Literature and Composition. Her work principally focuses on issues related to race, culture, and identity.

Suzanne Highland has an MFA in poetry from Hunter College, and she has received support from the 92nd Street Y, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Brooklyn Poets, where she was a fellow in the summer of 2018. Suzanne’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Redivider, Willow Springs, Bomb Cyclone, and Nat. Brut, among others. She is a queer poet from Sarasota, Florida, currently living in Brooklyn.

Clifford Prince King (b. 1993) is an artist and photographer living and working in Los Angeles, CA. King documents his intimate relationships in traditional and routine settings that speak on his experiences as a queer black man. As an artist who did not attend college or formally study the medium, King’s imagery is uniquely his own. Layered within his tender portraits are nods to the beyond. Shared offerings to the past manifest in codes hidden in plain sight, known only to those who sit within a shared place of knowledge. A poster in a bedroom, a wig on a dresser, the labor of watermelon, small collections of items that signify a specific blackness and sensuality. All these could be missed. In these instances, King’s work begins to morph into an offering of memory; it is how he honors and celebrates the reality of layered personhood. Soft moments of refuge and uninhibited intimacy that is unapologetically honest. King’s imagery prioritizes what it means to be seen and tended to in ways that move beyond the physical. Portraiture becomes prose. It is in the layering of spaces that King’s work is not simply an act of archiving; it is a part of a collective world making, of sustaining and imagining black queer existence defined by the lived experience of those who are black and queer.

Urvi Kumbhat graduated from the University of Chicago with degrees in English and creative writing. She won the UChicago New Voices in Fiction prize and the Ron Offen Poetry prize, and her poems appear or are forthcoming in Vavavya, Rigorous, Red Wedge Magazine, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. She grew up in Calcutta, India.

t. tran le is a poet living in Brooklyn with their spouse and 3 cats. In 2019, t. was awarded a fellowship from Brooklyn Poets, and they were nominated for Best of the Net 2019 by Breakwater Review. You can find more of their work at 8 Poems, Kweli Journal, and Breakwater Review.

Alice Liang is a poet based in Brooklyn, NY. She is currently working on her first manuscript, Beforelife. Her work has appeared in Sine Theta, Where The Questions Live, Vegetasians, and elsewhere. Besides poetry, she also works in other media, such as photography and data.

Troy Michie is an interdisciplinary painter and collage artist. His work engages black consciousness, Latinx experience, immigration, and queerness through assemblage and juxtaposition. Utilizing textile, garment and archival paper, from newsprint to pornography, Michie subverts dominant narratives by placing past and present in confrontation. The resulting work is a non-linear extolification of political resistance and transgressive self-expression and gesture. Recent exhibitions include those at The Shed, New York; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; New Museum, New York; The Artist’s Institute, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York. His work was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Awards and residencies include Recess Art, the Emerging Artist Grant and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He was born in 1985 in El Paso, TX and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Zora J Murff is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Arkansas. He received his MFA from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and holds a BS in Psychology from Iowa State University. Merging his educational experiences, Murff uses his practice to highlight intersections between various social systems, photography, and art. He has published books with Aint-Bad Editions (PULLED FROM PUBLISHER) and Kris Graves Projects. His most recent monograph, At No Point In Between (Dais Books), was selected as the winner of the Independently Published category of the Lucie Foundation Photo Book Awards. Murff is also a Co-Curator of Strange Fire Collective, a group of interdisciplinary artists, writers, and curators working to construct and promote an archive of artwork and criticism created by diverse individuals.

Mai Nardone is a Thai and American writer. His short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He lives in Bangkok.

Frances Nguyen is a freelance journalist, nonfiction writer, and poet covering issues of violence against women, migration, identity, Othering, and the American Dream. She edits for the Women’s Media Center’s Women Under Siege section (which reports on gender-based and sexualized violence in conflict and other settings) and is a member of the editorial team for Interruptr (formerly Foreign Policy Interrupted), a platform dedicated to elevating female experts in foreign policy, national security, and international relations. She lives in Central California.

Tuesday Smillie is a visual artist working with textiles, collage, printmaking, and watercolor. At the core of her work is a question about the individual and the group; the binary of inclusion and exclusion and the porous membrane between the two. Smillie lives and works in New York. In 2018, she had solo exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum and Participant Inc. Her work has shown at the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), and Haus der Kunst, Munich. Smillie has been an artist resident at the Rauschenberg Foundation (2020) and Abrons Art Center (2018-19). Her work has been featured in ArtForum, New York Magazineand the Boston Globe.

Rosie Stockton is a poet based in Los Angeles. Their first book, Permanent Volta, is the recipient of the 2019 Sawtooth Prize, and is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2020. They recently received their MA in creative writing at Eastern Michigan University. Their poems have also been published by Publication Studio, Monster House Press, BigBig Wednesday, Flint Magazine, A Plume Journal, and WONDER.

xtian w is a genderqueer poet & performer. they paint their nails & water plants in Brooklyn, where they’re working through their MFA.

Jane Wong’s poems can be found in places such as Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Agni, Third Coast, and others. Her essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, The Common, Shenandoah, and This is the Place: Women Writing About Home. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, Willapa Bay AiR, Hedgebrook, the Jentel Foundation, and the Mineral School. She is the author of Overpour from Action Books, and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, which is forthcoming from Alice James. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor, and author of Muslim Women Are Everything (HarperCollins, 2020), The Impatient Dr. Lange: One Man’s Fight to End a Global HIV Epidemic (Johns Hopkins, 2018) and the forthcoming, If God Is A Virus: The Ebola Poems (Haymarket, 2021). Yasmin is director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative and a science correspondent for WIRED.