dion banville is a poet, comic book fiend, and amateur historian. He attended the New York State Summer Writers Institute in 2023 and was a 2024 Tin House Summer Scholar. His work has been published in the Rio Grande Review, where he won the Emerging Voices prize for poetry in 2023. dion currently lives in El Paso, Texas.

Olivia Bell is from Chicago and attends Yale University, where she is working on her creative writing thesis and as an editor for the Yale Literary Magazine. Last year, she received the Francis Bergen Memorial prize. She can be found on Twitter at @OliviaBell812.

Hal Flower is a writer and artist based in Philadelphia, PA. His work has previously appeared in The Heavy Feather Review. He can be reached at halflowercomics@gmail.com.

Desmond Everest Fuller grew up in rural Washington. He earned an MFA in fiction at Boise State University and served as associate editor of The Idaho Review. He was a 2023 Sun Valley Writers Conference Fellow and a 2021 Glenn Balch Award recipient. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and is forthcoming or appears in Grist, Indiana Review, Zone 3, Florida Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Peauxdunque Review, West Trade Review, The Gravity of the Thing, and elsewhere.

Galina Itskovich was born and raised in Odesa, Ukraine, and has lived in New York City since 1991. She graduated with a Master’s degree from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. In addition to teaching and practicing psychotherapy, she writes poetry, prose, and nonfiction in Russian and English. Professionally, she has published on the subject of maternal mental health and developmental disorders, and is a contributing editor of Mental Health: Global Challenges Journal. From the first days of the war in Ukraine, Galina has been providing support to both civilians and professionals and became involved in numerous humanitarian projects, including but not limited to psychoeducation on the subject of trauma.

Emily Alice Katz‘s work has appeared in Salamander, Meridian, South Carolina Review, and Lilith, among other publications. She conducted research into her family history, upon which this essay draws, as a fellow at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati in 2022-2023. She teaches in the Department of American Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her family. You can read more about her at https://emilyalicekatz.com/

Callan Latham is a poet from the Midwest. Her work has been published in places such as The Nassau Literary Review, Santa Clara Review, and Sybil Journal. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. He is the English translator of The Gleaner Song by the Chinese poet Song Lin, and The Wild Great Wall by the Chinese poet Zhu Zhu. His debut collection of poetry The Orange Tree was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize.

Zack Lesmeister is a poet, performer, playwright, and filmmaker from St. Louis, Missouri. They are the Poetry Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review. Zack’s writing has been supported by Tin House, Lambda Literary, The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, & OMAI First Wave. Their writing is published in The Missouri Review, Foglifter, The Offing, The Margins, Nimrod International, and elsewhere. Zack has written and performed for venues including The Lincoln Center, Washington University in St. Louis, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Maui Arts Cultural Center, Brave New Voices, The Theatre Communications Group National Conference, and elsewhere. Their debut film was published by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. For more visit zacklesmeister.com

Rodrick Minor is a visual artist, poet, and Black foodways advocate from Mississippi and Louisiana. He’s a four-time member of the Baton Rouge National Poetry Slam Team, the 2015 Baton Rouge Grand Slam Champion, and a member of the 2016 Philadelphia National Poetry Slam Team. His work has appeared in Voicemail Poems, The American Poetry Review, Knights Library Magazine, Micro Podcast, Duende, Poemhood: Our Black Revival: History, Folklore and The Black Experience: A Young Adult Poetry Anthology (Harper Collins, 2024) , Callaloo and other forthcoming presses and journals. He is a Best of Net nominee, Tin House Fellow, Watering Hole Fellow, Winter Tangerine Alumnus, Hurston-Wright Fellow, and BOAAT Press Fellow. He is currently an editor for Voicemail Poems. He recently earned an MFA in poetry at Randolph College, where he was awarded the Nancy Craig Blackburn ’71 Fellowship.

Migwi Mwangi is a storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Fence, and Nashville Review among others. He currently resides in Brooklyn, NY, and is an MFA candidate at NYU’s Creative Writing Program.

Ian Ross Singleton is a writer of fiction. He is also a translator of literature from the Russian and Ukrainian languages. And he often writes criticism of American and Eastern European literature, often of literature in translation. He teaches Writing and Critical Inquiry and Creative Writing at SUNY Albany and serves as the Nonfiction Editor of Asymptote. His debut novel Two Big Differences, about the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity, came out in 2021 from Boston-based MGraphics Press, and is currently being translated into Russian for the Ukrainian press Freedom Letters. In 2024, he took part in the Translating Ukraine Summer Institute in Wrocław, Poland.

Brett Stout is a 44-year-old artist and writer. He is a high school dropout and former construction worker turned college graduate and paramedic. He creates mostly controversial work usually while breathing toxic paint fumes from a small cramped apartment known as “The Nerd Lab” in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. His work has appeared in a vast range of diverse media, such as art and literature publications by NYU and Brown University.

L. A. Weeks is a poet who’s lived in various port cities along the North American Coastal Plain. Her work can be found in journals such as The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, and Harpur Palate. Her poems also appear in The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol. IX: Virginia (Texas Review Press, 2022).

Ye Hui is an acclaimed Chinese metaphysical poet who lives in Nanjing. His poems in English translation have appeared or are forthcoming in 128 Lit, The Arkansas International, Asymptote, Bennington Review, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Circumference, Copihue Poetry, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, Poetry Northwest, and Zocálo Public Square. The English full-length translation of his latest collection, The Ruins, was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Grant and is forthcoming from Deep Vellum.