Contributors

ISSUE 7

MIKE DRESSEL is a writer and artist based in New York. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dirt Child, The Berlin Review, Warm Brothers, Bachelors, and Chelsea Station, among others. 

SARA DUDO is an adjunct Writing professor, a recent MFA graduate from University of Nevada Las Vegas, Pushcart Prize nominee, and recent "Best of the Net" nominee. She has had her poetry recently published in The Cincinnati Review, The Atlanta Review, The Idaho Review, The Portland Review, Southwest Review, and Oakland Review. Sara enjoys exploring the intersections of the body and landscape, and how illness shapes and redefines relationships. When she is not writing, she enjoys exploring the desert, road-tripping, surfing, and spending time with her husband and her dog. 

Originally from San Antonio, Texas, JONATHAN FLETCHER holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Columbia University School of the Arts. He has been published in Acropolis Journal, The Adroit Journal, Arts Alive San Antonio, The BeZine, BigCityLit, Book of Matches Literary Journal, Catch the Next: Journal of Ideas and Pedagogy, Colossus Press, Curio Cabinet, Door is a Jar, DoubleSpeak, Emerge Literary Journal, Flora Fiction, FlowerSong Press, fws: a journal of literature & art, Half Hour to Kill, Heimat Review, Hyacinth Review, LONE STARS, Midway Journal, The MockingOwl Roost-An Art and Literary Magazine, MONO., and Moot Point.

LUCA LAGERSTROM is a writer, musician, and photographer from Cape Town, South Africa.

PATRICK MCEVOY has had stories included in various comic book anthologies such as Emanata and Continental Cryptid. Illustrated stories have also appeared on Slippery Elm's website, Murder Park After Dark Vol. 3, Best of Penumbric Vol. 6, and in New Plains Review. In addition, short plays he wrote were chosen to be performed at the Players Theatre in New York as part of their various festivals (Sex, NYC and BOO) in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2019. And he wrote and directed short plays for Emerging Artists Theatre's New Works series in 2021 and 2022. A play anthology called What May Arise was also streamed June 30-July 6th 2022 as part of the Rogue Theater Festival. He wrote and directed Directions, which appeared in the 2022 Dream Up Festival, as well as Coordinates, which appeared in Chain Theatre's 2023 Winter Festival. Photography has also been exhibited with Exhibizone: Scenic, HMVC, Greenpoint Gallery, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Molecule, riverSedge, and Good Works Review.

LIA SWOPE MITCHELL is a writer and translator from Minneapolis. Her fiction has appeared in magazines like Asimov's and Apex, and her translations of Antoine Volodine and Georges Didi-Huberman have been published by the University of Minnesota Press.

OLIVIA PELAEZ is a NJ based artist. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in NY with a degree in Cartooning. Her published work includes comics “Little Girl,” “The Kitchen Witch,” “Unite and Takeover: stories inspired by the songs of The Smiths,” and various anthologies.

SETH SIMONS is a journalist and poet based in Brooklyn. He writes Humorism, a newsletter about labor, inequality, and extremism in comedy. His poetry has been published in Conduit, The Adroit Journal, Fugue, and elsewhere.

SARAH J. SLOAT’s poems, prose, and collage have appeared in Seneca Review, Diagram, Shenandoah, and many other publications. In 2020, Sarabande published her book of visual poetry, Hotel Almighty. Born in New Jersey, Sarah has lived for many years in Europe, where she works in news. You can keep up with her at sarahjsloat.com.

SETH TROYER is an Akron, Ohio based poet, musician, and experimental filmmaker. The process of creating the apocalyptic, gay soap opera miniseries Wronald Wants To Be A Barber (available on YouTube) led him to the work of John Ashberry, and a love affair with poetry in general. His writings have been published by various anthologies including The Purpled Palm, Between The Lines, and The Wig Wag Film Journal. 

MIRKA WALTER is an emerging visual artist, illustrator, and graphic designer from Cologne, Germany. It was here where Mirka got first in touch with surrealism, as Max Ernst was born in Brühl, a small city close to Cologne. But what especially has been influencing Mirka’s work and worldview is the feminist surrealism by artists such as Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. What Mirka wants to capture is the beauty, banality, and brutality of the everyday, the human body in motion, as well as a surreal and fantastic representation of the world. The artist’s favorite materials are watercolor in all its expressions and ink as well as papercut art.

Mirka contributed the watercolor featured on our cover page. 

MAURA WAY is the author of Mummery (2023) and Another Bungalow (2017) both from Press 53. Her poetry and flash memoir has been widely published in journals such as The Appalachian Review, Poet Lore, Hong Kong Review, Puerto del Sol, Hotel Amerika, and The Potomac Review. Originally from Washington, DC, Maura lives in North Carolina, by way of Boise. She has been an English teacher since 1995, most recently at a small Quaker high school. 

MATTHEW WOODMAN teaches at California State University, Bakersfield and was named the 2023 Kern County Poet Laureate. He is the editor of multiple regional anthologies, most recently Writing Covid. His own poems have appeared in recent issues of Sugar House, Word West Revue, and Amsterdam Review, and more of his work can be found at matthewwoodman.com.

ISSUE 6

VICTOR AKHERE (B. 2002) is a Nigerian photographer and budding filmmaker. Although Victor grew up surrounded by a lot of photography, he had no interest in pursuing photography professionally until 2019 when he experienced an existential crisis. Drawing inspiration from cinema and his experiences, his work often explores feelings of melancholy, nostalgia, and vulnerability.

LILY BROOKS-DALTON's most recent novel is The Light Pirate, a #1 Indie Next pick for December 2022, a Good Morning America Book Club selection, and one of NPR's "Books We Love." She is also the author of Good Morning, Midnight, which has been translated into seventeen languages and was the inspiration for the film adaptation The Midnight Sky, as well as the memoir, Motorcycles I’ve Loved, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A former writer-in-residence at The Kerouac House and The Studios of Key West, she currently lives in Los Angeles.

CASSIO is a Colombian analog collage artist and sociology student. His work focuses on subjects such as time, environment, social relationships and literature.

Graduated from Saint Joseph University in Beirut in 2012, MELISSA CHALHOUB has directed and sound designed many experimental short films, and has been working as a visual artist and illustrator, translating what she learned from movie making onto paper. 

NATHAN DIXON is a doctoral candidate in English literature and creative writing at the University of Georgia where he serves as graduate editor of The Georgia Review. His creative work has appeared in Redivider, Fence, Tin House, Carolina Quarterly, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. His critical/academic work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Transmotion, and Renaissance Papers, where he previously served as assistant editor.

JESSAMYN DUCKWALL lives and works in Oregon. They are an MFA candidate at Portland State University and the author of the chapbook Sylvia sings in the garden. They serve as Co-Editor in Chief at The Portland Review. Their work has appeared in Josephine Quarterly, Kithe Journal, Pithead Chapel, and other publications.

MIRJAM FROSTH is a Swedish-American photographer, poet, and humble servant to her dog, Sten. She currently resides in Stockholm, Sweden.

KATE GARKLAVS (she/they) is a queer writer and artist living in Portland, OR. Her work has appeared in Juked, Wigleaf, Tammy, and Jubilat, among other places. Their first chapbook ("Diffusely Yours") was published by Bottlecap Press in August 2018.

Originally from Beijing, YUCHEN LU is an illustrator now based in New York. She received an illustration degree from the School of Visual Arts. She finds inspiration from nature, mythologies, fairytales, and dreams; stemming from a fascination of fantasy since her childhood. Yuchen draws in pen and ink, and then colors each piece digitally. 

Yuchen contributed the illustration featured on our cover page.  

MILA RAE MANCUSO is a Boston-based writer and experimental filmmaker. She believes in allowing the subconscious mind to drive creative impulses. Mila Rae seeks to produce works that bend the stagnancy of the present moment, capturing the absurdist aura dangling over the subject and their imaginary friend. Her creative work generally surrounds subjects of intimacy, the body, and the utopique morose self we become when there’s no audience attesting to our humanness.

STUART MASCAIR is a professional writer living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was born in February, 1991, and has lived in Colorado, Washington state, and New Mexico. Stuart learned his writing craft with short stories, drinking too much coffee, and listening to inspiring music. Stuart graduated with a masters in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2022, and has been working on the final touches of his novel. Stuart is also a proud member of the Cherokee Nation. Stuart gets his inspiration from history, as the story of humanity provides a common touchstone for us all. When he is not writing, Stuart can be found taking long walks, practicing a fun cooking recipe, and obsessing over old episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

ROSS ROBBINS is a poet and painter living in Portland, Oregon, with Clay (husband), Biscuit (cat), and Triscuit (dog). His most recent book, THE THREE EPs (2018), is available now from Two Plum Press.

MEREDITH SADLER is a Toronto-based illustrator and graphic designer. She is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, and her editorial work has been commissioned by a variety of North American publications, including Smithsonian Magazine, the Literary Review of Canada, and the Boston Globe.

DR. MIDORI SAMSON (she/her) サムソンみどりis a bassoonist, composer, educator, and activist in Bloomington, Illinois. Currently she is the bassoon professor at Illinois State University and performs with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra. Her electroacoustic compositions use acoustic bassoon, field recordings, white noise, and electronic distortion to explore themes of identity, relationships, trauma, and resilience. Having studied both classical music and social work, her sound art draws from social work’s principles of social justice, community organizing, and anti-racism, while utilizing classical structures and harmonies. Personally, she is a mixed-race Asian woman, bisexual person, and abuse survivor, and her intersecting identities are inseparable from everything she creates.

ADIE B. STECKEL is a writer living in Portland, Oregon, where they co-edit the small press Fonograf Editions and work for an HIV/AIDS & LGBTQ+ health and social services nonprofit.

ISSUE 5

SRISHTI BAHL: I’m an artist from India currently pursuing MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I explore values of freedom, rebirth, flowering of the spirit and abundance in my paintings. The works are layered with suggestive cultural imagery such as Shiva's all knowing third eye, Ganesha, and many legends. They’re not direct images, they’re abstract gestural images that only have the subtle references to rediscovering faith as a new age child wondering about the legitimate nature of myths and stories that we grow up with. I’m mostly interested in painting the breath, the fast-slow, the urgent-relaxed, the heavy and soft moments of existences. What does it really mean to be alive in this moment–the very now juxtaposed with history and tradition of the ages and all the conditioning that we grow up with.

LUCIE BONVALET is a writer, a visual artist and a teacher. Her writing (prose & poetry) can be found in Phantom Drift Limited, Juked, Jellyfish Review, Catapult, Puerto del Sol, 3AM, Hobart, Michigan Quarterly Review, Entropy and elsewhere. Originally from the Dordogne in France, she lives in Portland, Oregon.

ANNETTE COVRIGARU is a gay, bigender american-israeli writer and photographer. They are the author of Reality In Bloom (Ursus Americanus Press, 2020). Annette's prose and poetry have been supported by fellowships and residencies from Tin House, Lambda Literary and SAFTA. They live and roller skate in Brooklyn.

LIVIO FARALLO is co-editor of Slipstream magazine (est. 1981) and Professor of Biology at Niagara County Community College in Sanborn, New York. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Blue Collar Review, Biscuit Hill, Beatnik Cowboy, Rattle, Spillway, Main Street Rag, Sheila-Na-Gig, Spelunker Flophouse, and others.

HATTIE JEAN HAYES is a writer and comedian, originally from Missouri, who now lives in New York. Her poetry and short fiction have been published by Belletrist Magazine, Hobart, LEON Literary Review, The Puritan Magazine, and others. You can find her at hattiehayes.com online, and @QueenHattieJean on social media. She is working on her first novel.

MARIKEN HEIJWEGEN is an intuitive artist. With her paintings she wants to achieve that mental illnesses are normalized in society. She hopes that the viewer recognizes and finds herself in her paintings and that a dialogue arises. She paints fear, panic, panic attacks, dark times, loneliness and everything about mental breakdowns. It doesn't have to be beautiful, it has to touch something.

VIRGINIA LAKE has been a senior auditor at Portland State University for about seven years. She takes writing classes as they are available to auditors and literature classes, especially those focused on reading poetry, when they are not. At PSU she has studied poetry writing at all levels and also creative nonfiction. She has pursued writing poetry throughout this time. She lives in senior housing with Francis, her cat.

RICHARD LEISE writes and teaches outside Ithaca, NY. A Perry Morgan Fellow from Old Dominion University's MFA program, his fiction and poetry is featured in numerous publications. His debut novel, BEING DEAD, will be available from Brigids Gate Press fall, 2023. His unique literary work, "Johannes & Merritt" (Dark Lake Publishing), is available from Amazon. And his luminous love story, “Jennifer,” will be available from DreamPunk press January, 2023. Follow him on Twitter @coy_harlingen. 

DARLA MOTTRAM lives and writes in Oregon. She is the creator of Gaze, an online literary journal. Her work can be found online and in print. To find out more, visit darlamottram.net.

NIBERA (1992) is an interdisciplinary visual artist transcending the borders of fine art photography, graphic art, and design. Based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, her images simultaneously reveal the beauty of our world and the devastating impact of humankind.

Nibera contributed the collage featured on our cover page.

SOL PAZ KISTLER resides at the most isolated population center in the world. They have been previously published in Sienna Solstice, The Antihumanist, and Silver Operation. Sometimes they design for Solspar Studios.

RACHEL SCHRAMM lives in Cincinnati Ohio with her spouse, two sons, two cats, twenty six houseplants, and an elm tree. She holds an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design.

SWATI SUDARSAN is based in Oakland, CA (Ohlone Land). Swati received a Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry, and graduated from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in Fiction. Her work can be found in So to Speak, Dead Skunk, Let's Stab Caesar, and The Adroit Journal. She can be found on IG and Twitter as @booksnailmail.

MORGHEN TIDD (she/her) is a writer from Maine who received her MA in English from the University of Maine. She has stories in Heavy Feather Review, Overheard Magazine, Squawk Back, and Unfortunately Literary Magazine. Her debut short story collection girl thing is forthcoming from Long Day Press.

ZOSIA WIATR authored the chapbook Atlas of Negotiable Trajectories (Couch Press, 2015) and was recently published in FENCE. She lives in Portland, OR.

ISSUE 4

JEFF ALESSANDRELLI is most recently the author of the poetry collection Fur Not Light (Burnside Review Press, 2019). In addition to his own writing Alessandrelli also runs the literary record label/press Fonograf Editions. He’s at https://jeffalessandrelli.net/.

NATHAN WADE CARTER (he/him) is a queer, grey-a, non-binary poet, musician, and artist living in Portland, Oregon. His chapbook is ROYGBIV (Ursus Americanus Press 2017). His poetry can be found in Hobart, Fugue, Gramma Poetry, Poor Claudia, The Fem, and others. He is the editor and founder of SUSAN / The Journal. He writes and performs songs under the name Purrbot. He co-facilitates the generative writing salon Creation Island with Zulema Renee Summerfield. Find him online at nathanwadecarter.com.

ENDI BOGUE HARTIGAN’s series titled the seaweed sd treble clef  is forthcoming as a chapbook through Oxeye Press, and her third full-length book of poetry titled oh orchid o'clock is forthcoming from Omnidawn Publishing in Spring, 2023. She is author of two books of poetry − Pool [5 choruses] (2014, Omnidawn Publishing), which won the Omnidawn Open Prize, and One Sun Storm (2008, Center for Literary Publishing), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and her work has been published in numerous journals. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and more on her work is at endiboguehartigan.com.  

RODNEY KOENEKE’s most recent book of poems, Body & Glass, appeared from Wave Books in 2018. Other collections include Etruria (Wave, 2014), Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX, 2006), and Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003). He lives in Portland, Oregon.

JANICE LEE is a Korean-American writer, editor, publisher, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry, most recently: The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), Imagine a Death (The Operating System, 2021), and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022). She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the concept of han in Korean culture, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Contributing Editor at Fanzine, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. She can be found online at janicel.com.

ERIN PERRY lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

FLÁVIA ROCHA is a Brazilian poet, journalist and screenwriter. She has three books of poetry published in Brazil: A Casa Azul ao Meio-Dia (Travessa dos Editores, 2005), Quartos Habitáveis (Confrafia do Vento, 2009) and Um País (Confraria do Vento, 2015). She holds an M.F.A. in Writing from Columbia University and for 13 years was an editor for the New York based multimedia literary magazine Rattapallax, which focused on international literature. Her poems, translations and articles have appeared in a number of publications in the U.S., Brazil and other countries. She currently lives in Portland, OR.

ALIX JO RYAN is an artist and gardener whose work mulls the notion of the grid, both as an imposed framework which maps out individually owned plots of land through the project of settler colonialism (and more specifically the Homestead Act), and in the sense of quilting––organizing materials into patterns and stitching them together into entanglement. The work grapples with the imposition of a grid as an impossible yet normalized phenomenon, understanding the accumulation of property through violence to be constitutive of contemporary notions of freedom, open space, and wilderness. Alix’s work has been shown in Portland, OR and Berlin, DE, and was most recently featured in the December 2019 issue of Art in America, as shown at Conduit, a local artist-run art space. She can be found online at alixryan.com.

Alix contributed the painting featured on our cover page.

KEVIN SAMPSELL is the publisher of Future Tense Books in Portland, Oregon. His writing has appeared in Southwest Review, Radioactive Moat, Fairy Tale Review, Longreads, X-R-A-Y Magazine, Big Muddy, Interrupture, and elsewhere. A book of his collage art and poems, I Made an Accident, will be published at the end of this year by Clash Books. See more of his collage art at kevinsampsellcollages.tumblr.com.

ISSUE 3

HEATHER CHRISTLE is the author of the poetry collections The Difficult Farm; The Trees The Trees, which won the Believer Poetry Award; What Is Amazing; and Heliopause. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, London Review of Books, Poetry, and many other journals. She teaches creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. The Crying Book is her first book of nonfiction.

LUCA DIPIERRO is an animator and illustrator born in Italy and living in Portland, OR. His cut-out animations, filmed in stop motion with marionettes made out of paper and old book cloth, have been called “a perfect balance between creepy and charming” (The Huffington Post) and “sad and beautiful” (L Magazine). His work has been shown in theaters, galleries, and film festivals in the USA and Europe, and appears regularly on book and record covers. In 2014, Dipierro started touring with the show Paper Circus, a screening of his animations with a live soundtrack that he performs together with the band Father Murphy. Dipierro is the author of the art zine Das Ding, published by The Walk; the illustrated novel in cards A Wooden Leg (The Walk, 2014); the collection of short prose Biscotti Neri (Madcap, 2011); and numerous art booklets. He is currently working on his first animated feature, The Cadence.

Luca contributed the cut-out featured on our cover page.

BRANDON DOWNING’s collections of poetry include The Shirt Weapon (2002), Dark Brandon (2005), AT ME (2010) and, most recently, Mellow Actions (2013). In 2007 he released a feature-length collection of short digital films, Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics, while a monograph of his literary collages from 1996 to 2008, Lake Antiquity, was published by Fence Books in 2010.  He's recently completed a sixteen-book cycle based around Euripides' The Bacchae. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area in California, he has lived in New York City since 2001.

MEGAN FRESHLEY and her cat Milkshake live in Portland, OR, where she attended the Portland State University MFA program. Her poems and essays have appeared in Witch Craft Magazine, Susan the Journal, Portland Review, Poor Claudia, Stay Wild Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2013 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize and is writing her first book.

EMILY KENDAL FREY is the author of The Grief Performance and Sorrow Arrow. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is a teacher and therapist.

ALICE HALL is a working poet based in Buffalo, NY where they are pursuing a PhD at SUNY-Buffalo's Poetics Program. Previously, they taught writing and poetry in Portland, Oregon. Their poems can be found online at Dream Pop, DIAGRAM, Paint Bucket, and elsewhere.

T.S. LEONARD is an author and performer. His experimental fiction has appeared in Buckman Journal and Frontera, and in his ongoing series “The Best Worst Times.” Writing about culture and community, his essay work has been featured in magazines like Civilian Journal and The New Territory. He was a featured guest at the 4th Annual Mother Foucault's Airstream Poetry Festival. He shouts queer obscenities in the band Soft Butch. He lives in Portland, OR with his friends. 

TYLER MEESE’s fiction has appeared in Tin House Online, Midwestern Gothic, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He is completing a collection of stories about the Midwest and outer space. He answers every email sent to tylermeese@gmail.com.

ERIN PERRY lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

SPENCER POND is a queer nonbinary artist living in Portland, Oregon. They are a sleepy femme who makes photography, listens to synthy music, and writes the occasional poem. Their photographs have been shown at Blue Moon Camera and they are currently a curator of the Persistence Existence Festivals.

CATHERINE WAGNER's fifth book of poems, Of Course, is forthcoming from Fence next fall. Her previous collection, Nervous Device, appeared from City Lights in 2012.  She is a writer whose interests include labor, ecology, and connections between poetic form, social practices and embodied experience. Her work has been anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Best American Experimental Writing/BAX, Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK, Gurlesque, Poets on Teaching,  Best American Erotic Poems and elsewhere. Recent poems appear in Poetry and Chicago Review. Cathy is professor of English at Miami University, Ohio, where she is president of the AAUP Advocacy Chapter for academic labor advocacy and co-coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Research Collaborative.

ISSUE 2

JOHN BEER is the author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium Books, 2010), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, a chapbook, Lucinda (Spork Press, 2013), and the full-length verse novella of Lucinda, published by Canarium Books in 2016. He is also the editor of a selection of Robert Lax's poems, published by Wave Books in 2013. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

LUCIE BONVALET is a writer, a visual artist and a teacher. Her fiction and nonfiction can be found in Fugue, Oregon Humanities, Catapult, Cosmonauts Avenue, Hobart, Word Riot, and Shirley Magazine. Her drawings and paintings can be found on Instagram.

BROOKE BUDY is a painter, French teacher, wine tour guide, and real estate remodel specialist based in Portland, Oregon.

SHEILA DONG grew up in Tucson, AZ and attained an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. Their work has appeared in Arcturus, Moonsick Magazine, Menacing Hedge, and other places. Sheila's first chapbook, Moon Crumbs, is out now from Bottlecap Press.

ROB GRAY lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

A 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and nominee for a Stranger Genius Award, ROBERT LASHLEY has had poems published in such journals as Feminete, Seattle Review of Books, NAILED, Gramma, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, and The Cascadia Review. His work was also featured in Many Trails to the Summit, an anthology of Northwest form and lyric poetry, and It Was Written, an anthology of poetry inspired by hip hop. His full-length books include THE HOMEBOY SONGS (Small Doggies Press, 2014) and UP SOUTH (Small Doggies Press, 2017). His chapbook, THE GREEN RIVER VALLEY, will be out in March.

DAVID NAIMON is the co-author of Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing (Tin House Books) and the host of the radio broadcast and podcast Between the Covers. His writing has appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, VQR, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM and elsewhere, been cited in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing, and reprinted in the Pushcart Prize anthology and The Best Small Fictions.  

JAC NELSON is a multimedia poet living between the ancestral lands of the Nisqually people (at Puget Sound) and of the Očeti Šakówiŋ (at the Minnesota River). Their work begins with art and artist as ethical questions that emerge from inherited context: ancestry, language, land, trauma, coercion, and decision activate their aesthetic search for multigenerational healing and connection. Jac continues to learn about, engage with, and resist the ways they benefit from white supremacy originating in genocide, slavery, and other violences. Recent work was shown at Gay City in Seattle Wa, published in Black Warrior Review, Fanzine, Blackbox Manifold and Otoliths, and is forthcoming in soft surface. Gram them @jacxnelson

ERIN PERRY lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

ROB SCHLEGEL is the author of The Lesser Fields (Center for Literary Publishing 2009), selected by James Longenbach for the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and January Machine (Four Way Books 2014), selected by Stephanie Burt for the Grub Street National Book Prize. His third collection is In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps (University of Iowa Press 2019), selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the Iowa Poetry Prize. With the poets Daniel Poppick and Rawaan Alkhatib, he co-edits The Catenary Press. Most recently, he has taught at Whitman College, and in the MFA Program at Portland State University.

ROSE SWARTZ is a writer-photographer-painter-musician-carpenter living in Portland, Oregon. Her last chapbook, Panhandle, came out on Abandon Press (Nehalem, OR) in 2016. Most of her other recent work involves sheet rock and steel studs and is visible/invisible in various commercial buildings in the Portland area. Early next year, she plans to display a series of large-scale paintings based on Polaroid photos found at the Goodwill bins. Follow her film photography on Instagram: @roseswartz

ANNIE SWIDERSKI (b. late 20th century, California), is an artist and sentimental human who lives in the desert. In addition to maintaining a personal art practice she also runs the American Institute of Thoughts and Feelings, an experimental project based out of her home in Tucson. Recent solo presentations of her work include: POM---PALM (Williamson | Knight, Portland, OR; 2018), Brushing Out the Brood Mare's Tale (Nationale, Portland, OR; 2017), and the good the bad and the ugly (Open Gallery, Portland, OR; 2015). She's participated in group exhibitions across the US and Europe steadily since 2012, and in 2015 she received a degree from an institution. She continues to seek forms of legitimization in her life and practice as a means of survival and in hopes of impressing you, though she's primarily interested in sincerity, connection, and finding the heart of the matter.

Annie contributed fire flower (burning bush), the painting displayed on our cover page.

STACEY TRAN is a writer from Portland, OR. Her writing can be found in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, diaCRITICS, and others. She is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018; Black Ocean, 2019) and the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, community, identity. Stacey is currently based in Providence, RI, where she is a candidate in the MFA Literary Arts program at Brown University. www.staceytran.com

JENESSA VANZUTPHEN’s work has appeared or is forthcoming.

TYRONE WILLIAMS teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of several chapbooks and six books of poetry: c.c., On Spec, The Hero Project of the Century, Adventures of Pi, Howell and As Iz. A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving edited the anthology, Inciting Poetics (2019).

ISSUE 1

COLLEEN BURNER is a Midwestern-raised writer and artist, co-editor of Shirley Magazine, and Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient. Their work has appeared in Quaint Magazine, Permafrost, Black Candies: Gross and Unlikable, and Entropy.

DARCIE DENNIGAN is the author of four books, including The Parking Lot and other feral scenarios, out from Forklift Ohio in fall 2018.

DOMINIC DULIN is a multidisciplinary artist out of the Northeast Ohio Area, currently residing in Kent, Ohio. He tends to work in painting, sculpture, collage, and assemblages. Dominic is inspired and informed by imperfection, and more concretely, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. Dominic sees his work as a challenge to capitalism and the waste of consumerist culture and in his work he tries to reuse objects and fabrics such a culture would see as worthless and expendable trash.

ELLEINADART is a New Jersey based artist looking to spread her love of drawing, dreams, sketches, cats, and life. Her comics have been published in "Blocked: Stories from the World of Online Dating" by Little Red Bird. You can find more work on Instagram, Society6, Etsy, or at elleinadart.com.

CARL-CHRISTIAN ELZE, born in 1974, lives in Leipzig and writes poems, short stories, and plays. He studied biology and German studies at the University of Leipzig, and later creative writing at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut Leipzig. Recent awards for his work include the Joachim-Ringelnatz Prize (2015) and residencies at the Künstlerhaus Edenkoben (2017) and the Deutsche Studienzentrum in Venice (2016), where he wrote the poems for his forthcoming book langsames ermatten im labyrinth. Other recent books include, diese kleinen, in der luft hängenden, bergpredigenden gebilde: poems (Verlagshaus Berlin, 2016), and Oda und der ausgestopfte Vater (kreuzerbooks, 2018), a book of short stories about growing up with the animals at the Leipzig Zoo where his father was head veterinarian.

GENEVIEVE HUDSON is the author of A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018), a book on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018). Her writing has been published in Catapult, Hobart, Tin House online, Joyland, The Millions, Lit Hub, The Collagist, No Tokens, Bitch, The Rumpus, and other places. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program and artist residencies at the Dickinson House, Caldera Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center.

ALEXA MAL’s work has appeared in Whiskey Island, Heavy Feather Review and elsewhere. They received an MFA in poetry from Portland State University. They live in Cleveland, Ohio.

ERIN PERRY lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

CAROLINE WILCOX REUL is the translator of Wer lebt / Who Lives by Elisabeth Borchers (Tavern Books, 2017) and the current poetry editor for the Timberline Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the PEN Poetry Series, Tupelo Quarterly, Poetry International, Lunch Ticket, The Los Angeles Review and others.

YONI SHRIRA lives and works in Los Angeles. By day he is a cinematographer. By night he is not a photographer.

ED SKOOG is the author of three books of poems, most recently Run the Red Lights (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Harper's and elsewhere. He lives in Portland.

RODRIGO TOSCANO’s newest book of poetry is Explosion Rocks Springfield (Fence Books, 2016) His previous books include, Deck of Deeds, Collapsible Poetics Theater (a National Poetry Series selection), To Leveling Swerve, Platform, Partisans, and The Disparities.  His poetry has appeared in the anthologies Voices Without Borders, Diasporic Avant Gardes, Imagined Theatres, In the Criminal’s Cabinet, Earth Bound, and Best American Poetry. Toscano has received a New York State Fellowship in Poetry. He works for the Labor Institute in conjunction with the United Steelworkers, the National Institute for Environmental Health Science, Communication Workers of America, and National Day Laborers Organizing Network, working on educational / training projects that involve environmental and labor justice, health & safety culture transformation, and immigrant worker rights. Originally, from San Diego, and after 16 years, in Brooklyn, NY, Toscano now lives in New Orleans.

CONSUELO WISE grew up on the Lost Coast in Northern California.