When a Child Wakes by Abdulmueed Balogun
Abdulmueed Balogun is a Nigerian poet and an undergrad at the University of Ibadan. He is a 2021 HUES Foundation Scholar and a poetry editor at the Global Youth Review.
The Way of It by Ashley Renselaer
Ashley Renselaer is an author, a poet, and an artist from Culver City, California, who attends high school at Windward School.
CRAZIES by Naomi Janowitz
Naomi Janowitz is a graduate of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology. She teaches Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her most recent book is Acts of Interpretation: Ancient Semiotic Ideologies and their Modern Echoes, forthcoming from De Gruyter. She has published poetry in Response and From the Depths.
THERE IS MORE TO LIFE, THERE IS MORE, by Ayşe Tekşen
Ayşe Tekşen lives in Ankara, Turkey, where she works as a research assistant at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University. Her work has been included in Brickplight, the Willow Literary Magazine, Fearsome Critters, Susan, the Broke Bohemian, the Remembered Arts Journal, Terror House Magazine, Shoe Music Press, Havik: Las Positas College Anthology, Deep Overstock, Lavender Review, Voice of Eve, the Courtship of Winds, Mojave Heart Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, Rigorous, Rabid Oak, the Thieving Magpie, Headway Quarterly, the Roadrunner Review, Helen: A Literary Magazine, the Ilanot Review, and Pensive.
CENTO: I KNOW YOU’RE TIRED, BUT COME. THIS IS THE WAY by D. Dina Friedman
D. Dina Friedman has published widely in literary journals and received two Pushcart Prize nominations for poetry and fiction. She is the author of one book of poetry, Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press), and two young adult novels, Escaping into the Night (Simon & Schuster BYR) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar, Straus and Giroux BYR). She has an MFA from Lesley University and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
LIKE LIVING IN AN EPILOGUE by Linda Hillringhouse
Linda Hillringhouse holds an MFA from Columbia University. She was a first-place winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (2014), a second-place winner of Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (2012), and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2020). Her work has appeared in Lips, New Ohio Review, Paterson Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Macdowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her recent book of poetry, The Things I Didn’t Know to Wish for (New York Quarterly Press) was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize in 2021.
2020 VISION by Gail Griffin
Gail Griffin is the author of four books of nonfiction, most recently Grief’s Country: A Memoir in Pieces, named a Michigan Notable Book, and “The Events of October:” Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus. Her essays, poems, and flash nonfiction have appeared widely and been honored in publications including Southern Review, Fourth Genre, Missouri Review, and New Ohio Review. A native of Detroit, she spent a long career teaching literature, writing, and women’s studies at Kalamazoo College, where she won awards for both teaching and creative/scholarly work. She is at work on a collection of personal essays on confronting whiteness; she is also digging through a stack of paper to see if a poetry collection is hiding there. From her vantage point in southwestern Michigan, she studies, and mourns, the cracking open of America and dreams of her next trip to the shore of a Great Lake.
SMOKE by Kelly Cressio-Moeller
Kelly Cressio-Moeller is a poet and visual artist. Her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, Guesthouse, North American Review, Poet Lore, Radar Poetry, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Water~Stone Review, and ZYZZYVA among others. Her debut collection, Shade of Blue Trees, is forthcoming from Two Sylvias Press. She is an associate editor at Glass Lyre Press.
LOVE POEM IN THE SHAPE OF A DREAM by Bobby Martinez
Bobby Martinez, half Mexican and half Portuguese, is an architect who lives in San Francisco and writes poems when he doesn’t feel any alternative. For the last fifteen years, he has enjoyed reading his poetry at Billy and Radical Faerie Gatherings, as well as at the retreats of his sangha. His poems have appeared in Christopher Street and in an anthology of contemporary Luso-American literature.
PROTESTATION by Daisy Bassen
Daisy Bassen is a poet and practicing psychiatrist who graduated from Princeton University’s creative writing program and completed her medical training at the University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Oberon, McSweeney’s, The Sow’s Ear, and [PANK] as well as multiple other journals. She was the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest, and the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. She was doubly nominated for the 2019 Best of the Net anthology and for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.
PERHAPS by Aremu Adams Adebesi
Aremu Adams Adebisi is a North-Central Nigerian writer and economist. In 2019, he was nominated for Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2019 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. His work of poetry, “Force Mechanism,” was adapted into Lucent Dreaming’s first theatrical performance in Wales. He has works published in Newfound Magazine, Lucky Jefferson, and elsewhere. He served as a mentor for SprinNG Fellowship and a panelist for the Gloria Anzaldua Prize. He edits poetry for ARTmosterrific, facilitates Transcendence Poetry Masterclass, and curates the newsletter Poetry Weekly on Substack.
OTHERING by Aremu Adams Adebesi
Aremu Adams Adebisi is a North-Central Nigerian writer and economist. In 2019, he was nominated for Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2019 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. His work of poetry, “Force Mechanism,” was adapted into Lucent Dreaming’s first theatrical performance in Wales. He has works published in Newfound Magazine, Lucky Jefferson, and elsewhere. He served as a mentor for SprinNG Fellowship and a panelist for the Gloria Anzaldua Prize. He edits poetry for ARTmosterrific, facilitates Transcendence Poetry Masterclass, and curates the newsletter Poetry Weekly on Substack.
THE POWER IS IN YOUR PULSE by Paula Coomer
Paula Coomer spent most of her childhood in the industrial Ohio River town of New Albany, Indiana. The daughter of more than two hundred years of Kentucky Appalachian farmers, she moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1978. She has been a migrant farm laborer, a waitress, a bean sorter in a cannery, a cosmetics saleswoman, a federal officer, a nurse, and a university writing instructor. Her essays, short fiction, and poetry have appeared in Gargoyle, Ascent, and The Raven Chronicles, among others.
THE WITNESSES by Margarita Serafimova
Margarita Serafimova is the winner of the 2020 Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award and a 2020 Pushcart nominee. She has four collections in Bulgarian and a chapbook, A Surgery of A Star (Staring Problem Press). Her chapbook, En Tîm (Wilderness) (San Francisco University Poetry Center), and a full-length collection, A White Boat and Foam (Interstellar Flight Press), are forthcoming. Her work appears widely, including in the Nashville Review, LIT, Agenda Poetry, Poetry South, Botticelli, London Grip, Steam Ticket Literary Journal, Waxwing, A-Minor, Trafika Europe, Noble/ Gas Qtrly, Obra/Artifact, great weather for Media, Origins, and Nixes Mate Review.
SHELTER by Nan Cohen
Nan Cohen is the author of two books of poetry, Rope Bridge and Unfinished City. The recipient of a Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and an NEA Literature Fellowship, she lives in Los Angeles and codirects the poetry programs of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
LOVE IN PANDEMIC TIMES by Galit Hasan-Rokem
Galit Hasan-Rokem is professor emerita of Hebrew literature and folklore research at the Hebrew University. In addition to many scholarly books and articles, she has published three poetry volumes in Hebrew and several poetry translations of major Swedish poets into Hebrew. She is also co-editor of The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present and cultural editor at the Palestine-Israel Journal.
WORKING AT HOME, DAY 5 by Amy Miller
Amy Miller’s full-length poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Her writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. She lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.
IMPOSSIBLE BOTTLE by Marc Alan Di Martino
Marc Alan Di Martino is a Pushcart-nominated poet and author of the collection Unburial (Kelsay Books, 2019). His work appears in Rattle, Baltimore Review, Palette Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, Matador Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and many other journals and anthologies. New work is forthcoming in Tinderbox, Free Inquiry, and First Things. His second collection, Still Life with City, will be published by Pski’s Porch in 2020. He lives in Italy.
SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT by Jeneva Stone
Jeneva Stone is the author of Monster, a mixed genre collection. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell and Millay Colonies. Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Waxwing, Scoundrel Time, and APR, with work forthcoming in New England Review.
NEW YORK by Eugene Mahon
Eugene Mahon, MD, is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He has published three books—A Psychoanalytic Odyssey, Rensal the Redbit, and Boneshop of the Heart—and numerous articles on psychoanalysis. He practices in New York City.
FOUND QUARANTINE ODE ON FB by Jeffrey Thomson
Jeffrey Thomson’s most recent book is Half/Life: New and Selected Poems from Alice James Books. He is professor of creative writing at University of Maine, Farmington.
THE PLANTS ARE HAPPY by Kate Angus
Kate Angus’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Indiana Review, Court Green, Gulf Coast, The Atlantic´s online Object Lessons series, The Washington Post, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day feature. She is the recipient of an A Room of Her Own Foundation Orlando award and an Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Sozopol Seminar fellowship, as well as residencies from the BAU Institute, the Betsy Hotel’s Writer’s Room and Interlochen Arts Academy (writer in residence). Angus is the author of So Late to the Party (Negative Capability Books) and the founding editor of Augury Books. Born and raised in Michigan, she currently lives in New York.
SLOW FUSE OF THE POSSIBLE: ON POETRY & PSYCHOANALYSIS by Kate Daniels
Kate Daniels is the Edwin Mims Professor of English and director of creative writing at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including In the Months of My Son’s Recovery (May 2019). A graduate of the New Directions program at the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis, she has been a member of the writing faculty there for a decade. She lives in Nashville.
POWER FAILURE by Eugene Mahon
Eugene Mahon, MD, is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He has published three books —A Psychoanalytic Odyssey, Rensal the Redbit, and Boneshop of the Heart—and numerous articles on psychoanalysis. He practices in New York City.
SACRED by Abraham Velazquez, Jr.
Abraham Velazquez Jr. is a youth worker at the Brotherhood/Sister Sol (Bro/Sis), an organization in Harlem that provides comprehensive, holistic, and long-term support services to youth who range in age from eight to twenty-two. He is also a cofounder of the Hip-Hop and poetry collective the Peace Poets, sharing art which responds to social and political crisis in over forty countries. Abraham earned his master of arts in educational theatre at New York University, where he studied theatre of the oppressed with Julian Boal, Barbara Santos, and Sanjoy Ganguly. In 2015, Abraham released his first solo album, A South Bronx Tale, engineered by Grammy Award recipient Mikaelin “Blue” Bluespruce.