Kathleen Hellen is the recipient of the James Still Award, the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her debut collection Umberto’s Night won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Hellen is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Meet Me at the Bottom, and two chapbooks.
D.M. Black is a Scottish writer and retired Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society. His translation and commentary on Dante’s Paradiso is due out in the NYRB Classics series in August 2025. A collection of psychoanalytic papers, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective, was published in 2024.
Mary Buchinger, whose recent books include Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, Honors, 2024 Massachusetts Book Award), and The Book of Shores (2024) and Virology (2022), both from Lily Poetry Review Books, is the winner of the 2024 Elyse Wolf/Slate Roof Chapbook Prize. She volunteered for Peace Corps in Ecuador, served on the New England Poetry Club board for many years, and teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. Her poetry appears in AGNI, Plume, Salamander, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, and elsewhere.
Ann Shenfield works across a number of media. Her animated films have received various international honors including selection in the Berlin Film Festival. Her poetry has also received numerous awards including the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her poetry book A Treatment (Upswell Publishing) was listed in The Age Best Books of 2023. Last year, she completed a four-year program of clinical and theoretical studies at the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis, where she is currently a member.
Aicha Bint Yusif grew up in the Lower Galile. Aicha عايشَة means “she lives” in Arabic. She holds a degree in English literature and honors interdisciplinary program and is currently studying medicine. She mainly writes poems, and her works appear in Rusted Radishes (Beirut) and World Literature Today (NYC), among others. She is passionate about languages, embroidery, and running.
Ali Asadollahi, an award-winning Iranian poet, is the author of six Persian poetry books. Asadollahi is a permanent member and the former secretary of the Iranian Writers’ Association (founded in 1968). His poems and translations are published/forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Consequence, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Guernica Editions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Los Angeles Review, and others.
Charles Byrne is a writer and teacher in San Francisco with poems published or forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, New American Writing, and 45th Parallel. He has read submissions for RHINO Poetry and Autumn House Press.
Nancy Kuhl is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently On Hysteria (2022) and Granite (2021). She has studied psychoanalysis as a research fellow at the Western New England Institute of Psychoanalysis. She is the curator of poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Sara Shaheen was born in Haifa in May 1996 and raised between the mountains of the Galilee in Northern Occupied Palestine, holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and is currently doing her clinical internship in Jerusalem, where she lives today. Her passion for writing poetry started when she was ten, and she’s been writing ever since.
Sara Shaheen was born in Haifa in May 1996 and raised between the mountains of the Galilee in Northern Occupied Palestine, holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and is currently doing her clinical internship in Jerusalem, where she lives today. Her passion for writing poetry started when she was ten, and she’s been writing ever since.
Katherine J. Williams, art therapist and clinical psychologist, was the director of the Art Therapy Program at George Washington University, where she is now associate professor emerita. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies such as Poet Lore, Passager, the Northern Virginia Review, 3rd Wednesday, the Delmarva Review, the Broadkill Review, the Widows’ Handbook, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. Her first poetry collection, Still Life, was published in 2022. Some of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Adrienne Pilon is a writer, editor, teacher, and booster of literary magazines. Recent work appears in The Tiger Moth Review, Susurrus, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, and elsewhere.
Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo is a Nigerian poet and the author of the micro-chapbook Sidiratul Muntaha (Ghost City Press, 2022). His work has been published or is forthcoming at Ambit magazine, Southern Humanities Review, Obsidian: Literature and Art in the African Diaspora, Oxford Review of Books, Stand magazine, Roanoke Review, Louisiana Literature, Olongo Africa, the Citron Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthology. Fasasi explores trans-Mediterranean migration, loss, sex trafficking, and, recently, transatlantic slave trade.
Laine Derr holds an MFA from Northern Arizona University and has published interviews with Carl Phillips, Ross Gay, Ted Kooser, and Robert Pinsky. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming from J Journal, Full Bleed + The Phillips Collection, ZYZZYVA, Portland Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.
Stephanie Niu is a poet and digital storyteller from Marietta, Georgia. She is the author of Survived By, winner of the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, and She Has Dreamt Again of Water, winner of the 2021 Diode Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Waxwing, Ecotone, the Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She is currently completing a Fulbright scholarship on immigration and labor history on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.
Diane Raptosh’s collection American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award in poetry. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013–2016). In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. She teaches literature and creative writing and codirects the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at the College of Idaho. Her newest chapbook, Hand Signs from Eternity’s Yurt, was published in June 2022 (Kelsay Books).
Kim Curts Mattheussens studied German and English literature at Ball State University, the Katholische Universität Eichstätt, and Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität Münster, and creative writing at the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University. She is an alum of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon. Her work is published or forthcoming in the Athena Review, Punt Volat, Southword Literary Journal, and the Common, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.
Diane Raptosh teaches creative writing and co-directs the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at the College of Idaho. Her eighth book, Hand Signs from Eternity’s Yurt, was published by Kelsay Books in June 2022. Her collection American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press) was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in poetry. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as Boise Poet Laureate (2013) and Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013–2016). In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence.
Eugene Mahon, MD, is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He has published four books—Such Stuff as Dreams, A Psychoanalytic Odyssey, Rensal the Redbit, and Bone Shop of the Heart—and numerous articles on psychoanalysis. He practices in New York City.
Terri Greco’s poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, North Carolina Literary Review, San Pedro River Review, Jacar Press, and Main Street Rag. She was the recipient of a James Applewhite Poetry Prize (Honorable Mention, 2020) and an honorable mention in Kakalak (Main Street Rag, 2019). She was a James Applewhite semifinalist (2022). She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.