Alejandro de Acosta
Alejandro is a teacher, writer, and translator, still in no particular order. His most recent teaching includes private tutoring in literature and philosophy. His most recent writing includes a manuscript of poems and a novel, finally. His most recent translations include poems by Macedonio Fernández, Alberto Laiseca, and Paulo de Jolly. Alejandro lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Stephanie Adams-Santos
Stephanie is a Guatemalan-American artist and writer whose work spans poetry, prose, screenwriting, and illustration. Often grappling with themes of strangeness and belonging, their work reflects a fascination with the weird, numinous and primal forces that shape inner life. They are the author of several poetry collections and chapbooks, including DREAM OF XIBALBA (selected by Jericho Brown as winner of the 2021 Orison Poetry Prize; finalist for the Oregon Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award) and SWARM QUEEN'S CROWN (finalist for a Lambda Literary Award). Stephanie served as Staff Writer and Story Editor on the television anthology horror series TWO SENTENCE HORROR STORIES (Netflix). In addition to their literary work, Stephanie is creating an original tarot deck that blends poetry, animism, and ancestral magic.
Jess Arndt
Jess is a transgenre writer seeking protuberant forms. Their debut story collection Large Animals (Catapult/Cipher) was shortlisted for the California Book Prize and their writing has recently surfaced in Conjunctions, Granta, LARB, Fence, BOMB, and in performance collaborations with The Knife. They are a co-founder of the prose experiment, New Herring Press, and when not teaching at University of Idaho, Moscow, live off-grid on an island in Washington State.
Jennifer S. Cheng
Jennifer S. Cheng’s work includes poetry, lyric essay, and image-text forms, exploring immigrant home-building, shadow poetics, and the interior wilderness. Her hybrid book MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS (2018) was selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Award and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018.” She is also the author of HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, and INVOCATION: AN ESSAY, an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. A former National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has received awards and fellowships from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, MacDowell, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she lives in San Francisco.
Matt Hart
Matt Hart is the author of FAMILIAR (Pickpocket Books 2022) and nine other books of poems. Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including American Poetry Review, Big Bell, Conduit, jubilat, Kenyon Review, Lungfull!, and POETRY, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a grant from The Shifting Foundation, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He was a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety from 1993-2019. Currently, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, co-edits the journal Sôrdəd and plays in the band NEVERNEW.
Sara Jaffe
Sara is a Portland, OR-based writer, educator, and musician. She holds a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She's the author of a novel, Dryland (Tin House, 2015) and a short story collection Hurricane Envy (Rescue Press, 2025), as well as short stories, essays, and criticism that have appeared in publications including NOON, Fence, BOMB, The Offing, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Though mostly a writer of fiction, Sara is also interested in the generative crossings between fiction and other prose genres. In addition to teaching in the LRCW MFA, she currently works toward justice in Palestine with Jewish Voice for Peace.
- Dryland (Tin House)
LaTanya McQueen
LaTanya McQueen is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment of the Arts (2022 Fellowship in Prose) and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is the author of two books—the essay collection And It Begins Like This (Black Lawrence Press, 2017) and the novel When the Reckoning Comes (Harper Perennial, 2021). Her stories and essays have been published in West Branch, TriQuarterly, Pleaides, New Ohio Review, The Arkansas International, The Florida Review, Bennington Review, Passages North, Black Warrior Review, Fourteen Hills, The North American Review, Ninth Letter, New Orleans Review, Indiana Review, and other journals. She received her MFA from Emerson College, her PhD from the University of Missouri, was the 2017-2018 Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow at Cornell College, and currently is an Assistant Professor of English-Creative Writing and African American Studies at Coe College. She is also the CNF Editor for Gigantic Sequins, the Associate Editor for Story Magazine, and is on the board for Iowa City’s UNESCO City of Literature.
Megan Milks
Megan Milks is the author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body (Feminist Press, 2021), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction, and Slug and Other Stories (Feminist Press, 2021), a revised second edition of their award-winning collection Kill Marguerite. Their personal history of early online music fandom, Tori Amos Bootleg Webring, was published in 2021 as part of Instar Books’ Remember the Internet series. With Marisa Crawford, they co-edited the anthology We Are the Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Artwork from Grown-Up Readers (Chicago Review Press, 2021); with KJ Cerankowski, they co-edited the academic volume Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge, 2014; second edition forthcoming 2024). Their essays and criticism have been published in The New York Times, 4Columns, Bookforum, and many other venues. They live in Brooklyn and teach writing at The New School.
Lara Mimosa Montes
Lara is a writer, editor, and teaching artist whose practices span the fields of alternative publishing and experimental writing. She is the author of THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020) and The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press, 2016). Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Futurepoem, Fence, The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, and elsewhere. In 2018, she was awarded a CantoMundo Fellowship as well as a McKnight Fellowship in Poetry. She teaches in XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement Master’s program at NYU, and divides her time between Minneapolis and New York. Her writing practice gravitates toward processes and phenomena that exhibit change or transformation as their defining features. To learn more, visit Lara's website.
Poupeh Missaghi
Poupeh Missaghi is an Assistant Professor in Literary Arts and Studies at the English Department of the University of Denver. She is a creative writer, scholar, editor, and translator (between English and Persian). Her debut novel trans(re)lating house one was published in 2020 (Coffee House Press) and her translation of Nasim Marashi’s novel I’ll Be Strong for You in 2021 (Astra House). Her second book Sound Museum is forthcoming in 2024 (Coffee House Press). She has a PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver; an MA in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD; and an MA in Translation Studies and a BA in Translation Practice from Azad University, Tehran. She also teaches at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, and Pacific Northwest College of Arts, Portland, OR.
- Trans(re)lating House One (Coffee House Press)
Vi Khi Nao
Vi Khi is the author of many books and is known for her work spanning poetry, fiction, play, film, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her forthcoming novel, The Italian Letters, is scheduled for publication by Melville House in 2024. In the same year, she will release a co-authored manuscript titled, The Six Tones of Water with Sun Yung Shin, through Ricochet. Recognized as a former Black Mountain Institute fellow, Vi Khi Nao received the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022.
Jay Ponteri
Jay Ponteri directed the creative writing program at Marylhurst University from 2008-2018 and is now the program head of PNCA’s Low-Residency Creative Writing program. His book of creative nonfiction Someone Told Me has just been published by Widow+Orphan House. He’s also the author of Darkmouth Inside Me (Future Tense Books, 2014) and Wedlocked (Hawthorne Books, 2013), which received an Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Two of Ponteri’s essays, “Listen to this” and “On Navel Gazing” have earned “Notable Mentions” in Best American Essay Anthologies. His work has also appeared in many literary journals. While teaching at Marylhurst, Ponteri was twice awarded the Excellence in Teaching & Service Award. In 2007, Ponteri founded Show:Tell, The Workshop for Teen Artist and Writers, now part of summer programming at Portland's Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC.org) on whose Resource Council he serves. He teaches memoir classes at Literary Arts. He lives with his son Oscar and Oscar's pug MO.
- Someone Told Me
- Wedlocked (Hawthorne Books)
- On Richard Linklater’s Boyhood
- What Jay Ponteri Told Me
- Making an Echo
Emilly Prado
Emilly Prado is an award-winning author and journalist, educator, and DJ living in Portland, Oregon. Her debut essay collection, Funeral for Flaca, was a winner of a 2022 Pacific Northwest Book Award and a 2021 bronze winner of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in Essays, amongst other honors. Her multimedia journalism and essays have appeared in 30+ publications including NPR, Marie Claire, and Eater. She has earned fellowships in nonfiction from the 2023 Sewanee Writers Conference, journalism from the 2018 Emerging Journalists, Community Stories fellowship (awarded in partnership with Oregon Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Pulitzer Prizes), and a Blackburn Fellowship from Randolph College where she received her MFA. Emilly has worked with students of all ages in settings such as public high schools, universities, MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility, and literary organizations including Tin House, Lighthouse, Corporeal Writing, Literary Arts, and the Independent Publishing Resource Center. She is a Tin House and Las Dos Brujas alum, and a co-founder of BIPOC arts non-profit Portland in Color and Latiné DJ collective Noche Libre.
Brandon Shimoda
Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently The Grave on the Wall (City Lights), which received the PEN Open Book Award. He has three books forthcoming: Hydra Medusa (poetry and prose, Nightboat, 2023), The Afterlife Is Letting Go (City Lights, 2024), a book of nonfiction on the ongoing afterlife of Japanese American incarceration, and, with the poet Brynn Saito, an anthology of poetry on JA incarceration, written by descendants of the concentration camps (Haymarket, 2025), titled The Gates of Memory.
Dao Strom
Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions), winner of the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (Hanoi: AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books). She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship, and has received support also from RACC, Oregon Arts Commission, NEA, and others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Strom was born in Vietnam and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collaborative art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and de-canon.
- Redux
- Instrument / Traveler’s Ode
- You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else
- The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys
- We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People
- East/West
- de-canon
Asiya Wadud
Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, day pulls down the sky/ a filament in gold leaf (written collaboratively with Okwui Okpokwasili), Syncope and the forthcoming No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Asiya is a 2019-2020 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) artist-in-residence and a 2020 Danspace Project PLATFORM writer-in-residence. Her work has been presented at LMCC’s River To River: Four Voices, Mount Tremper Arts, and Danspace Project and recent writing appears in e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine, Social Text Journal, FENCE, Makhzin, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School.
- Syncope
- Crosslight for Youngbird
- “L” & “the back door or the lone coast”
- attention as a form of ethics (excerpt)
- the order was in the hour of worship
- Straight Lines, Knots, Quarter Turns — Repeat
- Burnished, Etched, Emblazoned (interview)
- I reckon, a latitude (Bodies Built for Game, Univ. of Nebraska Press)
- Nearly Any Two Things Can Cohere (BOMB Magazine)