Good With Animals

Danielle Cadena Deulen is the author of four books. Her most recent poetry collection is Desire Museum (BOA Editions, 2023). Her previous books include Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us,which won the Barrow Street Book Contest; The Riots, which won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award; and which won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award. She served as a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She has been the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. She is co-creator and host of “Lit from the Basement,” a literary podcast. She teaches for the graduate creative writing program at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her website is danielledeulen.net.




Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife and Two-Headed Nightingale, and co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, an anthology of essays. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, her awards include an NEA fellowship, the Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize, among others. Shara’s poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, and IMAGE, and have been included in the Pushcart and Best American Poetry anthologies. She is Consulting Editor for Acre Books.

Robert Walikis is a writer, playwright, poet, and songwriter. His short stories “Terrafir” and “Peak Child” were semifinalists for the North American Review‘s 2023 and 2022 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prizes. His very short story “Funerary Rumors” was second runner-up for PRISM International‘s 2022 Grouse Grind Lit Prize for V Short Forms. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Post Road, PRISM International, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. Rob lives in Maine with his wife-partner-writer Diana Mullins. He makes maps and tells stories. Read more at www.robertwalikis.com.

Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn is a Senior Features Editor at The Rumpus. Her debut essay collection, A Fish Growing Lungs (2020), was a finalist for the Believer Awards in nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Kenyon Writers’ Workshop, and she teaches creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn is a Senior Features Editor at The Rumpus. Her debut essay collection, A Fish Growing Lungs (2020), was a finalist for the Believer Awards in nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Kenyon Writers’ Workshop, and she teaches creative writing at Warren Wilson College.