Crystal Boys in Taipei
Li Zhuang is a PhD candidate of Creative Writing at Florida State University. In 2019, Li graduated with an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Pleiades, The Common, Denver Quarterly, The Madison Review, and The Collapsar, etc. She is the winner of 2025 SAMLA Graduate Student Creative Writing Award, a finalist for the 2025 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize and a runner up for Grist’s ProForma contest. Her poetry chapbook But Octopi Don’t Sing, published in March 2026, was selected as the runner-up for the Purple Ink Press’s Chapbook Contest by Chen Chen. Li is working on her debut novel about Chinese lesbian romantic relationships in a futuristic New York City, where memories can be altered through mnemonic navigation machines.
Testimonial Grids
Elisávet Makridis, a US-born great-granddaughter of Pontic Greek refugees, is a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominated cross-disciplinary poet and educator. Recipient of the Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award, Elisávet earned an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University where she taught for four years as a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English. Her writing has received multiple awards and honors, selected most recently as a finalist for RHINO Poetry’s 2026 Founders’ Prize and Black Warrior Review’s inaugural Experimental Forms Contest and named a semifinalist for the Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition (Black Lawrence Press). A 2026 McCormack (formerly Tin House) Winter Online Workshop Participant, Elisávet’s work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Canthius, amongst others. Her poetics aim to calibrate otherwise ways of communing with infinite ancestral beloveds across a lineage of forced displacement, refugeehood, and genocide to metabolize a wail that predates her body. Find her online at elisavetmakridis.com.
Polaroid Stories
London-based artist Tash Kahn has a multi-faceted practice that merges painting, Polaroids and sculpture. Working intuitively, images are arrived at spontaneously and chance encounters are embraced through colour, composition and form. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions in London, Sussex and New York. She also works as a freelance editor.
Cathy Rose is a San Francisco, CA writer whose stories have appeared in Sluice, Hunger Mountain, Greensboro Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Fourteen Hills and elsewhere, and in fiction and creative nonfiction anthologies. She holds an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and is a practicing psychologist.
Could be the last time
Robin LaMer Rahija is the author of Inside Out Egg (Variant Lit 2024). She received her MFA from the University of Kentucky, where she is an administrative assistant in the Department of English. Her poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, FENCE, Spoon River Review, and elsewhere.
Soulmate As a Verb by Kelsey L. Smoot
Reviewed by Bess Cooley | Mar 28, 2026 Dopamine Books, February 2026 Paperback, 120 pages, $16.95 I had the pleasure of hearing Kelsey L. Smoot read his work in a bookstore in the Atlanta area last spring. The room was small, quiet but crowded—in that way poetry readings are meant to be. Smoot had his audience, and […]
We Open on a Field
Michaela Brown is a Midwest transplant currently teaching English in Vigo, Spain. She is the first place recipient of the 2020 Marjorie Stover Short Story Prize and has previously been published in Unstamatic Magazine, Gone Lawn, The Daily Drunk, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @mikienbrown.
Parable of Sparrow and Crocodile
Originally from the DC area, Matthew Moniz has poems appearing in or forthcoming from The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Crab Orchard Review, Meridian, Tupelo Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, and minnesota review. His work has been awarded Poetry by the Sea’s Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Crown Contest prize and the SCMLA Poetry Prize.
MY GRANDMOTHER AFTER KOREA
Arah Ko is a writer from Hawai’i and the author of Brine Orchid (YesYes Books 2025) and Animal Logic (Bull City Press 2025). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Arah edits at Surging Tide Magazine and is pursuing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Cincinnati. Catch her at arahko.com.
One Winter in Vermont
Emily Light is a poet, educator, and mother living in northern New Jersey. Her poetry can be found in such journals as Inch, Salt Hill, Cherry Tree, Cumberland River Review, and RHINO, among others.
How to Love the Natural Sciences
Based in West Texas, Jennifer Loyd is a poet, translator, and a former editor for Copper Nickel, West Branch, and Sycamore Review. For her poetry exploring the archives of Rachel Carson, she has received a Stadler Fellowship, as well as research grants from Purdue University, where she earned an MFA. Her poems and prose, which explore the intersection between private voice and public narratives, appear in Best New Poets, The Southern Review, The Rumpus, Swamp Pink, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.