Category: Poetry

Poems by Melanie Manuel

Melanie H. Manuel is a Filipina American poet. She attends SDSU for her MFA in poetry. She teaches for the Rhetoric and Writing Studies and English and Comparative Literature departments. Her work has been published by Third Iris Zine, North American Review, Grist: A Literary Journal of Arts, boats against the current, Los Angeles Review, Quillkeepers Press, and The Shore. She also has forthcoming work with minnesota review, Porkbelly Press, and Zone 3 Press. Her debut chapbook, in storyboard, is now out with Bottlecap Press.

Poems by Laura Villareal

Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving, (University of Wisconsin Press 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters’ John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Guernica, AGNI, among others.

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.

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.

INOPERABLE

Anna Antongiorgi(she/her) is a poet, choreographer, and dancer. She earned her BA in English and Theatre, Dance, and Media at Harvard, followed by an MFA in Poetry at the New School. Her poetry chapbook refinding the rules of gravity(Finishing Line Press, July 2021), was featured in Dance Magazine and included in Flight Path Dance Project’s curriculum. Her original choreopoem, SUNDAY, was presented at the TADA! Theater in October 2022. Individual poems of hers have been featured in The Inquisitive Eater and Big Windows Review. She lives in Brooklyn, works as a freelance choreographer, and dances with the Brooklyn Ballet. You can find her on instagram, @annaantongiorgi.

DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE

Brenna Womer (she/they) is a queer, childfree, Latine prose writer and poet. She is the author of Unbrained (FlowerSong Press, 2023), Honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and two chapbooks. Her writing across genres has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, teaching in the MFA program at California State University, Fresno.

Legion

Katherine Indermaur is the author of ‘I|I’ (Seneca Review Books), winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and the 2023 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and two chapbooks. She serves as an editor for Sugar House Review. Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, Frontier Poetry, the Journal, New Delta Review, Ninth Letter, the Normal School, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

As the Sun Goes Down

Javier Sandoval grew up in the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico and studied under Forrest Gander and John Wideman at Brown University. He now teaches at the University of Alabama where he also served as Poetry Editor of Black Warrior Review. His work has appeared in Narrative, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Massachusetts Review, and Southeast Review among others, and he’s been a finalist for awards from Iowa Review, Pinch, and Ninth Letter, and the recipient of Frontier Poetry’s Global Poetry Prize and swamp pink’s Indigenous Writers Award. His chapbook, Blue Moon Looming, was recently reviewed by National Book Award nominee José Olivarez as ‘poetry for the unruly, and yes, the brilliant among us.’ But mostly, he loves to smoke on the stoop with his lady.

The Drive Home

Sonya Lara is a biracial Mexican American writer. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in Poetry from Virginia Tech. She was accepted for the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop with Leila Chatti, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, the Hambidge Creative Residency Program, the Peter Bullough Foundation Residency, the Blue Mountain Center Residency, the Good Hart Artist Residency, and the Shenandoah National Park Artist-in-Residence Residency. She is the recipient of the Studios Fellowship through The Studios at MASS MoCA. Additionally, she was a finalist for the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship and the Outpost Residency Fellowship, and was shortlisted for The Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award and runner-up in Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Her work appeared or is forthcoming in Frontier, The Pinch, X-R-A-Y Lit, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, AGNI, The Los Angeles Review, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she is the Poetry Editor for Minerva Rising and an Editor-at-Large for Cleaver Magazine. Previously, she was the Managing Editor for The New River, the Managing Editor of the minnesota review, and an Associate Fiction Editor for The Madison Review. Additionally, she has served as a juror for contests and residencies, such as the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Peter Bullough Foundation Residency, and the Blue Mountain Center Residency. For more information, visit www.sonyalara.com.