Contributors
Poetry
Carmen Calatayud is the daughter of immigrants: a Spanish father and Irish mother. Her book, In the Company of Spirits, was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist. Her second poetry book, This Tangled Body, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press, in conjunction with Letras Latinas, in June 2024.
Robin Carstensen's chapbook In the Temple of Shining Mercy was awarded first place by Iron Horse Literary Press when it was published in 2017. Her poetry and prose have been recently published with Lamar Press, Jacar Press, FlowerSong Press, and many more. She coordinates the creative writing program at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where she also works with students as senior executive editor for The Windward Review: Literary Journal of the South Texas Coastal Bend.
Originally from the Rio Grande Valley, Alfredo Castillo is 29 years old and resides in San Antonio, Texas. He is a graduate of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and works in finance for an investment firm. In his downtime, he likes to practice piano and enjoys staying active.
PW Covington writes in the tradition of the North American highway. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Covington has performed their poetry from coast to coast. PW lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they have worked on film and television productions such as Better Call Saul and The Cleaning Lady.
Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts. His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, for which he will have his debut chapbook, This Is My Body, published in 2025. Currently, he serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow and lives in San Antonio, Texas.
Juan Flores Jr. is a Marine Corps veteran, writer, and coffee enthusiast—a favorite pastime being a strong cup of black coffee paired with a good book. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and is currently trying to defeat the final boss of the writer’s procrastination game.
Rachel Jennings teaches composition and literature at San Antonio College. She serves on the board of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center and is a longtime member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. She has published three books of poetry: Hedge Ghosts, Elijah’s Farm, and The Walk to the River.
At graduate school at Oxford University, Evalyn Lee studied with Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann and literary critic John Bayley. Most recently, she has worked with American novelist Joyce Maynard and English novelist Louise Doughty. Her broadcast work has received an Emmy and numerous Writers Guild Awards. She won the Willow Review prize for short fiction in 2016. She is currently at work on her first collection of poetry.
Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, PANK, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has appeared in many literary journals, among them Valparaiso Poetry Review, Phoebe, Pennsylvania English, American Journal of Poetry, Delmarva Review, and Cimarron Review.
Katharyn Howd Machan writes poetry and memoir on her Dragon Patio when weather allows and elsewhere when it doesn’t. As a professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College, she mentors students in fairy-tale-based creative writing courses. Her most recent publications are A Slow Bottle of Wine (The Comstock Writers, Inc., 2020) and Dark Side of the Spoon (The Moonstone Press, 2022). For spirit and body, she belly dances.
Born and raised in Laredo, Texas, María-Luisa attended UT Austin and UC College of the Law, San Francisco. After a short practice, she followed her spouse to postings in the Netherlands, Singapore, and India. In Singapore, she taught legal research and writing to law students at the National University of Singapore. María-Luisa resides in Houston, Texas, and is an independent scholar of Tejano folklore. She is currently working on a book.
Deivid Rojas-Jimenez (him/el) is a queer Colombian filmmaker, storyteller, poet, and organizer based in Chicago. He was a 2022 Full Spectrum Features Community Storyteller, where he wrote and produced the short film La Salida.
Kaitlin Ruiz was raised on sunscreen and field guides in South Texas, where she received a BA in English & Communications in 2017. Her work has appeared in places like The McNeese Review, Channel, and Belt Magazine.
Oswaldo Vargas is a former farmworker, a 2021 recipient of the Undocupoets Fellowship, and was featured in the Poem-A-Day series by the Academy of American Poets. He has been anthologized in Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color and Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, among others. His work can also be seen in places like Narrative Magazine, The Common, and The West Trade Review. He lives and dreams in Sacramento, California.
Originally from Boulder, Colorado, Kris Whorton teaches writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and works with the incarcerated as well as teens and adults in the community. Alchemy (Finishing Line Press, 2023) is Whorton’s first poetry collection. Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Driftwood Press, Scarlet Leaf Review, and elsewhere.
Fiction
Catalina Bartlett’s fiction has appeared in Aster(ix) Journal and Boston Review, and twice has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection Comadres: Stories was named an Honorable Mention selection for Miami Book Fair’s Emerging Writer Fellowship. She is also the recipient of a Ledig House Art Omi Residency and a residency at Prairie Center for the Arts. Catalina teaches at Michigan State University.
Nick Godec writes poetry and short fiction, with works appearing in Brief Wilderness, El Portal, Flights, Grey Sparrow, Hedge Apple, MORIA Literary Magazine, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Rue Scribe, Shark Reef, Sierra Nevada Review, Steam Ticket, Thieving Magpie and Thin Air Magazine. He has a B.A. in history and an MBA from Columbia University and works in finance in New York City. Nick enjoys spending time with his wife, Julia, and their miniature pinscher, Emma.
Katherine Harer has published seven, small-press, poetry collections. The most recent, Deconfliction, was published by fmsbw press in 2021. Katharine’s poems appear in: Fog & Light: San Francisco Through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here; California Fire & Water; and Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry & Prose. She teaches at the SF Writing Salon, works as a union organizer, and reads kids’ books with a translator to children in Ukraine via zoom.
Kay Jimerson lives in St. George, Utah. She is a graduate of the University of New Mexico and previously taught composition as an adjunct instructor at the University of Arizona. The Southwest is her happy place. Her story “Pando” was a semifinalist in the 2024 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards competition, and she participated in the 2024 Masters Workshop in Tucson.
G.H. Plaag is a non-binary poet, writer, and musician who grew up splitting time between Boston and the South. They received their MFA from Hollins University, where they also taught, and have been supported by The Academy of American Poets, Winning Writers, and Sundress Academy for the Arts, among others. Currently, they reside in New Orleans, where they are developing a novel in conversation with various structures of power along the Gulf Coast.
Born in Mexico, Natalia Treviño is the author of Lavando La Dirty Laundry (Mongrel Empire Press) and VirginX (Finishing Line Press). Natalia has won several awards for her poetry and fiction, including the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and the 2024 Ambroggio Award for translation from The Academy of American Poets. Her work is forthcoming in Poetry, her next collection of poetry, Socorro, is coming out in fall 2025 from Flowersong Press, and her first novel, La Cruzada, will come out from Arte Público Press in spring 2026.
Nonfiction
Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of six books of fiction and poetry, most recently Fat Time and Other Stories. He is also the co-author of An Unspeakable Hope with Leon Ford. Allen has received numerous accolades for his writing. Making his home in both the U.S.A. and South Africa, he is at work on the memoir Mother Wit.
Michael Cannistraci, formerly a professional actor, currently works as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist. His essays have been published in Entropy Magazine, Briar Cliff Review, Clockhouse, Ravensperch, Literary Medical Messenger, Glacial Hills Review, The Evening Street Review, Long Ridge Review, and The Bryant Literary Review. He was finalist in the Anne Barnhill Nonfiction Contest, Pen2Paper Literary Contest, the New Millennium Writings, and The Good Life Review Literary Contest. He/His/Him
Erasmo Guerra is a Lambda Literary Award-winning author. His nonfiction work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Highways, Texas Monthly, The Texas Observer, and New York Daily News, where he was a longtime freelance contributor, covering the city’s Latino community. Born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley on the U.S.-Mexico border, he now lives in New York City.
Once an English professor, Karen Paley re-trained as a Financial Advisor ten years ago. By July 19, 2024, she will also be a student in the MFA program in nonfiction at Goucher College.
Recent work appears in Stirring Nonfiction, the Avalon Literary Review, and The Virginia Writers Club Journal 2023. Other publications include I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching the Personal Narrative (So. Illinois UP); Women and Language, The Binnacle, Kerem, and the Yale Journal of Humanities and Medicine.
Michael Riordan lives in Arlington, Texas, and has taught in the US, Australia, Singapore and China, where he was a professor of Writing and Film. He won first prize for nonfiction in 2020 Ageless Authors and third prize in the 2022 LIGHT story contest. His work can be found in Short Edition, Consequence, Multiplicity Magazine, Whimsical Poet, Spirituality & Health, Smart Set, and elsewhere.
Dramatic Scripts
Brooke Downs earned an MFA in creative writing from Brigham Young University, and she teaches a variety of literature and writing courses there. Her other plays include Postlingual, in which a young television host must adapt to sudden, total hearing loss, and Treatment Tables, which features the unique friendship of two patients at a physical therapy clinic. These works have been performed by the American Stage Theatre Company, Wordsmyth Theater Company, and Wasatch Theatre Company.
Hunter Prichard is a writer of short stories, criticism and drama. His work has appeared in Tampa Review, Hunger Mountain, and Free State Press, amongst other print and web publications. He was born and still lives in Portland, Maine.
Art and Graphic Lit.
Jack Bordnick has worked as a product designer in New York, Santa Fe, and Europe. His current artistic projects in sculptural and digital photography employ mixed-media assemblages to achieve surrealistic, mythological, and magical imagery. Some of these images hover at the brink of abstraction, some combine found natural objects with industrially produced materials (metal, plastic) to create highly textured surfaces.
Duncan Tonatiuh (toh-nah-tee-YOU) is an award-winning author-illustrator. He is both Mexican and American. He grew up in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and graduated from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College in New York City. His artwork is inspired by Mesoamerican art, particularly that of the Mixtec codices.