Contributors

David Connor

David Connor is a writer based in Los Angeles, California, recently graduated from the California Institute of the Arts with an MFA in Writing. His work has appeared in Potluck Magazine, Running Moon, and his story “The Tornado is in a Seltzer Bottle in the Kitchen” was named as a finalist for the Robert and Adele Schiff Award in Prose at The Cincinnati Review. In his free time, David develops new languages for communicating with his neighbor’s dog. He is working on a novel, Oh God, the Sun Goes, which he hopes to complete soon.

Aurielle Marie

Aurielle Marie is a Black, Atlanta-born, Queer hip-hop scholar and a cultural worker. Through her work as a poet and an activist, she explores the uses of intimacy and ritual in the practice of Black resistance. Aurielle is a Roddenberry Fellow Finalist, a Voices of Our Nation Fellow-Alum, and a current Queer Emerging Artist-In-Residence at Destiny Art Center. Both her activism and artistry ground themselves in the afro-indigenous legacy of storytelling in the Deep South. She was a 2016 Kopkind Fellow and has been featured as a social-political pundit on CNN. Her essays and poems have been published in Selfish Magazine, in Scalawag, on For Harriett, ESSENCE Mag, Allure, NBC Blk, and Huffington Post. Her inaugural collection, Gumbo Ya Ya, is forthcoming from Write Bloody Press. Her work has been featured on a global host of stages, most importantly in her grandmother’s kitchen. Follow her on Twitter & Instagram: @ElleOfTwoCities.

Reyes Ramirez

Reyes Ramirez is a Houstonian. In addition to having an MFA in Fiction, Reyes received the 2014 riverSedge Poetry Prize, the 2012 Sylvan Karchmer Fiction Prize, and has poems, stories, essays, and reviews (and/or forthcoming) in: Houston Noir, Southwestern American Literature, Glass Poetry Press, Gulf Coast Journal, Origins Journal, The Acentos Review, Cimarron Review, riverSedge: A Journal of Art and Literature, Front Porch Journal, the anthology pariahs: writing from outside the margins from SFASU Press, and elsewhere. You can read more of his work at www.reyesvramirez.com.

Alana de Hinojosa

Alana de Hinojosa is a poet pursing a dissertation in the César E Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA that is concerned with histories of displacement, dispossession, diaspora, loss, return, and what these sometimes have to do with rivers and bodies of water. Her poetry has been published in Huizache, Duende, and is forthcoming in Four Chambers, Track//Four, and elsewhere. She is a Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Las Dos Brujas, and Hampshire College alum. She was raised in Davis, California.

Evan Lloyd

Evan was born near Oxford, England. After traveling the world at age twenty-five, he settled in Washington, D.C. He has worked as a teacher in the U.S and the U.K for fifteen years and currently teaches World Literature at Thurgood Marshall Academy. He has a degrees from Lancaster University, Warwick University and recently received a Master of Writing from Johns Hopkins. Evan is currently finishing up his first novel, The Lunchroom, as well as a collection of short stories. He lives in Columbia Heights with his husband, Josh and their Beagle-Labrador mix, Jasper.

Samuel Piccone

Samuel Piccone received an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including, The Southeast Review, Passages North, Southern Indiana Review, and The Minnesota Review. He serves on the poetry staff at Raleigh Review, and currently resides and teaches in Nevada.

Yvonne Conza

Yvonne Conza’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, F(r)iction #5 and Funhouse Magazine and her author interviews appear in The Millions, The Bloom and Tethered by Letters. She has performed at The Moth in NYC and has recently been a finalist for the: Penelope Niven Award in Creative Nonfiction, Cutbank Literary Journal, Tobias Wolff, Barry Lopez Creative Nonfiction, Blue Mesa Review and The Raymond Carver Short Story.

Sarah Groth

Mahsa Sadeqi

Nazifa Islam

Romeo Harrell

L. Vocem

Zuri Montgomery

Issue 53 Masthead