Letter from the Editor
By John Hardberger
Provocative Converged Precognitions
Jim Woodson
Art
Issue 52
Fall 2025
Fiction
Poetry
Out of the Shade
By Meghan Sterling
arroyos
By Marika Guthrie
monarchs
By Ivy Raff
Her English
By Jose Oseguera
Nonfiction
Contributors
Brad Barkley
Brad Barkley is the author of the novels Money, Love and Alison’s Automotive Repair Manual, named Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post and Library Journal. His short fiction has appeared in Fractured Lit, The Southern Review,Oxford American, Glimmer Train, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, which twice awarded him the Balch Prize for Best Fiction. He has also authored three YA novels from Penguin/Dutton and received fellowships from the NEA and the Maryland State Arts Council. His new YA novel, The Reel Life of Zara Kegg, arrives from Regal House Publishing in June 2026. More at bradbarkley.com.
Samantha Edmonds
Samantha Edmonds is an artist and writer living in Rome, Georgia, where she works as an Assistant Professor in the creative writing program at Berry College. Her paintings have appeared in December Magazine and Doubleback Review, and her written work has appeared in The New York Times, Ninth Letter, Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is also the author of the short story collection A Preponderance of Starry Beings (Triquarterly Books 2025).
Benjamin Green
Benjamin Green is the author of twelve books including His Only Merit (Finishing Line Press) and the upcoming Old Man Looking through a Window at Night (Main Street Rag); he is also a visual artist employing many different media. At the age of sixty-nine, he hopes his new work articulates a mature vision of the world and does so with some integrity. He resides in Jemez Springs, New Mexico.
Marika Guthrie
Marika Guthrie is an emerging writer residing in Pueblo, Colorado. She is a nontraditional undergraduate student currently attending CSU-Pueblo, pursuing a major in English with an emphasis in creative writing. Marika is an ardent horsewoman, a sometimes artist, a stumbling philosopher, a poet and writer. Marika has been published in The Baltimore Review, The New Ohio Review, La Piccioletta Barca, The Rappahannock Review, Tempered Steele, and Vortex. Her work will also be featured in The McNeese Review in spring of 2026.
Jeffrey-Michael Kane
Jeffrey-Michael Kane is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It, a celebrated nonfiction work on cognitive patterning and inclusion in the workplace. His literary work has appeared in L’Esprit Literary Journal, Azure (Lazuli), Blue Mesa Review, and Superlative. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and four sons in a house filled with paintings, dogs, and stories that unfold slowly.
Kaila Lancaster
Kaila Lancaster holds a PhD from Oklahoma State University and is a lecturer at Stephen F. Austin State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Pinch, Third Coast, Puerto del Sol, and Harpur Palate, among others. When she’s not writing or teaching, you can find Kaila playing pickleball and birdwatching. She also hopes to take a horseback riding lesson in the near future.
James Lex
James Lex is a writer from Washington DC and a current MFA Creative Writing Fellow at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. Previously published as a finalist in the Bardsy Writing Contest. He lives with his dog Milo.
Patricia Maciesz
Patricia Maciesz is an artist, author and creator of the hit website billthepatriarchy.com for which she won the 2018 Barbara Deming Money for Women Grant. Her writing has been published in numerous literary magazines and she writes a Substack, The Patriarchy Polka about her journey from art and activism to a completed memoir manuscript at www.patriciamaciesz.com.
Liana Meyer
Liana Meyer is an American painter based out of the Philippines whose abstract work explores color, movement, and emotion through intuitive, approachable forms. Her art reflects a belief that creativity should feel welcoming and accessible, a philosophy she expresses through her brand Mango Mornings. Liana’s pieces are known for their warmth and grounding energy, resonating with viewers who seek calm and connection. As her practice evolved, she expanded into therapeutic art facilitation, guiding individuals to use creativity as a tool for reflection and emotional wellbeing. Her work blends artistic expression with gentle healing, offering spaces where people can breathe and reconnect.
Amuri Morris
Amuri Morris is an artist based in Richmond, VA. She recently graduated from painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. Throughout the years she has acquired several artistic accolades such as a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and has participated in over a dozen exhibitions. She aims to promote diversity in art canon, specifically focusing on the black experience. You can find more of her work at www.murisart.com.
Jose Oseguera
Jose Oseguera is an LA-based writer of poetry, short fiction and literary nonfiction. His writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Water Stone, Pinch and Sonora Review. He is the author of the poetry collections The Milk of Your Blood(Kelsay Books, 2021) and And This House Is Only a Nest (Homebound Publications, 2024).
Ivy Raff
Ivy Raff is the author of What Remains/Qué queda (Editorial DALYA, forthcoming 2026), a bilingual English/Spanish poetry collection that won the Alberola International Poetry Prize, and Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024), hailed by Pulitzer finalist Bruce Smith as “lacerating, fearless.” Poems and translations appear in such journals as Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, Iron Horse Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature, and International Poetry Review, as well as anthologies London Independent Story Prize Anthology (LISP, 2023), and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize Annual (Aesthetica, 2023). Her Best of the Net-nominated work has garnered the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Experimental Poetry Award and the New Writers UK Prize, along with support from the Colgate Writers’ Conference, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, the New York Mills Cultural Center, and Under the Volcano. Ivy serves artist communities as MacDowell’s Senior Digital Systems Strategist. Read more at www.ivyraff.com.
Casey Reiland
Casey Reiland’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from F(r)iction, HAD, trampset, On the Seawall, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wyoming, and she resides in Somerville, MA. You can find more of her work at caseyreiland.com or her latest musings at @caseyreiland.bsky.social.
Jim Ross
Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after rewarding career in public health research. With graduate degree from Howard University, in ten years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, interviews, and plays in 200+ journals on five continents. Photo publications include Alchemy Spoon, Barnstorm, Burningword, Camas, Feral, Invisible City, Orion, Phoebe, Stonecoast. Photo-essays include DASH, Kestrel, Litro, NWW, Pilgrimage, Sweet, Typehouse. His most recent interview, published by Terrain.org, was conducted with an artist. A Best of the Net nominee in Nonfiction and Art, he also wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim’s family splits time between city and mountains.
Maite Russell
Maite Russell is a Colorado-based multimedia artist who works primarily with animal subjects in an illustrative style. Her works have been part of exhibitions at 40 West Arts Gallery and in the collection of Red Rocks Community College.
Sandra Slaughter
Sandra Slaughter is a German-American emerging abstract expressionist painter based in the Houston, TX area. Her work focuses on emotion, memory and the intensity of human experience through layered texture, movement and atmospheric color. Her paintings have been recognized in international juried competitions with Teravarna Gallery and published in literary issue 57 of Beyond Words Magazine. Sandra creates paintings that merge intuition with storytelling inspired by landscapes, personal history, and psychological depth.
Meghan Sterling
Meghan Sterling (she, her , they) is a queer/bi writer and mother. She has been published in Tahoma Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, Rhino Poetry and others. Sick Letters from the Lovebed (Harbor Editions) is forthcoming in 2026.Poet laureate of Gardiner, Maine, read her work at meghansterling.com.
Jim Woodson
Jim Woodson, a distinguished Texas painter, has spent more than five decades crafting a unique visual language rooted in the rugged terrains of the American Southwest. In 2013, Woodson was named State Visual Artist by the Texas Commission on the Arts. Exhibitions include: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; George W. Bush Presidential Center; Dallas Museum of Art; Fort Worth City Hall; The Grace Museum; WiWe Museum. Press includes The New York Times; DFW Magazine; Artsy; Fort Worth Magazine; The Dallas Morning News; Glasstire; Art and Antiques Magazine; Fort Worth Star Telegram. His work is held in numerous public collections.
Ellen June Wright
Ellen June Wright is an internationally published artist, poet, photographer and former language arts instructor, known for her abstract expressionism. She studied art and art history at Rutgers College, New Brunswick, NJ as an undergraduate. Wright’s dynamic watercolors have been published in journals online and in print, most recently: Abstract Magazine: Contemporary Expressions, Lolwe, Harpur Palate, Ponder Review, New Plains Review, Beyond Words Magazine, Kitchen Table Quarterly, NOVUS Literary Journal, and her work was included in the 2024 and 2025 Newark Arts Festivals and featured at the gallery at the HACPAC in NJ. She is an admirer of the works of Stanley Whitney, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Frank Bowling, Howardena Pindell, Jamaican Artist: Cecil Cooper and others.
Issue 52 Masthead
John Hardberger
Editor-In-Chief
John Hardberger is a Texpat writer and radio DJ, now living in New Mexico. He’s a third year fiction MFA candidate at UNM and an alum of the 2025 Clarion Writers Workshop. His fiction straddles fantasy and reality, the mundane and the weird, exploring the liminal spaces between identities, cultures, and landscapes. His journalism has appeared in Chicago magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and Edible New Mexico, and he blogs about arts and culture at voyagerradio.substack.com.
Paris Baldante
Managing Editor
Paris Baldante is writer from Philadelphia and a third-year MFA student at UNM. Her fiction and nonfiction explore strange weather, ghostly locations, liminal identities, and cold intimacies. Lately, she’s been reading Jesmyn Ward and Italo Calvino. Her hobbies include playing piano badly, ping-ponging against the wall, and worrying about things that are out of her control. She thinks we need bios on everything because of our inability to define ourselves.
Candra Lowery
Nonfiction Editor
Candra Lowery is a second-year MFA student at UNM with roots in both Oklahoma and Texas. Drawing from the oratory traditions and redneck lore of her High Plains upbringing, Candra’s creative nonfiction is voice-driven and often irreverent, exploring complex trauma, poverty, addiction, and every type of grief. She is also a poet, but don’t tell anyone.
E.C. Gann0n
Fiction Editor
E.C. Gannon is a second-year MFA student in fiction at the University of New Mexico. From New Hampshire, she has a degree in English and political science from Florida State University and is hard at work on a novel about authoritarianism. Her fiction can be found in Soundings East, Peatsmoke Journal, Assignment Magazine, and elsewhere. She wants to hear your jokes.
Jas Colorado
Poetry Editor
Jas Colorado is a Central American diaspora writer and MFA student at the University of New Mexico. Her work moves through the blurred borders of migration, queerness, and the ancestral spaces between religion and magic.
Hannah Janson
Associate Editor
Hannah Janson is a poet from the Midwest and a second year MFA student at UNM. Besides poetry, she enjoys a variety of creative hobbies like painting, music, and no longer living in the Midwest. Her poetry is interested in infinities both large and small, reality tv, blood, rocks, and the thinnest possible shards of self that can be chipped off and held to the light.
Marisa P. Clark
Faculty Advisor
Marisa P. Clark (she/her) grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, came out in Atlanta, Georgia, and relocated to beautiful New Mexico in 1998. She holds a PhD in fiction-writing from Georgia State University and an MA in American literature and a BS in psychology from the University of Southern Mississippi. A lecturer for more than two decades at UNM, she has taught all genres of undergraduate creative writing, queer texts and other literature courses, first- and second-year composition courses, and ESL, along with taking on various roles with Blue Mesa Review. She is the author of the poetry collection BIRD, and her prose and poetry appear in numerous literary publications journals.
Graduate Readers
Alissa Kuster
Undergraduate Readers
Emilio Garcia Benavidez
Carl Miles
Alyssa Ramos