Letter from the Editor
By John Hardberger
Reflections by Strobe
Coriander Focus
Art
Issue 53
Spring 2026
Fiction
Earthskin
By Hana Rehman
The Velvet Chair
By Nina Schuyler
Poetry
Letter to You About Home as a Song on Our Bodies
By Lindsay Wilson
Grocery Run for Grandpa
By Victor Mendeville
Borrowed Saints
By Windy Martinez
Nonfiction
Illumination: An Essay in Two Acts
By Jackie Martin
Swamp Heart
By Samantha Edmonds
The Cry of the Cicada
By Jeffrey J. Higa
Contributors
Lawrence Bridges
Lawrence Bridges is best known for his work in the film and literary world. His photographs have been exhibited at the Las Laguna Art Gallery, the London Photo Festival, the ENSO Gallery in Malibu, and were featured in the Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery in November 2025. He created a series of literary documentaries for the National Endowment for the Arts “Big Read” initiative, which includes profiles of Ray Bradbury, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolff, and Cynthia Ozick. He lives in Los Angeles. You can find him on IG: @larrybridges
Rosetta Dorsa
Rosetta Dorsa is a retired married artist and writer living in Forest Hills, NY. As a visual artist since 2021, she plays joyfully with watercolor paints and also expresses herself with collage. She recently had her Poem “Rush Hour In NYC” published in Superpresent Magazine in the current April 2026 issue. She embraces City & Southwestern themes in her poetry. She is constantly exploring new media and techniques in her artwork.
Samantha Edmonds
Samantha Edmonds is the author of the story collection A Preponderance of Starry Beings as well as the chapbooks Pretty to Think So and The Space Poet. Her work appears in The New York Times, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Creative Nonfiction, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She’s an Assistant Professor in the creative writing program at Berry College and lives in Rome, Georgia.
Coriander Focus
Coriander Focus is a full-time creator, working most in the mediums of Multimedia photography and written word. Coriander spent her youth deep in the mountains of rural Appalachia where her love of wild places was cultivated. She has since captured that love using fine art over the last 15 years. She has had her work displayed nationally across galleries, shows and publications since 2010. Notable highlights of Coriander Focus’ recent career have been Her Voice, Her Vision – Chesapeake Arts Center (2024) Windows to the Inside, Woman Made Gallery (2023) and Sarasvati Creative Space Residency (2022).
Jeffrey J. Higa
Jeffrey J. Higa is the author of Calabash Stories, which won the Robert C. Jones Prize and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Stories from the collection, including “The Shadow Artist” received an honorable mention in the Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize from the North American Review and “Christmas Stories” which was serialized and broadcast by Aloha Shorts on Hawaii Public Radio. Despite being published widely in literary and commercial magazines, he still finds memoir exceedingly difficult to write. In 2022, he was a Kundiman fiction fellow at the Sewanee Writers Conference.
Robb Kunz
Robb Kunz hails from Teton Valley, Idaho. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho. He currently teaches writing at Utah State University and is the Art and Design Faculty Advisor of Sink Hollow: An Undergraduate Literary Journal. His art has been published in Peatsmoke Journal, the NonBinary Review, and New Delta Review. His art is upcoming in Phoebe, Reed Magazine and Thin Air Magazine.
Jackie Martin
Jackie Martin is an educator and writer from the Boston area. Her work has been published by New Pages, Heuer Publishing, Smith & Kraus, Applause Books, Next Stage Press, Pioneer Drama, and others. Jackie recently received her MA in English from Bridgewater State University, where she was an editorial intern on the literary magazine Nerve to Write. When she is not reading, writing, grading, or planning, she delights in spending time with her husband, two children, and cats.
Windy Martinez
Windy Martinez is a Harlem-born poet whose work is rooted in memory, faith, family, and the layered music of city life. Her poetry blends lyric intensity with narrative grit and cultural specificity to explore survival, longing, and identity. Her work is forthcoming in Wingless Dreamer’s Fire in the Lines anthology and appears in Poets Choice’s Everything Unprecedented. She is currently pursuing a BA in Creative Writing and English at Southern New Hampshire University.
Victor Mendeville
Hana Rehman
Hana Rehman is a writer from Georgia living in Richmond, Virginia. She received her MFA in fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Fellow, helping administer an annual prize for debut novelists. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review and Moon City Review.
Nina Schuyler
Nina Schuyler’s novel, Open the Floodgates, will be published on September 15, 2026. Her short story collection, In This Ravishing World, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, the W.S. Porter Prize, the Prism Prize for Climate Literature, and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her novel, Afterword, was part of San Francisco’s One City One Book program. Her stories have been published by Zyzzyva, Chicago Quarterly Review, Fugue, Santa Clara Review, and other journals. She won Best Microfiction 2025 and 2025 Best Small Fictions and teaches for Stanford Continuing Studies.
Lindsay Wilson
Lindsay Wilson is an English professor in Reno, Nevada where he co-edits The Meadow. His first two collections are No Elegies and The Day Gives Us so Many Ways to Eat. His writing has appeared in Narrative, Fourth Genre, and The Colorado Review. For more information go to www.lindsaywilson.net.
Ellen June Wright
Ellen June Wright is an internationally published artist, poet, photographer and former language arts instructor, known for her abstract expressionism. Wright’s dynamic watercolors have been published in journals online and in print, most recently: CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature, Blue Mesa Review, Abstract Magazine: Contemporary Expressions, NOVUS Literary Journal, and her work was included in the 2024 and 2025 Newark Arts Festivals and 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 53 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 a 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. Gannon
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