Waxwing Literary Journal: American writers & international voices.
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Contributors to Issue XIV

Hasan Alizadeh

Notwithstanding his spare output, with only two volumes of poetry Diary of House Arrest (Rūznama-yi tabʿīd, 2003) and Blue Bicycle (Ducharkha-yi ābī, 2015), Hasan Alizadeh (b. 1947, Mashhad, Iran) has left a poetic signature on modern Persian poetry distinguished by lyricism and colloquialism. Alizadeh embarked on a literary career initially as a short story writer, and cultivated his writing talents alongside the notable Iranian novelists Reza Daneshvar and Ghazaleh Alizadeh in the literary circle that developed in their hometown of Mashhad. He later came under the influence of the famous modernist poet Bijan Elahi, who selected the poems of Diary of House Arrest. Since the early 1990s, Alizadeh has focused mostly on poetry. In Alizadeh’s poems, a labyrinthine memory, structured by the intricate architecture of old Iranian bazaars and mosques, continually revises itself in spontaneous narrations of love and death.

Gabriella Balza

Gabriella Balza is a writer and current MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. These are her first published poems. She can be reached at gabriellabalza@gmail.com.

Emily Borgmann

Emily Borgmann (they/them/theirs) is a poet, essayist, and writing educator. They are the recipient of a 2018 Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Champion of Youth advocacy award from Youth Emergency Services. They have served as a teaching artist in correctional facilities, middle schools, community mental health resources, and youth triage. Emily’s poems and essays have appeared in such journals as Copper Nickel, The Laurel Review, Green Mountains Review, and Alligator Juniper.

Barrett Bowlin

Barrett Bowlin’s essays and stories appear in places like Ninth Letter, Hobart, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Salt Hill, Bayou, and storySouth. Photos and links to his work can be found at barrettbowlin.com.

Cortney Lamar Charleston

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, and Doppelgangbanger, forthcoming in Fall 2020 from Haymarket Books. He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Granta, The Nation, and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at The Rumpusem> and on the editorial board at Alice James Books.

Oliver de la Paz

Oliver de la Paz is the author of five collections of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth. He also co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. A founding member, Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. He has received grants from the NYFA and the Artist Trust and has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. His work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.

Amy Dryansky

Amy Dryansky’s second book, Grass Whistle (Salmon Poetry, Ireland) received the Massachusetts Book Award for poetry. Her first, How I Got Lost So Close to Home, won the New England/New York Award from Alice James. Her work is included in several anthologies and individual poems appear in a variety of journals, including Barrow Street, Harvard Review, New England Review, Memorious, Orion, The Sun, and Tin House.vShe’s received honors from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She was also an Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, where she looked at the impact of motherhood on women poets. Dryansky directs the Culture, Brain & Development Program at Hampshire College.

María Esquinca

María Esquinca is an MFA candidate at the University of Miami. She is the winner of the 2018 Alfred Boas Poetry Prizefrom the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared in The Florida Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Scalawag, Acentos Review, and No Tender Fences: An Anthology of Immigrant and First-Generation American Poetry. A fronteriza, she was born in Ciudad Juárez, México, and mostly grew up in El Paso, Texas. You can find her on Twitter @m_esquinca.

Maia Evrona

Maia Evrona is a poet, writer and translator. Her poetry has received a Fulbright Scholar Award to Spain and Greece, while her translations of Avrom Sutzkever were awarded a fellowship from the NEA. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, the North American Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.MaiaEvrona.com.

Sophie Farjeon

Sophie Farjeon lives and works as a writer in New York. She was a 2019 finalist in the Sewanee Review First Annual Fiction and Poetry Contest, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cathexis anthology, Ars Poetica, and Prelude.

Jessica Lynne Furtado

Jessica Lynne Furtado is a poet, photographer, & librarian. Jessica’s photography and micro-poem collages have been featured in CALYX, Muzzle Magazine, PANK, and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared in apt, Hobart, Rogue Agent, Rust + Moth, and Stirring, among others. Visit her at www.jessicafurtado.com.

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She’s the author of five books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the SFPA’s Elgin Award. Her work appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner. Her web site is webbish6.com, and Twitter and Instagram @webbish6.

Ángel García

Ángel García is the author of Teeth Never Sleep, winner of a 2018 CantoMundo Poetry Prize and a 2019 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and finalist for the 2019 PEN American Open Book Award. His work has been published in the American Poetry Review, Miramar, McSweeney’s, Huizache, and The Good Men Project, among others. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers-Squaw Valley, and Vermont Studio Center.

Rebecca Ruth Gould

Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of the poetry collection Cityscapes (Alien Buddha Press, 2019) and the award-winning monograph Writers & Rebels (Yale University Press). She has translated many books from Persian and Georgian, including After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and The Death of Bagrat Zakharych and other Stories by Vazha-Pshavela (Paper & Ink, 2019). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was a finalist for the Luminaire Award for Best Poetry (2017) and for Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize (2017). She teaches at the University of Birmingham.

Berry Grass

Berry Grass has lived in rural Missouri, Tuscaloosa, and now Philadelphia. They are the author of Hall of Waters (The Operating System). Their essays and poems appear in DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Barrelhouse, and The Wanderer, among other publications. They are a 2019 nominee for the Krause Essay Prize. When they aren’t reading submissions as Nonfiction Editor of Sundog Lit, they are embodying what happens when a Virgo watches too much professional wrestling.

Mark L. Keats

Mark L. Keats earned an MFA from the University of Maryland and a PhD from Texas Tech University. He has received fellowships from Kundiman and The Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. His work is forthcoming in Minnesota Review, Permafrost, and Portland Review.

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, fiction writer, memoirist and translator. Her latest book is the poetry collection America that island off the coast of France (Tupelo Press, 2019), which won the Dorset Prize. She is also a translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. She is currently the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Kabel Mishka Ligot

Kabel Mishka Ligot was born and raised in and around Metro Manila in the Philippines. He holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received the 2019 Jerome Stern Teaching Award. Mishka’s work has been published or is forthcoming in RHINO, Bear Review, The Margins, and other journals. A recipient of the Don Belton scholarship at the Indiana University Writers’ Conference and a Tin House Summer Workshop alumnus, he currently lives in the Midwest, where he works at a high school library.

Circe Maia

Photo: Dan H. Fuller

Circe Maia (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1932) she has lived most of her life in the northern city of Tacuarembó. She is the author of ten poetry collections and her work has been published in Argentina, Spain, and the United States, including Invisible Bridge/ El puente invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia (University of Pittsburgh Press), translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval.

Kevin McLellan

Kevin McLellan is the author of Hemispheres (Fact-Simile Editions, forthcoming), Ornitheology (The Word Works, 2018), [box] (Letter [r] Press, 2016), Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015), and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010). He won the 2015 Third Coast Poetry Prize and Gival Press’ 2016 Oscar Wilde Award, and his poems appear in numerous literary journals including Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review Online, West Branch, and Western Humanities Review. Also, with Laura Knott he co-wrote, co-directed, and co-produced the short experimental film Exordium. Kevin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and you can find out more about him here.

Shannon McLeod

Shannon McLeod is the author of the essay chapbook PATHETIC (Etchings Press). Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Prairie Schooner, Hobart, Joyland, Wigleaf, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other publications. Born in Detroit, she now lives in central Virginia and teaches high school English. You can find Shannon on twitter @OcqueocSAM.

Ry Molloy

Ry Molloy lives in Las Vegas, where he teaches and waits tables on the strip. His work has appeared in The Believer, TulipTree Review, and Hello Mr, among others. Follow him on Instagram @power.twink.

Robin Myers

Robin Myers (New York, 1987) is a Mexico City-based poet and translator. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming from the Kenyon Review, the Harvard Review, Two Lines, The Offing, Beloit Poetry Journal, Asymptote, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. Recent book-length translations include Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg (Cardboard House Press, 2018), Empty Pool by Isabel Zapata (Argonáutica, 2019), Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press, forthcoming), and Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books, forthcoming). She is currently translating Isabel Zapata’s collection Una ballena es un país (working title: A Whale Is a Country), from which “Spermaceti” is excerpted.

Margaret Noodin

Photo: Troye Fox

Margaret Noodin received an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is currently a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she also serves as Director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education. She is the author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature and Weweni, a collection of bilingual poems in Ojibwe and English. Her poems are anthologized in New Poets of Native Nations, Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, Poetry, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Water Stone Review, and Yellow Medicine Review. She is a strong advocate for education and community engagement through relevant research and teaching. In Milwaukee she works with the First Nations Program in the Milwaukee Public Schools, the Milwaukee School of Languages, the Milwaukee Indian Community School, and the Urban Ecology Center.

Ukamaka Olisakwe

Ukamaka Olisakwe grew up in Kano, Nigeria, and now lives in Vermont. She was awarded an honorary fellowship in Writing from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2014, she was chosen as one of the continent’s most promising writers under the age of 40 by the UNESCO World Book Capital. In 2018, she won the Vermont College of Fine Arts’ Emerging Writer Scholarship for the MFA in Writing and Publishing program. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Times, Longreads, The Rumpus, Catapult, Rattle, and more.

Brian Oliu

Brian Oliu is originally from New Jersey and currently lives and teaches in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is the author of two chapbooks and four full-length collections, most recently the lyric-memoir i/o, and Enter Your Initials For Record Keeping, a collection of essays on NBA Jam. Recent essays on topics ranging from long distance running to professional wrestling appear in The Collagist, Catapult, The Rumpus, Runner's World, Gay Magazine, and elsewhere.

Megan Pillow

Megan Pillow is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction and is currently a doctoral candidate in the University of Kentucky’s English Department. Her work has appeared recently in, among other places, Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, Paper Darts, and Brevity. She has received fellowships from Pen Parentis and the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and a residency from the Ragdale Foundation. She is currently writing her dissertation and a novel. You can find her on Twitter at @megpillow.

Chaitali Sen

Chaitali Sen is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky and numerous short stories and essays published in Ecotone, New England Review, New Ohio Review, Catapult, Colorado Review, LitHub, Shenandoah, and other journals. “The Bat Mitzvah” is excerpted from her recently finished second novel, Little Pilgrim. Born in India and raised in New York and Pennsylvania, she currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Bhavika Sicka

Bhavika Sicka was born and raised in Calcutta, India. She holds a BA in English from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University. She is currently based in Norfolk, Virginia, where she is pursuing an MFA at Old Dominion University. She has been a finalist for The Times of India’s Write India contest, and her work has appeared in Arkana, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Lunch Ticket, and The Punch Magazine, among others.

Marcela Sulak

Marcela Sulak’s third poetry collection em>(City of Sky Papers) and first memoir (Mouth Full of Seeds) are forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press, where she’s previously published Decency and Immigrant. She’s co-edited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. A 2019 NEA Translation Fellow, her fourth translation, Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali was nominated for a 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She hosts the podcast “Israel in Translation,” edits The Ilanot Review, and is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University.

Avrom Sutzkever

Avrom Sutzkever (1913-2010) is a legendary figure in the Yiddish cultural world. Born in modern-day Belarus, he spent much of his childhood in Siberia, where his family fled during the First World War. He later survived the Vilna Ghetto, before immigrating illegally to Mandatory Palestine just before the founding of the State of Israel. He lived out the rest of his life in Tel Aviv.

Angela Narciso Torres

Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange, winner of the Willow Book Literature Award for Poetry. Her second full length collection, What Happens Is Neither, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2021, and a chapbook, To the Bone, from Sundress Publications in 2020. Recent work appears in POETRY, [PANK], and TriQuarterly. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Ragdale Foundation. She resides in South Florida where she joins the 2020 Palm Beach Poetry Festival conference faculty.

G.C. Waldrep

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the long poem Testament (BOA Editions, 2015). Newer work has appeared in APR, Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Iowa Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, Conjunctions, etc. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch.

Annie Woodford

Annie Woodford is the author Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, The Southern Review, The Rumpus, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She has been awarded scholarships from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences as well as a Barbara Deming Fund Fellowship and the Jean Ritchie Fellowship. She teaches at Wilkes Community College in North Carolina.

Isabel Zapata

Isabel Zapata (Mexico City, 1984) is a writer, translator, and editor. She is the author of Ventanas adentro (poetry, Ediciones Urdimbre, 2002); Las noches son así (poetry, Broken English, 2018); Alberca vacía/Empty Pool (essays, Argonáutica/UANL, 2019); and Una ballena es un país (poetry, Almadía, 2019). Her critical and creative work has appeared in Tierra Adentro, the magazine of the Universidad de México, Periódico de Poesía (UNAM), Literal, Horizontal, Letras Libres, and Este País, among others. In 2016-2017, she received a FONCA Young Artists grant for poetry. She writes a weekly column on gender and culture, “Tiresias,” for Letras Libres online. In 2015, she and four friends founded the press Ediciones Antílope, which publishes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Margaret Zhang

Margaret Zhang used to go by Mar-gar-gar. A Best New Poets 2019 nominee and Tin House Poetry Workshop alum, she has been recognized by the Poetry Society of the UK. Read her work in The Louisville Review, Salt Hill Journal, The Minnesota Review, DIALOGIST, and other journals.