Staff and Board

Luke Hankins is the author of the poetry collections MAGNITUDE: New & Selected Short Poems (forthcoming, Texas Review Press), Radiant Obstacles, and Weak Devotions, as well as a chapbook, Testament. He is also the author of a collection of essays, The Work of Creation, and is the editor or co-editor of several anthologies, including Breaking into Blossom: Poems with Extraordinary Endings (with Nomi Stone), Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, and Orison Books' annual Best Spiritual Literature. A volume of his translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems, was published by Seagull Books in 2019. Hankins is a graduate of the Indiana University MFA program, where he held the Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry. His poems, essays, articles, and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, EuropeNow, Image, New England Review, New Poetry in Translation, Pleiades, Poetry International, Poets & Writers, 32 Poems, Verse, World Literature Today, and The Writer’s Chronicle, as well as on the American Public Media radio program “On Being.”

Matthew Duffus is the author of Dunbar’s Folly and Other Stories (Unsolicited Press, 2020) and the novel Swapping Purples for Yellows (SFK Press, 2019). His work has appeared in such places as Beloit Fiction Journal, Cimarron Review, New Ohio Review, and Moon City Review. He lives with his family in North Carolina, where he teaches high school English.

Susanne Paola Antonetta’s latest book is The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here. Forthcoming from Counterpoint in 2025 is The Devil's Castle. She is also the author of Make Me a Mother, Entangled Objects, Body Toxic, A Mind Apart, and four books of poetry. Awards include a Pushcart, a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, an Amazon best memoir of the year award, and others. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ms., The Huffington Post, The UK Independent, The Hill, Orion, Psychology Today, and The New Republic and have been featured on CNN as well as the CBC Ideas documentary series.

Mackenzie Kozak is the author of no swaddle, selected for The Iowa Poetry Prize by Brenda Shaughnessy, forthcoming in 2025. She holds an MFA from UNC-Greensboro, where she served as Poetry Editor of The Greensboro Review. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Boston Review, Diagram, jubilat, Missouri Review, Sixth Finch, Thrush, and elsewhere.

Chad B. Anderson has published fiction in Salamander, Black Warrior Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Best American Short Stories 2017, Clockhouse, and Burrow Press Review, and he has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. He has had residencies at The Ledig House International Writers’ Colony, The Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, and The Carolyn Moore Writers House. He is currently an acting managing editor for Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters and has served as guest editor for Burrow Press Review. Born and raised in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, he earned his B.A. from University of Virginia and his M.F.A. in creative writing from Indiana University, where he served as fiction editor for Indiana Review. He currently lives in Michigan.

Rebekah Denison Hewitt's poetry collection Creature in Bloom is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Pinch, Gulf Stream, Narrative, The Rumpus, and the anthology New Poetry From the Midwest. 

Dale Neal is the author of the novels Kings of Coweetsee, The Woman with the Stone Knife, and Appalachian Book of the Dead, a finalist for the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award. His novella, Floodmarks, about the 1916 flood in Asheville, is forthcoming from Regal House. His short stories and essays have appeared in Our State, Smoky Mountain Living, North Carolina Literary Review, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. As an award-winning reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times for three decades, he traveled everywhere from Upper Paw Paw in Madison County to Karachi in Pakistan, covering culture, books, religion, business, science, and technology.

Nathan Jordan Poole is the recipient of the 2012 Narrative Prize; the 2013 Mary McCarthy Prize for his debut story collection, Father, Brother, Keeper, which was published by Sarabande Books in 2015; and the 2014 Quarterly West Novella Contest for Pathkiller as the Holy Ghost. He is a former Milton Fellow at Seattle Pacific University and Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College.

Jordan Rice is the author of Constellarium (Orison Books, 2016), a finalist for The Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Blackbird, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been anthologized in The Long Devotion: Mothers Writing about Motherhood, Writing the Walls Down, Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume V, Best New Poets, and Best of the Web. Rice has been awarded The Indiana Review Poetry Prize, The Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, The Yellowwood Poetry Prize from Yalobusha Review, The Richard Peterson Poetry Prize from Crab Orchard Review, and The Milton-Kessler Memorial Prize from Harpur Palate. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a PhD from Western Michigan University.

Eric Tran is the author of the poetry collections Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke (Diode Editions, 2022) and The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer (Autumn House Press, 2020), as well as the chapbooks Revisions (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018) and Affairs with Men in Suits (Backbone Press, 2014). His work has appeared in Diagram, Indiana Review, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is a resident physician in psychiatry.

Star Zahra is a Nigerian poet, arts journalist, and traditional textile designer. She holds a degree in English Language and is the author of the poetry collection Girls and the Silhouette of Form (Masobe Books, 2024). In 2022, she served as a judge for The Andrew Nok Poetry Prize and has been a columnist with Konya Shamsrumi Press. She has read poetry for Guesthouse Magazine and Salamander. Star studied Creative Industries through the African Leadership University in partnership with the British Council, and trained in Indigenous Arts at the Nike Research Center for Arts and Culture. Her work has appeared in Isele Magazine, Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, Shallow Tales Review, Red Poets, and Writers Space Africa.