ELISA GABBERT is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: Any Person Is the Only Self (out from FSG on June 11, 2024); Normal Distance (Soft Skull, 2022); The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays (FSG Originals, 2020), The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018), L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016), The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013), and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010).

The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty were both New York Times Editors’ Picks, and The Self Unstable was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. Elisa’s work has appeared in Harper’s, The Believer, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, A Public Space, and many other venues.

DAVID SEUNG is a Korean-American standup comedian and writer advocating for his hometown of downtown Portland, Oregon through his walking tour company, Side Dish Mafia Food Tours. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University, where he now in turn teaches.

David Seung's debut book of poems, Silkworm's Pansori, is a collection of English-language sijo poems: a traditional Korean poetic form that is straightforward in its syntax but emotionally nuanced. Following this historical form closely, these are poems of elegance and understatement, like a painted still life imbued with heartbreaking subtlety and metaphor. Yet the poet can only get so far with this exercise before his own personal history, a family legacy of war and torture, starts creeping in to shatter the otherwise poetic calm. Inserted toward the end of the book is the Korean Declaration of Independence; among the signers is the poet’s great-great-grandfather. Asking the reader to contextualize this document with the history of sijo and his own family saga, Seung gracefully addresses generations of anger and pain, and reflects on the intricacies of human existence.

“I remember that I’m always angry. Wickless. Our family’s name, the one we clung to, means inheritance.” Whether in haunting prose poems or playful sijo, inheritance is alive in Seung’s poems. Here, the ancient and present touch, such as in “DMZ Fable” where we watch “the last Korean tiger/ pawing at a land mine” or living in “my father’s father’s father” like “Sisyphus’s kidney stone” in “Parthenogenesis.” At turns sacred and irreverent, Silkworm’s Pansori scours archives of history, family, and desire nestled within each other like Matryoshka dolls. Borders blur in Seung’s poems as the footnote in “Crockpot Desire” becomes its own poem—a litany of “I wants”—or the titles in a cycle of sijo blend seamlessly into new bodies. These inventive works marry tradition and innovation, dancing between forms and eras like the silkworm they evoke in endless reincarnations. Seung’s poems sing with exquisite lyricism, bite with irony, and spin with tenderness. —Arah Ko

“Inheritance is everything you don’t decide” writes David Seung in his remarkably piercing and brilliant debut. These uncanny yet utterly precise permutations enact an insistence of becoming, an insistence against stagnancy, and an insistence of choice and reimagination. Mixing the inheritance of familial history with a sharp wit, these poems show how intimacy can be dependent on the straddling of distance—a gravitation away is also an orientation towards—and though inheritance isn’t a choice, the ability to imagine other kinds of agency is. —Janice Lee

JANICE LEE (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 8 books of fiction, creative nonfiction, & poetry: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (Meekling Press, 2023). An essay (co-authored with Jared Woodland) is featured in the recently released 4K restoration of Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr) from Arbelos Films. 

She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy?

Her next book seeks to explore ties between the Korean cultural concept of han, narratives of inherited trauma in the West, the Korean folk traditions and shamanic practices of her ancestors (especially rituals around death), the history and creation of Korean script (Hangul), and revisions of the Korean myth of Princess Bari.

Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and facilitates guided meditations, especially as a practitioner of Engaged Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh) and an aspirant for the Order of Interbeing. She also incorporates elements of ancestor work, Korean shamanic ritual (Muism), traditional Korean folk practices, plant medicine & flower essence work, card readings & divination, and interspecies communication.

She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks and most recently, Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age (JackLeg Press, 2023). Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for more than three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. Her recent debut short story collection, The Ghost Town Collectives, won the 2023 Osprey Award for Fiction from Middle Creek Publishing. For more information, visit www.brittneycorrigan.com.

Elizabeth Costello is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. She works (remotely) as an editor for UC Berkeley and co-founded the ekphraestival, a generative exchange among visual artists and poets that culminates in readings and exhibitions in April, national poetry month. Her publications include arts writing for SF Weekly and 7x7 and the poetry chapbook RELIC. Her debut novel, The Good War, is out from Regal House on January 28 and an audiobook version will be available on February 11. Publishers Weekly describes The Good War as “dark and intense…lyrical…Moody and atmospheric, this gritty tale is worth a look.”

Jo Ann Fawcett is a California native. She has Associate of Arts degrees in film production and Accounting. She is the mother of a successful grown daughter and is the proud grandmother of three. She enjoys reading, needlework, walking, travel, and spending time with the family. She is owned by her Tuxedo cat Winston. 

Jo Ann never aspired to be a writer. In the late 90s she published a community newspaper, writing articles about interesting places to visit and environmental issues. Years later while speaking at a Super Soldier conference about her former husband’s military experiences, an attendee asked her when her next story was coming out. Not her husband’s next story – HER story. Several years later, Jo Ann finally put her story on paper. 

Jo Ann writes from the heart and is grateful for the inspiration that flows to her. She writes matter-of-factly, weaving in her own style of humor. She openly shares her vulnerability. Readers enjoy her honesty and praise her courage to share her story. Through her many struggles, she found her strengths, gifts, and inner power. She learned that dreams can, and do, come true. Today she is a warrior who proudly carries the title, Wise Woman-Crone.

Midlife Magic is Jo Ann’s first book. The memoir contains stories about her first six marriages involving abuse, divorce, and death. Jo Ann talks about meeting and marrying husband #7, a former military intelligence officer incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit. Having been an active member of the Mormon Church for nearly 30 years, Jo Ann left the Church to fully embrace the world of UFOs, elementals, magic and the paranormal – a new path she loves.

The Prince Was Wrong – Leaving the Narcissist Behind is Jo Ann’s second book, to be published in mid-to-late 2024. This book is a follow-up memoir to the first book as Jo Ann discovered the reality that husband #7 is a narcissist. This book discusses the red flags of this type of abuse. It lays out the demise of their relationship with clear examples of his narcissistic behavior. The ‘happy ending’ chapter shows that Jo Ann has found a joyous life after divorcing #7 and is on the path to creating her best life.

The magical benefit of writing these books and doing her healing inner work is that Jo Ann has found her voice, passion, and desire to help other women who feel stuck and overwhelmed in their toxic relationships. Jo Ann wishes to offer the hope that healing can happen. Their lives can get better. They can find peace and joy in their lives once again.  

M.L. Krishnan originally hails from the coastal shores of Tamil Nadu, India. She is a 2019 graduate of the Clarion West Writers' Workshop, a 2022 recipient of the Millay Arts Fellowship, a 2022 recipient of the Carnegie Corporation Fellowship, and a 2022-2023 MacDowell Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared, or are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Black Warrior Review, Zócalo Public Square, The Offing and elsewhere. While at Tin House, M.L. is working on her debut short-story collection whose characters come to terms with queer longing, ferocious desires, and codified traditions that they are forced to adhere to. Ultimately, this collection is about queer concealment as survival, about lives layered beneath other lives, about the gendered violences of place and caste and colonial hubris.

Ruby Hansen Murray is a columnist for the Osage News. She’s the winner of The Iowa Review and Montana Nonfiction Prizes, and a MacDowell, Indigenous Native Poets, Ragdale, and Hedgebrook fellow. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Moss, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Prism International. She’s a citizen of the Osage and Cherokee Nations with West Indian roots, living in the lower Columbia River estuary. While at Tin House, Ruby is working on When Blood is Oil, which places Osage life and history beside America’s false self-image, crafted of scenes from Little House on the Prairie and Ree Drummond’s soft-focus Pioneer Woman. Poems range across ancestral land, Wah Zha Zhe community life, and language preservation. The manuscript, which celebrates Osage lifeways, is an antidote to the battle against Osage sovereignty.

Anthony Hudson is a Grand Ronde / Siletz artist and writer working in theatre, drag, film/video, and nonfiction. Anthony's theatrical work, from Looking for Tiger Lily to Queer Horror—and performances as Portland's premier drag clown CARLA ROSSI—have earned him national fellowships, international engagements, and sainthood from the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Anthony’s writing has appeared in American Theatre, BOMB Magazine, and Arts and International Affairs. He is currently adapting Looking for Tiger Lily into a book.

Carla Crujido is the Assistant Editor at River Styx Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and has had writing published in Moss, Bellingham Review, Crazyhorse, Yellow Medicine Review, Ricepaper Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut fiction collection, The Strange Beautiful, centers on the Mount Vernon Apartments in Spokane, Washington, offering a glimpse into the lives of ten tenants over a period of one hundred years.

An experienced fixer for journalists covering Haiti, Jean often unexpectedly finds himself on the subject side of stories. After his son was kidnapped and his house taken, Jean decided to move his family out of Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic. In the first of McSweeney’s new Dispatches series, Jean tells us the story of this struggle to relocate, another change of country in his search for a better life.

Dispatches from individual lives, as they happen: in our new Dispatches series, each compact book originates in short confidences recorded by individuals during borrowed moments from their interesting lives. Set amid some of our most pressing contemporary predicaments and edited by award-winning writers Peter Orner and Laura Lampton Scott, these invaluable books seek to document the highs and lows of daily human endurance.

Laura Lampton Scott is an editor and writer. Her work has appeared in Hobart, 68 to '05, and Michigan Quarterly, among other publications. A MacDowell Colony fellow, she teaches fiction at Portland State University. She is co-editor, with Peter Orner, of the Dispatches series published by McSweeney's Books.

Alyssa Ogi is a poet and editor in Portland, Oregon. The recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant and an Oregon Literary Fellowship, she received her MFA from the University of Oregon, and now works as an editor at Tin House. 

A cheeky how-to guide, as raunchy as it is heartfelt, from a bright new literary voice.

A bold and vulnerable collection from a new, young voice, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a daring mash-up of pillow book, grimoire, and manifesto by writer Vera Blossom. From hooking up to trans witchcraft, petty crime, capitalism, friendships, divorce, and survival, Blossom brings wit and melancholy, grandeur and smarts, debuting a bright literary voice as raunchy as it is heartfelt. A cheeky how-to guide that earnestly asks if it is possible to fuck oneself into girlhood, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a cult classic in the making.

VERA BLOSSOM is a proud transfemme Filipina. She was born in the Bay Area, forged in Las Vegas, and currently lives in Chicago. Her work explores desire, pleasure, gender, spirituality, art, and death with explicit vulgarity and frank humor. 

Vera’s writing has been supported by TinHouse, PEN America, and the Ann Friedman Weekly. Her work as an audio journalist includes Season 2 of The Anti-Trans Hate Machine which focused on the disinformation ecosystem constructed by the Christian Nationalist movement, as well as Black Mountain Radio, an artist-driven, community-focused audio project published in collaboration with Black Mountain Institute and the Believer magazine. Vera was a producer and co-owner of Your Magic, a mystical podcast that featured celebrity tarot readings and deep-dives into contemporary spiritual practices. 

She is the loser of many other fellowships, accolades, and awards. She does not have a post-secondary education. She is, however, very serious about playing around.

Chelsea Starr is a shining star in Portland and San Francisco's queer communities. Her iconic finery is made by her own hand. In addition to being a highly in-demand DJ, she’s a strong voice of equality and love.

2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Poetry Prize winner

Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter is a story about leaving religion and coming of age in a world of accelerating climate apocalypses and environmental loss. In her debut collection of poems, H. G. Dierdorff interweaves an investigation of wildfires in Eastern Washington with a personal account of growing up in Christian fundamentalism, calling our attention to the violent histories undergirding both.

“I want you to touch the fire / sparking from my lips” the opening sonnet commands, daring the reader to abandon the safety of analytical distance and draw near to the moment of ignition itself. The voice that emerges is incessant, ecstatic, explosive. Fire erupts from every page, multiplying into rage, desire, judgement, responsibility, and renewal. 

A love song to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a dramatic portrait of a daughter struggling to find her place in her family, and a philosophical exploration of the limits of language and belief, this collection demands the necessity of both pleasure and grief as responses to a world on fire.

H. G. Dierdorff is a poet from the scablands and pine savannas of eastern Washington, the ancestral, unceded land of the interior Salish people. She is the author of Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter, which was selected for the 2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award in Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Nevada Press in 2024. Her work has been awarded a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and appeared in journals such as Cut Bank, Arkansas International, and Willow Springs. You can currently find them in Oregon, where they volunteer with Write Around Portland and teach poetry through Literary Arts.

A miraculous book envisioned by Allison deFreese at the Oregon Society of Translators & Interpreters, and edited by Allison deFreese and Kim Stafford.

Thanks to Allison’s international network, Kim’s peace poem in English is translated into fifty languages, together with notes on translators and their languages, and QR access to dozens of voiced readings. This book sends a peace proclamation around the world so it may become a new poem in Arabic and Hebrew, Russian and Ukrainian, Tibetan and Mandarin, Tamil, Vietnamese, Polish, Yoruba, Yucatec Maya, and a host of other languages. With its fifty voices speaking gentle words, this book is for the children of the world. The cover image by Michael Nye shows a child holding a poem by Mahmoud Darwish:

I long for my mother’s bread

And my mother’s coffee

And my mother’s touch

And my childhood grows up

One day following days full of patience

And I love my life

Because if I die

My mother’s tears will shame me

Kim Stafford is Emeritus Professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. He writes, teaches, and travels to raise the human spirit through poetry. In 1986, he founded the Northwest Writing Institute, and he has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. His most recent book is the poetry collection As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen Press, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate for a two-year term.

Surveille’s queer speaker is on the cusp of motherhood, vacillating between attentiveness and paranoia. Exploring drone strikes, scorpion eradication, bird behavior, mating deer, ICE detainees, and family relationships, Caitlin Roach’s poems stare into and through the truth with a blazing intensity. This is a book about control (self-inflicted and external), about watching and being watched (by oneself, by others, by the state), and about the desperate search for meaning in a world that feels increasingly violent and filled with despair.

Caitlin Roach is a poet originally from San Diego, California. Her poems appear in Best New Poets (2023, 2021, and 2017), Narrative Magazine, Tin House, The Iowa Review, jubilat, Poetry Daily, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the Provost Fellow and a Postgraduate Fellow. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, she lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, the essayist José Orduña, and their two sons. 

Lisa Wells is the author of Believers, a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her debut collection of poetry, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. A new book, The Fire Passage, was selected by Diane Seuss for the Levis Prize in Poetry and will be published by Four Way Books in 2025.

Her essays have been published in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, N+1, The New York Times, The Best American Science & Nature Writing, and The Best American Food and Travel Writing. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with the writer Joshua Marie Wilkinson and helps edit the Kuhl House Poets Series.