The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Brynn Martin. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, April 25th, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/sundress with the password “safta”.
Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!
The theme for April’s Poetry Xfit is “Joy.” In the uncertain, dispiriting, and often violent times we are living through, it can be difficult to hold onto comfort and, even more so, happiness. While writing is often a tool to process trauma and hopelessness, it is just as important to find and celebrate joy and warmth through the gloom.
Brynn Martin (she/her) is a Midwesterner at heart, but she has spent the last decade living in Knoxville, where she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Tennessee. She is an Associate Editor for Sundress Publications and the event manager for an indie bookstore. Her poetry has appeared in Contrary Magazine, Rogue Agent, FIVE:2:ONE, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Writing the Speculative Diaspora,” a workshop led by Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin on Wednesday, April 8th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: SAFTA).
Every story is a diaspora story, and every diaspora story is speculative in nature. In this craft talk and workshop, open to all genres, students will gain an appreciation for diaspora stories and be able to spot and understand the presence of the speculative within them. We’ll discuss perspectives on diaspora narratives from authors such as Ocean Vuong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, R.F. Kuang, and Ling Ma; diaspora stories’ role in challenging western storytelling conventions; and how diaspora pushes against genre, concepts of truth and authenticity, and the confines of individuality and representation. We’ll then discover the speculative diaspora form and its potential, and explore the speculative diaspora through writing prompts such as truth/lie (“speculative truth”)/dream activities and a collective storytelling exercise.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin via Venmo: @kylayen or PayPal @KylaYenHuynhGiffin
Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin (they/them) is a queer and trans, biracial, Vietnamese American diaspora writer whose speculative work focuses on diaspora, transness, ecology, empire, and intergenerational histories. They are a Press Editor for Half Mystic Press, a Co-Coordinator for Sundress Publications’ Poets in Pajamas, and an Associate Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. Kyla-Yến’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and appears in The Offing, Oroboro, Vănguard, and other publications. They have been awarded residencies, workshops, and/or fellowships from Tin House, the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA), Seventh Wave, Abode Press, and more.
This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block (The Word Works 2025).
Allegory With Human Host
Trust me like the little dog has to, having been so denatured. Having so little to do with a wolf. Follow me to a sinking city where the weather hums, where the leaves grow monster-wide.
I put my faith in larvicide and lizards, in the tongues of frogs. I built a house from salt and fossil shells.
Outside the bullfrog sings for his bride, for the mouse and the limp-tailed rat. The tail of a cat or some animal flicks at the slats of our bedroom window.
I told our boy, in so many words, the fate of foxes. I told him the tree frog is a friend— that even poison has its place. But still he woke with a red ring rising from his side.
A ring of roses is either an amulet or an ornament. Either way I hung a wreath outside our door.
I said trust me like the little dog has to. Trust me, son, to be the mother that all soft animals require and the little dog laughed.
Mary Block (she/her) is the author of Love from the Outer Bands (Word Works Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Nimrod International Journal, and Sonora Review, among other publications, and can be found online at Rattle, SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer—The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, a 2018 Best of the Net finalist, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Mary lives in her hometown of Miami, Florida with her spouse, her young children, and her old dachshund. She is an editor at SWWIM.
Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.
This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block (The Word Works 2025).
My Body Writes Me a Sonnet
Having coalesced around you, how I love you. You are the one I breathe through the night for. I take flesh in my mouth each day and chew it into something that serves you, something more than I can give you. I try to teach you what I know, adopted child, about the past. The bone-bent grief of the people who made you to survive in snow you’ve never seen, to bare your teeth at anyone getting too close to your kids or your sweet, soft life. And all the times I endured your laxatives and relaxers, I knew that you did it to protect me, to make less of me to hate. Be sure that I love you. And, of course, that I’ll outlive you. And you haven’t asked, but of course, I forgive you.
Mary Block (she/her) is the author of Love from the Outer Bands (Word Works Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Nimrod International Journal, and Sonora Review, among other publications, and can be found online at Rattle, SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer—The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, a 2018 Best of the Net finalist, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Mary lives in her hometown of Miami, Florida with her spouse, her young children, and her old dachshund. She is an editor at SWWIM.
Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.
This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block (The Word Works 2025).
Panic Attack on an Airplane, With My Daughter
I start to pray but then I remember there is no God. Philadelphia stutters below us all in our bullet, seatbelted, flying inside of a cumulus hell, hot and endless around me, autonomic and nervous, losing sensation, fingers taloned around the armrest, riding the current up and tensing for the fall, for the scream and the shudder of welding, of metal kicked through the air like a can, like a bean, my baby, the body I grew from a seed strapped into this contraption, rising and falling with me, the mother, the maker of this and all decisions, wild-eyed and clawing around for the barf bag, breathing, the bag like a heart pumping carbon dioxide into my brain, getting lighter and rising up through the holes in my scalp and my skin, floating over my daughter, the vagus outline of her in the middle seat, next to a stranger, tied to this thing with its wings and fabric, coffee and sweat suspended in air with me, my body below in the chair, sitting rigid and pointless next to my daughter, praying to pass out, brainless, a primitive animal begging to leave her young.
Mary Block (she/her) is the author of Love from the Outer Bands (Word Works Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Nimrod International Journal, and Sonora Review, among other publications, and can be found online at Rattle, SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer—The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, a 2018 Best of the Net finalist, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Mary lives in her hometown of Miami, Florida with her spouse, her young children, and her old dachshund. She is an editor at SWWIM.
Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.
This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block (The Word Works 2025).
Never Adopt, Says the Cabdriver.
That’s not your blood. That’s not your child. Adopted will kill you in your sleep with a mop handle pressed against your neck. Adopted will tie you up with the strings of your own guitar. And like his car I’m suddenly dangerous. Strangely intimate. Something jumped into without enough thought. I’m not, to this man, just short of a secret. A child attempting to pass for a real child. A second-best. A cuckoo in the nest. A joke between sitcom siblings, shorthand for Something is wrong here. For You don’t really belong here.
Mary Block (she/her) is the author of Love from the Outer Bands (Word Works Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Nimrod International Journal, and Sonora Review, among other publications, and can be found online at Rattle, SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer—The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, a 2018 Best of the Net finalist, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Mary lives in her hometown of Miami, Florida with her spouse, her young children, and her old dachshund. She is an editor at SWWIM.
Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.
Ally Ang’s Let the Moon Wobble (Alice James Books, 2025) is a timely poetry collection rich with bold reclamations of life from systems designed to harm. Ang’s unapologetic poetic voice is inspiring; they announce their queerness with the power of community behind every word, writing, “queer as in death to cops and politicians! / May they live their every waking moment / afraid of what the people will do to them” (47). The defiance throughout Let the Moon Wobble is a call to action for all; Ang asserts that the world can change for the better if we can imagine it, manifest it, and celebrate ourselves for all that we are and all that we have been through.
Let the Moon Wobble is organized into three sections with “Invocation” proceeding them. This poem’s first line is the title of the entire collection, and each subsequent line begins with “Let…” Ang here invites readers into a type of prayer, a summoning of what we need to heal, to be safe, to connect with the best parts of ourselves:
“Let the basil plant flower.
Let the poets discombobulate.
Let the verbs noun. Let the nouns verb.
Let the grief howl.” (1)
As a poet myself, I love the line above about allowing writers to be inventive with language, to take so-called standard grammatical rules as mere suggestions. Ang is reaching for a world where every single thing, big or small, is safe to be as it needs to be: the basil plant, the moon, the grief. Upon reading this poem, I was reminded of Walt Whitman’s “Transpositions,” a short poem in which he similarly calls for a reversal of power dynamics, of what is wrongfully accepted without enough resistance. “Invocation” ends on a repeated call for the people to be free, a notion asserted throughout the collection.
One of the most touching poems of the collection for me is “June 23, 1982,” dedicated to Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man murdered by two white men who ended up not receiving any jail time. Ang starts the poem sweetly:
“Vincent shyly kissing his fiancée at the bar
egged on by his friends’ pillowing laughter
Vincent, face warm and aglow
after just two beers
Vincent, pulling a strand of her shiny black hair
off the sleeve of his coat and tucking it
into his breast pocket…” (18)
Words like pillowing and warm show that Vincent is safe, surrounded by loved ones and feeling loved. The small gesture of saving the hair strand, keeping it close to his heart, becomes more heartbreaking as we are guided towards the tragic end of the night. Ang foreshadows the darkness ahead for readers who have not skipped to the note section before proceeding to read “June 23, 1982” with the lines, “Vincent, mother’s only baby, assuring her / that this would be his last time going out” and how “it’s bad luck to say last time” (18). This poem serves as an elegiac ode to the life and goodness Vincent had, as well as a condemnation of the “good boys, / not the kind of men you send to jail” (19) and the racist and patriarchal systems designed to protect the few and enact violence on the many.
In their insistence on creativity, ingenuity, and joy, Ang employs a number of unique poetic forms as containers for sometimes heavy subject matter. For example, “Heartbreak Mad Libs” uses the form of the classic game to make space for possibility within a set script. Readers can fill in their own answers to categories such as “# of your lover’s hairs stuck in the shower drain,” “type of love you lacked in childhood,” and “the source of the light in your eyes” (37). Ang here is offering a tool for healing, for readers to walk into and through their own heartbreak, reaching hope on the other side. “The Truth Is” is a multiple choice poem, similarly giving readers, and themself as poet, space to explore and invite options. The truth does not need to be one thing, Ang seemingly asserts; it can change over time, it is different from person to person, etc. Other poem titles like “Quars Poetica” and “Owed to My Father’s Accent” are playful with craft words; ars poetica is queered, an ode is combined with reverence and due credit.
In the penultimate poem, “You Deserve the World,” Ang writes,
“The world has ended before,
and before and before, and for some, there was
no after. We have watched its rind cracking open
like a freshly-broken heart, and each time
we build and rebuild.” (61)
I see echoes here of Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, The World Goes On, and of the afro-futurist notion that the apocalypse has already happened. Despite this reality, Ang is a part of the survival; they are a part of the continued living, full of desire, hope, joy, culture, energy, and strength. The title phrase “you deserve the world” is an affirmation that we have every right to live, to be our full selves, and to enjoy a safe world, including all of its pleasures, treasures, and wonders.
Let the Moon Wobble is a brilliant debut collection I encourage all readers of contemporary poetry to get their hands on. Ang’s words act as an invitation to incite joy, a decree of justice, a celebration of queerness, and a mastering of poetic voice amidst a large variety of form. In “The Moon, Abstracted,” Ang writes, “From Palestine / to West Papua, from Puerto Rico / to Hawai’i, from Congo to Sudan, / from the river to the sea. / … / May every / oppressed tongue know the taste / of water, honey, freedom, freedom” (10). I firmly stand with Ang in this call for freedom, safety, and nourishment for all. As Ang invokes, may we see this come to fruition in our lifetimes.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of feathering and Honey in My Hair. She is Cofounder and Managing Editor at Two Cardinals Literary. At Sundress Publications, she serves as Assistant Chapbook Editor. Livia has been awarded recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the City of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA in poetry, she teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level.
I wish I could speak to a transformative, empowering journey of childhood reading, but I don’t think my relationship to creative writing really began to mean anything until I was 15. I grew up in suburban Tennessee near Knoxville and towards the end of elementary school, I moved to a suburb of Seattle. Like many other writers, my childhood had been punctuated by whatever book I was then reading, and then the next (Little House on the Prairie, or YA romances later on), but only when my relationship to poetry was complicated by workshop did creative writing emerge as something essential to me.
The summer after 10th grade, I had the opportunity to attend the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and have Logan Hoffman-Smith as my teacher, in addition to several lovely classmates. By then, I was already infatuated with writing. I obsessed over rhythm or the perfect turn of phrase; I turned in poems that I’d written about love, trauma, or loss. The workshop had been titled Troubling the Voice, and indeed, Logan urged me to interrogate my writing more sincerely. I think about their advice to me all the time: that I have to be writing about either what I either really want to talk about or what I really don’t want to talk about at all, and what I was already saying—supposedly about love and loss—was not that.
Since then, I’ve been trying to ask myself every week what compels me to write and why I keep returning to writing in the first place. I’m a freshman in college now, and one upside of such a transitional period in life is that I finally feel like I have some sort of answer.
I love stories about people who spend too much time on the internet and kids who are up to all kinds of weird, stupid stuff; I love characters who are too angry, hurt, or confused. I’m not a fiction writer quite yet but those depictions of shame and grief in others’ work informs so much about my own artistic creation, whether in poems or elsewhere. For example, reading Alexander Chee’s personal essay “The Autobiography of My Novel” or Kelly X. Hui’s short story “Iphigenia” for the first time felt life-changing. In 11th grade, I took an art history class, and I still relate one installation we learned about—Pepón Osorio’s En la barbería no se llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop)—to moments in my life all the time.
Above everything else, in my own work and in engaging with others’, I’m thinking about it in the context of things like queerness, Asianness, borders/diaspora, and ongoing forces of imperialism and colonialism. Kelly X. Hui and Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong (a past Sundress intern!) are both incredible, lovely writers—who I admittedly and sentimentally see as older cousin-ish figures—and they lead their creative lives with so much astonishing dedication to the communities around them.
Like Kaylee and Kelly, I want to ask what kind of world we are building with and for each other while creating art. Another one of my friends (she’s so brilliant…) told me once, years ago, that for the process of revision, her goal is to locate the heart of a story or poem and, from there, ask how best it can be brought to the surface. That’s how I’ve tried to approach writing ever since.
More about me: I love postcards, sincere emails, bridges, shakshuka, the movie God’s Own Country, and I hope to figure out the short-story-writing thing soon.
I’m so excited to see where my time at Sundress takes me. Sundress takes so much initiative to platform underrepresented voices and create a more accessible literary community, and I’m so grateful to be able to play a part in that.
Ruoyu Wang is a writer from Seattle. Their poems appear in Sine Theta Magazine, COUNTERCLOCK, and The Shore, and have been recognized by YoungArts, The Adroit Journal, and Narrative Magazine, among others. Currently, they serve as the Founding Director of the SUNHOUSE Summer Writing Mentorship and study Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. They love linguistics, postcards, live music, and jasmine milk tea.
This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block (The Word Works 2025).
Diluvian Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you when the tide defeats the town. May you find a way to get your kids to Georgia. May the wind die down. May the sun show you mercy, the former inhabitant of an elaborate circuit of thermally optimized dwellings and automobiles. May the rain fall soft on your broken city, pitch black, dazzling in its downed power lines, volatile snakeheads sparking and snapping, hissing at legions of disinterred dinosaurs, liquefied, blooming from the exhaust pipe of a surrendering god on his way to the state line, hands at ten and two.
Mary Block (she/her) is the author of Love from the Outer Bands (Word Works Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Nimrod International Journal, and Sonora Review, among other publications, and can be found online at Rattle, SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer—The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, a 2018 Best of the Net finalist, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Mary lives in her hometown of Miami, Florida with her spouse, her young children, and her old dachshund. She is an editor at SWWIM.
Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.
This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Language of a Wound is Love by Megha Sood (FlowerSong Press 2025).
Ten Ways of Looking at Hunger
I
Stars dazzle in the ashen sky on a cold night streaming and making long traces of hopes bouncing from one end to another, tracing a path for you to place your wish. A wish is hunger in its infancy.
II
A simmering passion rises from the dearth of your acceptance, birthing at the corners of your mouth. Lingering desire scorched by societal norms and you wait to exist in a different dimension. The language of the wound is love.
III
A cold gaze on the morning of the funeral waits to gulp down the memories, as you bury the remnants of your happiness in a warm womb of trowled earth, whose skin is broken by the lash of overnight rains. Acceptance is a fallacy.
IV
An incessant desire to look for the likeness of the soul, as your identity sits like a square knob in the circular opening of this godforsaken life, and your identity is solely defined by what lies between your soft supple thighs. Love is an elegy for acceptance.
V
An uninterrupted clacking of soft beaks, as it waits for the next morsel, pushed down its supple throat as fledglings make their home in the oak tree in my courtyard and I think of a thousand ways to call their hunger my own.
VI
A desire for survival as the frail scorched hands of a child hold the photo of their bombed city, carrying the identity of a refugee, looking for a stranger’s embrace. A single night demarcates your identity.
VII
Searching for a definition of elusive peace, as he breaks another morsel from the dried rye bread making a constellation around his courtyard, giving sustenance to the gray-winged visitors flocking his courtyard. A lame excuse to fill the emptiness in his weary old heart.
VIII
A life nothing but a deluge of expectations, waiting to jump across the gushing terrain, in a race for survival, spawning only to meet death in a run for life. A shimming desire in the cold white eye of a salmon.
IX
An unsung, unfinished lullaby that will haunt their existence forever, as they decide on the color of the coffin matching the dress of her doll, thinking of ways to bring that last phantom smile to her face.
X
Hunger speaks in thousands of ways, in a language unknown to many, and yet cleaves a soul asking for more. Making thin sluices of suffering, desire, and loneliness, scratching a path in our existence to carry pain. A flute carved deep to sustain melody
Megha Sood (she/her) is an award-winning Asian-American author, poet, editor, and literary activist from New Jersey. She is Literary Partner with “Life in Quarantine” at Stanford University. Her works have been supported by the National League of American Pen Women, VONA, Kundiman, Dodge Foundation, Pen Women, and Martha’s Vineyard Creative Writing Institute. Her four poetry collections include the award-winning My Body Lives Like a Threat (FlowerSong Press, 2022), My Body is not an Apology (Finishing Lines Press, 2021), Language of the Wound is Love (FlowerSong Press, 2025). She was recently inducted as an honored listee for the 125-year-old Marquis Who’s Who. A 2020 National Level Winner for the Poetry Matters Project, and a Four-Time State Level Winner for the NAMI NJ Dara Axelrod Poetry Award, Megha is a member of National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW), The Artists Forum (USA), ArtPride (NJ), and United Nations Association-US Chapter. She has also been chosen as a featured poet for the 2024 Dodge Poetry Festival. Her widely anthologized poems, essays, and other works discuss her experience as a first-generation immigrant and woman of color. Her 900++ works have been widely featured in print, online journals, public exhibits, and anthologies. Her co-edited anthology The Medusa Project and other works have been selected to be sent to the moon in 2025 as part of the historical LunarCodex Project in collaboration with NASA. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and her 14-year-old son. Find her at https://linktr.ee/meghasood.
Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.
