This selection, chosen by guest editor nat raum, is from Split Daughter of Eve by Catherine Gonick (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025).
Newcomers
The only Jews in town, my father’s family was respected. The churchgoers in Red Oak, Iowa, considered them People of the Book they hadn’t read.
Kindergarten was a huge surprise, a place where everyone spoke another language and no one understood my father’s.
By the time a boy on the playground told him the Jews killed Christ, my father knew enough English to ask, “Who’s that?”
I don’t know if his parents, Yiddish speaking atheists from Odessa, provided an answer to his question. In 1916, America was at peace, little boys
in Red Oak could still watch horses pull a fire engine through the streets, and, as People of the Book, my grandparents might have felt safe there from pogroms.
Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Sheila-Na-Gig,The Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, One Art, Of The Book, The Nu Review,Judith, Nashim, and The New Verse News. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Poetic License Press; Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing, Beacon Press; Dead of Winter 2021, Milk & Cake Press; Support Ukraine, Moonstone Press; and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice, Anhinga Press. Her poems have been featured in Verse Daily and Best American Poetry: Pick of the Week. She is a winner of the Ina Coolbrith Prize for Poetry and was a finalist in the Louisville Actors Theatre 10-Minute Play Contest. A native of California’s Bay Area, she lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, and works with him in a company that slows the rate of global warming.
nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They hold an MFA from the University of Baltimore and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Past and upcoming publishers of their work include Poet Lore, beestung, Baltimore Beat, Split Lip Magazine, BRUISER, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.
This selection, chosen by guest editor nat raum, is from Split Daughter of Eve by Catherine Gonick (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025).
Being Treated as Dead
How tribal it feels, like being shunned by Amish, shown the dirt road out from a Pilgrim town, forbidden to place a last offering
of flowers in a palm leaf basket at the village shrine in Bali. But even a family of two sisters is a tribe.
A radioactive horse between us couldn’t decay fast enough for us to outlive its halflives. She disowned me, left me
for dead, like a daughter of Orthodox Jews who marries a goy. Did she sit shiva, cover mirrors? Does she light
yahrzeit candles? I’m wearing a shroud, so can’t understand how she can still send cards for Christmas and my birthday,
containing still more cards entitling me to free coffee. Is she buying time? Will I be dead only for a decade, like an ostracized
Athenian official? If life, as a Buddhist teacher said, boils down to three words, not always so, do I try to detach
from both hope and fear? I feel like Schrödinger’s cat, condemned to remain both dead and alive, or half
of an entangled pair of sub-atomic particles that can’t unknow each other, from any distance. After thirty years of not speaking
to her sister, our dying mother said, This is silly I should call her, but didn’t. Constellations revolve, above
and below the horizon. Tracked by stars, malign and kind—before death, who can say what’s final?
Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Sheila-Na-Gig,The Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, One Art, Of The Book, The Nu Review,Judith, Nashim, and The New Verse News. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Poetic License Press; Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing, Beacon Press; Dead of Winter 2021, Milk & Cake Press; Support Ukraine, Moonstone Press; and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice, Anhinga Press. Her poems have been featured in Verse Daily and Best American Poetry: Pick of the Week. She is a winner of the Ina Coolbrith Prize for Poetry and was a finalist in the Louisville Actors Theatre 10-Minute Play Contest. A native of California’s Bay Area, she lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, and works with him in a company that slows the rate of global warming.
nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They hold an MFA from the University of Baltimore and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Past and upcoming publishers of their work include Poet Lore, beestung, Baltimore Beat, Split Lip Magazine, BRUISER, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.
In Emilia Phillips’ Nonbinary Bird of Paradise (The University of Akron Press, 2024), God is many things: they are “a knot / that knows how to untie itself,” “the first/war,” a “voyeur, who gave / [the speaker] dreams to cover the dark / valley of [their] loneliness / with wildflowering / mosquitoes” (19, 21, 6). Overflowing with references to their upbringing in the church, Phillips chronicles the manifestations of gods in their childhood, weaving their own queerness into retellings of stories from the Judeo-Christian and classical canon. Nonbinary Bird of Paradise is a reckoning with, and reclamation of, this volatile past–both their personal history, and a greater human mythology stained with misogyny, queer erasure, and a relentless centering of heterosexuality.
The collection begins with a Genesis-like series of poems titled “Queerness of Eve” divided into twelve ‘books’ (no accident, seeing as the Old Testament depicts the twelve sons of Jacob, the early patriarchs of the Bible). In “Book IV,” the speaker conjoins their own mythology with that of Eve, writing, “Woman alwayssettled / on me like snow / on warm ground. Briefly” (Phillips 9). Phillips’ Eve feels no closeness with God or Adam, but rather holds a litany of unanswered questions; they write,
“I once
asked God the which
came first question
but he only answered
by taking
out his pencil
eraser to the concept
drawing. He was Adam’s
friend. Not mine.” (10)
Eve turns God’s own strategy against him to create a femme lover in “Book VI,” proclaiming, “God made man / in his own image, / so they say. / So I made a beloved / in mine” (Phillips 13). The forbidden fruit for this Eve, then, is not fruit at all, but rather “peachflesh / muscled in [their] cage” (Phillips 18). After she and Adam are exiled from the Garden of Eden following God’s discovery of her creation, she divulges, “No one / can exile / me from / desire, not / even / desire” (Phillips 22). In moments like these, Eve carves out an identity for herself in the very spaces in which God and Adam seek to erase her, asking, “How do I make silence / my gender?” (Phillips 9). Throughout the loneliness and subjugation of the “Queerness of Eve,” Phillips skillfully imbues the speaker with quiet resilience; Eve repeatedly returns to her inner fortitude in the midst of punishment from male forces that attempt to control and subdue her.
In the second part of Nonbinary Bird of Paradise, the reader is wrenched from this somber story of Eve’s exile and punishment for her defiance of God’s heteronormative hierarchies into the undeniable present; the two opening poems are about Wi-Fi and Google. The speaker still visits mythology, but from a distance; on a writer’s retreat, they sleep beneath a painting of the Rape of Io, a river god’s daughter who was raped by the Roman god Jupiter. This, again, interweaves with their own stories as they decide to leave their husband, telling the reader, “I called him to say / I was coming home / soon but not to / him” (Phillips 36). Later in this section, after more contemporary poems that discuss french horns and butterfly houses, the speaker again inhabits a Biblical woman: the nameless wife of Noah, describing life before and after the flood (here, in a series of poems titled “Antediluvian,” “Diluvian,” “Covenant,” and “Postdiluvian”). Phillips again revisits the dismissal of female voices by Biblical giants; the speaker describes how she
“kept
begging Noah to build slower
much slower, to never
finish, to save the world
by never hammering
the last nail
into the ark. What
did I know,
he wondered
aloud. I was
just a vessel,
like the ship.” (57)
By comparing Noah’s wife to the “captive stock” of the ship (ibid.), and likening the ark to a body being lowered into a grave (58), Phillips forces the reader to consider the manipulation of female lives in service of male whims and dreams.
In its third and final act, Nonbinary Bird of Paradise transports the reader from queer mourning into full-throated queer reclamation. Where there were motifs of profound, ancestral loss learned across generations (alongside dry, self-aware humor: in “Queerness of Eve,” the speaker admits, “You probably guessed / I created the female orgasm / all by my lonesome” (Phillips 3). In this Part Three, we encounter story after story of triumphant and playful defiance. Mythology and literature become a vehicle by which our speaker finds empowerment, a lineage of resistance. In “Emilia, Widow to Iago,” Shakespeare’s Othello serves as a method for our speaker to “dodge the dagger,” faking their death in order to escape cleaning up a man’s mess and avoid being his “rag and mop” (Phillips 74). In the next poem, the speaker again reminisces on a self they’ve shed in the voice of the naiad Daphne, who transformed into a tree to escape the sexual advances of Apollo. Resolute even in a new form, Daphne implores the reader:
“Women especially
hear me. If I had fallen with no one
around, I still would have
made a sound.” (Phillips 75)
The speaker embraces humor and sensuality as they do their queerness in Part Three as well, savoring the sonics of the words “lesbian elephants” as they fantasize about draping their trunk over their lover’s shoulders “like a boa constrictor” (Phillips 84). Alongside other delights of Part Three, including a laugh-out-loud poem satirizing gender reveals (“We’re having a cigarette after sex! We’re having it! Like once or twice a week!” [Phillips 69]), the collection’s titular love poem also comes in this section. Phillips writes, “Would you stay/& watch me, even/though I have no blue velvet/skirt or ruby-raw/throat?” (63). The speaker imagines how they would woo their beloved as a bird-of-paradise, without the gendered anatomy to perform standard mating rituals.
In Nonbinary Bird of Paradise, Emilia Phillips critiques, mourns, and reinvents classical stories by giving female queer heroines a voice within their pages. These heroines search for Gods everywhere, and often are left wanting. But by the end of this collection, the speaker has identified a potent God to whom they can speak – that which exists in those they love. In the irreverently gorgeous “Artemis Wears A Strap-On”, they proclaim their worship for their lover: “What is godlike in you,/ I’ll godden” (Phillips 79). I have found much to godden in the vividly transporting pages of Phillips’ fifth collection, Nonbinary Bird of Paradise.
Catie Macauley (they/he/she) is a transmasculine aspiring poet living and working in Boston. They study Sociology, Environmental Studies, and English at Wellesley College, where they also compete on the Wellesley Whiptails frisbee team and perform with the Wellesley Shakespeare Society. A Best of the Net 2024 Nominee, his writing has appeared in brawl lit, The Wellesley News, and the Young Writer’s Project, among other publications. In their free time, Catie enjoys boxing, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and buying far too many books at independent bookstores – primarily the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where they are somehow lucky enough to work.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “The Enthusiasm of Influence,” a workshop led by Sandra Marchetti on Wednesday, October 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).
We’ve all heard of the “anxiety” of influence. Have you ever struggled to pin down who or what is influencing your writing? Do you want to learn how to write with your influences instead of against them? Do you worry that acknowledging your influences makes your work less likely to be taken seriously? Do you want to find out more about what makes you, you on the page? If so, this workshop will help you to sleuth your voice.
You will learn how your influences are working in your writing, how to make an influence-driven exercise into a polished piece, and how and when to “steal” from writers you love. Literary “influencers” like Jessica Rae Bergamino, Ansel Elkins, and Colm Tóibín will be discussed. Bring two influential texts (art, poems, music!) to share, a pre-existing draft of your own that you want to revise, and some blank notebook paper!
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Sandra Marchetti via Venmo:@Sandra-Marchetti-1.
Sandra Marchettiis the 2023 winner of The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Poetry Book of the Year. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, DIORAMA, from Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2025), Aisle 228 (SFA Press, 2023), and Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015). Sandy is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry and essays appear widely in Mid-American Review, Blackbird, Ecotone, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She is Poetry Editor Emerita at River Styx Magazine. Sandy earned an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from George Mason University and now serves as the Assistant Director of Academic Support at Harper College in Chicagoland.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Bleah Patterson. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, October 26th, 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!
Bleah Patterson is a queer, southern poet from Texas. Much of her work explores the contention between identity and home and has been featured or is forthcoming in various journals including Electric Literature, Pinch, Grist, The Laurel Review, Phoebe Literature, The Rumpus, and Taco Bell Quarterly.
This selection, chosen by guest editor nat raum, is from Split Daughter of Eve by Catherine Gonick (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025).
Deus Absconditus
Jesus looks at me from his cross and I suddenly know: He’s only human. He says my name. Heaven has changed, but our second-grade nun didn’t hear. She keeps reading aloud, preparing the class for First Holy Communion.
My mother throws a coat over her nightgown to drive me to mass, then waits in the car with a book. My father’s Jewish. They’re both atheists.
If I could go outside, I might see God as an almost-face in a cloud. And feel the warm breath of the Holy Ghost. Those two like being invisible. When I asked why, Sister said, It’s a mystery.
I stare at Jesus. He stays silent. What if he came down? I could wipe the blood from his hands, comb his matted hair. We could go for a walk. I would share my sandwich.
Jesus looks like he’s thinking it over. But he doesn’t move. How am I supposed to live the rest of my life?
A priest comes in, points to a water stain under the crucifix tells us it looks like Golgotha. I see a dingy wall and feel embarrassed by the show. God deserves more. Yet I need to be kind.
Certainty ends, longing begins. Many years later I learn that when Pompey conquered Jerusalem, drove his chariot through streets of golden stone, he entered the Holy of Holies, the Temple’s most sacred space, and was amazed to find it was an empty room.
Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Sheila-Na-Gig,The Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, One Art, Of The Book, The Nu Review,Judith, Nashim, and The New Verse News. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Poetic License Press; Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing, Beacon Press; Dead of Winter 2021, Milk & Cake Press; Support Ukraine, Moonstone Press; and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice, Anhinga Press. Her poems have been featured in Verse Daily and Best American Poetry: Pick of the Week. She is a winner of the Ina Coolbrith Prize for Poetry and was a finalist in the Louisville Actors Theatre 10-Minute Play Contest. A native of California’s Bay Area, she lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, and works with him in a company that slows the rate of global warming.
nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They hold an MFA from the University of Baltimore and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Past and upcoming publishers of their work include Poet Lore, beestung, Baltimore Beat, Split Lip Magazine, BRUISER, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.
This selection, chosen by guest editor nat raum, is from Split Daughter of Eve by Catherine Gonick (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025).
Born of Polish Women
Our world, a long gray river contained by an overturned basin of sky, a single pewter cloud. Yet within the house find the snow-white-red embroidered softness of our Christmas dinner napkin, a joyous bosom, sprouting winter berries. Christ’s blood flows toward us all the year as we kneel in churches where no lady-breast will spill wine upon the altar clothing, no milk is served at mass.
Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Sheila-Na-Gig,The Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, One Art, Of The Book, The Nu Review,Judith, Nashim, and The New Verse News. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Poetic License Press; Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing, Beacon Press; Dead of Winter 2021, Milk & Cake Press; Support Ukraine, Moonstone Press; and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice, Anhinga Press. Her poems have been featured in Verse Daily and Best American Poetry: Pick of the Week. She is a winner of the Ina Coolbrith Prize for Poetry and was a finalist in the Louisville Actors Theatre 10-Minute Play Contest. A native of California’s Bay Area, she lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, and works with him in a company that slows the rate of global warming.
nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They hold an MFA from the University of Baltimore and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Past and upcoming publishers of their work include Poet Lore, beestung, Baltimore Beat, Split Lip Magazine, BRUISER, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from FishWife by Alysse McCanna (Black Lawrence Press, 2024).
THE MERMAID
She comes to me phantasm, midnight- blurry, my wishwife in salmon petticoat, flushed flutter and click of her pink- & grey-
scale. Her upside-down boat, my wet bell: seaweed cloud, indigo rust, her pitted coral cheek. I pocket bubbles, knot my fingers
into the anchor’s chain, reach for her slick neck and a sip of breath. O widow, hail the siren’s ruin: she promises a shipwreck
soon, drowns his fists & sways the moon, tomorrow he’ll be no more. Sand notches my cheek: awake, ashore. I steady
my vision—her fishface echoes—against the horizon and begin the day’s search. Fisherman, sailor, husband. Scanning
for the blur of boat that signals his return. A friend invites me for sushi, her tongue tempting with superwhite tuna melting like a pat of butter.
She manipulates another fleshy bite with her chopsticks. The pink flash of her tongue carries me back into dream
and the world monochromes. Gasping in the moon pool, all silver-blue and seasalt- white, her line cast, hook fast in the corner
of my mouth. She sighs a promise of gills but still I hear his fist, hard and steady, keeping time. Our diving bell sinks deeper
into the mirrored world, her mouth hard against mine in this, our last act, final art. O widow, hail the siren’s ruin:
she promises a shipwreck soon, drowns his fists & sways the moon, tomorrow he’ll be no more.
Alysse Kathleen McCanna is the author of FishWife (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Alysse’s chapbook Pentimento won the 2017 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her work has been supported by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tucson Festival of Books, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA from Bennington College, and serves as Associate Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine. Alysse is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Mountain College in the Vail Valley.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from FishWife by Alysse McCanna (Black Lawrence Press, 2024).
WOMAN TURNED INSIDE OUT
This is what a healthy pink vagina looks like the doctor says to the intern
The room is white, glinting metal caught in fluorescence, half-closed shades betraying a litter-strewn park
Girl will hold this compliment inside for a long time
even as woman, when her hands are raw- pink from dishy soapwater, her body strange, turned inside out like a housewife’s yellow gloves
like a blossom or a wallet or a womb, a nicer word than uterus—too raw, too empty,
such a nicer word than matrix or mold, pear or purse. Why pink? Why is pink compliment?
A man she loved, of goodish devillooks, said he loved her pink and also her mind
but what he really meant was I am lucky you are so blind to the bruise that is my love sting-pink and singing, high note of honor
Woman stands in line at the gas station, smells the aftermath of a cologne
so familiar yet untraceable that she flees, throws up in the parking lot, asphalt home to half-cigarettes, Styrofoam, now the body’s memory:
pink on the blacktop, bird flown from cage, the body’s language, a shout that becomes
a kind of singing.
Alysse Kathleen McCanna is the author of FishWife (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Alysse’s chapbook Pentimento won the 2017 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her work has been supported by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tucson Festival of Books, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA from Bennington College, and serves as Associate Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine. Alysse is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Mountain College in the Vail Valley.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from FishWife by Alysse McCanna (Black Lawrence Press, 2024).
THE SCIENTIST
Old friend, always leaving half of a sandwich for me, slipping her best cards beneath the table— a trick. Her hands, lithic. Cold,
precise as soft claw. Just her finger on my forehead and my lip, quivering.
What natural history, our affair— strata like necklaces laced, then undone. Each catalyst preserved perfect as the day it was doomed,
my hands too small to reach the thistle- nest of her closely guarded church.
The ability to predict catastrophe this far in advance is zero, Doctor— her affection sparks a flight of birds burning shadow
a feather’s width of whiskey and my fingers stroking the rough buzz of her scalp. Ancient, these flutters.
Alysse Kathleen McCanna is the author of FishWife (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Alysse’s chapbook Pentimento won the 2017 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her work has been supported by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tucson Festival of Books, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA from Bennington College, and serves as Associate Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine. Alysse is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Mountain College in the Vail Valley.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
