Issue Two Bios
September 2025
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Dan Alter is the author of two collections of poetry: My Little Book of Exiles (Eyewear, 2002), winner of the Cowan Poetry Prize, and Hills Full of Holes (Fernwood, 2025). He is also the translator of Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited (Ben Yehuda, 2024) from the Hebrew of Yakir Ben-Moshe. His poems, reviews, and translations have been published widely. He works at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley.
Karen Leona Anderson is the author of the poetry collections Receipt (Milkweed Editions) and Punish honey (Carolina Wren). Her work has most recently appeared in POETRY, Pleiades, Little Star, Alaska Quarterly Review, ZYZZYVA, The Best American Poetry, and other journals and anthologies; her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Grant. She is a professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland.
Allen Braden's poetry collections are A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood (University of Georgia) and Elegy in the Passive Voice (University of Alaska/Fairbanks). His poems have been anthologized in The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Poetry: An Introduction, Best New Poets, and Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry. Assistant poetry editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments, Allen has received fellowships from the NEA and Artist Trust.
Emily Carlson is the author of Majestic Cut (Fernwood Press, winter 2025) and the chapbooks Why Misread a Cloud (Tupelo Press), I Have a Teacher (The Center for Book Arts), and Symphony No. 2 (Argos Books). Their writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from journals including Fence, Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, Speculative Nonfiction, and swamp pink.
Amy Evans Bauer's five-chapbook sequence includes and umbels (Jonathan Williams Chapbooks prize, US, 2020) and PASS PORT (Shearsman, UK, 2018). Together, these form the first transcript of her ongoing at-sea, cross-border installation SOUND((ING))S, which she has performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and waterfront locations internationally. Her poetry includes Suffrajitsu (Earthbound, UK, 2024), and her montages feature in Chicago Review, Jacket, and elsewhere. She currently teaches Creative Writing and Publishing at De Montfort University, co-organizes the Contemporary Innovative Poetry Research Seminar at the University of London’s Institute of English Studies, and is the publisher of Larynx Press.
Katey Funderburgh is a queer Colorado poet. She serves as a co-coordinator for the Incarcerated Writers Project of Phoebe Journal and she is a Poetry Alive! teaching fellow. Her work appears in The Blood Pudding, Where the Meadows Reside, and Josephine Quarterly, among others. Katey is a current MFA candidate at George Mason University.
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GTimothy Gordon’s collections include Dream Wind (Spirit-of-the-Ram), Ground of This Blue Earth (Edwin Mellen), and Everything Speaking Chinese, awarded the Riverstone Poetry Book Prize. He has been awarded NEA and NEH fellowships. His work appears in AGNI, American Literary Review, Cincinnati Review, Louisville Review, Mississippi Review, New York Quarterly, RHINO, and Texas Observer, several nominated for Pushcarts and Best of the Net. His latest collections Empty was published 2024, Blue Business in 2025, while Knowing is in publication review. Gordon divides lives between New Mexico/Texas borderland of the Chihuahuan Desert Southwest Organ Mountains and Asia.
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Tracy Taylor Grubbs is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores impermanence, interconnection, and the liminal space between self and other. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including Marin MOCA, The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Morris Graves Museum of Art. She received a grant from SF Arts Commission in 2023 and was nominated for an SF MOMA SECA award in 2022.
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Ben Gucciardi, originally from San Francisco, CA, is the author of The Beautiful Relations (Persea Books, 2026), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. His poems appear in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and elsewhere.
Anthony Lioi has published poetry in Blast Furnace, FAUNA, Now Hear This, Watershed, The Dark Mountain Project, The Green Humanities, Numinous, and Assaracus. He is at work on a book of poetry called Choirpunk. He lives on a creek called Second River in Montclair, New Jersey and teaches at the Juilliard School in New York.
Pepper Luboff is a Minneapolis-based writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Utah. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review and Projector, and her literary reviews have been published in Drunken Boat, OmniVerse, and Poetry Flash. She has a chapbook And when the time for the breaking with Ark Press, and her personal essays can be found on her blog Pigeon Review.
E.J. McAdams is a poet, artist, and collaborator exploring language and mark-making in the urban environment using procedures and improvisation with found and natural materials. He published his first book LAST (BlazeVOX [books]) in 2023. He has also published five chapbooks and had a solo exhibition, an installation called Trees Are Alphabets, at The Bronx Museum of the Arts. His poems have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Pamenar Online Magazine, The Paris Review, EOAGH, eccolinguistics, About Place Journal, unarmed journal, and others. A selection of his poems was collected in the anthology Poetics for the More-than-Human World, and he curated the Social-Environmental-Aesthetics reading at EXIT ART from 2009-2012.
Philip Metres has written thirteen books, including Dispatches from the Land of Erasure (2025) and Fugitive/Refuge (2024). He has translated five books of poetry from Russian. Winner of three Arab American Book Awards, a Guggenheim, and a Pushcart Prize, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, & Human Rights program at John Carroll University and teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Jesse Nathan has published a book of poems called Eggtooth, and his work appears in the New York Review of Books and The Paris Review. He lives in the East Bay.
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Molly Ponkevitch is a poet, single parent and caretaker currently located in the Pacific Northwest. They earned a B.A in English from the University of Oregon, an M.A. in Consciousness in Action and a certicate in ecotherapy from Southwestern college. Their work has been featured in Unbound Journal, Buck O' Magazine, From Whispers to Roars, Santa Fe Reporter, Plants & Poetry, Poetry X Hunger, barnowlpoetry.com, and is upcoming in Herstry. Their teachers include poets such as Ann Filemyr, Malena Mörling, and Garrett Hongo, to whom they give deep and continual thanks.
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Dimitri Psurtsev is a poet and translator who has written five books of poetry (Ex Roma
Tertia, Tengiz Notebook, Between, Tired Happiness, and Murka and Other Poems) alongside numerous translations of classics from English world literature. His poems in
English translation have appeared in The Dodge, Ergon, Guernica, Image, The Journal, The Offing, Presence, and World Literature Today. He teaches at Moscow State Linguistic University and lives with his wife Natalia outside Moscow.
Lila Robinett Tindall is a graduate from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi where she attained a Ph.D. in Creative Writing. She is a native East Texan relocated to Charleston, South Carolina. Her work can be found in Broad River Review, Vita Poetica, Ekstasis, and elsewhere.
John Shoptaw was raised in the dredged and logged and farmed Mississippi River bottomland of "Swampeast" Missouri. He teaches Dickinson and ecopoetry in UC Berkeley's English Department. His Times Beach won the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. His latest poetry collection is Near-Earth Object (Unbound Edition, 2024).
Matthew Zapruder is the author most recently of the poetry collections I Love Hearing Your Dreams (Scribner, 2024) and How to Continue (Economy Press, 2025). His books also include Why Poetry (Ecco/Harper Collins) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Saint Mary’s College of California and plays music with The Figments, The Date Nights, and O These Ghosts.
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