Nicky Beer
Nicky Beer’s work offers a strikingly diverse and complex sensuality—whether discovering the handicraft of Venusians in the lacework of a cancer cell, the assembly line decadence in a Van Dyck portrait, or the myth of a kraken monster magically devouring a waking city in the cloudy visions of Rimbaud. She is a collector of states of mind and visionary landscapes rendered in language which is radiant and necessary.

Kara Candito
Kara Candito specializes in a poetry of the unflinching gaze, a penetrating investigation of the difficult situation and the accused self entangled in it. In sharp, crisp language she delivers challenges (“Say something interesting and I might stay/ for five minutes”) and sticks around to see what happens. Her interrogation searches through crime and punishment, damage and regret, rapture and betrayal, arriving at nuanced revelations of pain and self-realization. 

Thomas Cooper
Thomas Cooper’s character driven fiction provides a story that is often in equal parts poignant and hilarious. His primary creation is Captain Carlson, a sorry drunk with a mean streak a mile wide, and what Cooper achieves is the grudging affection that we assign to an immoral, cruel, and broken man. The redemption that Captain manages is earned through a reader’s respect, a deft authorial maneuver that endows the Captain with a soul.

Anna Journey
Steamy and athletic, transgressive yet wise, Anna Journey’s poems display rich sonic effects that amplify rapidly developing action and imagery, impelling her readers along the paths of astonishment described by Joseph Conrad’s Stein in Lord Jim: “in the destructive element immerse.” The manifold selves these poems reveal construct a Baudelairean personal mythology, erotic and spiritual, promising to “lie in your hot shallows and, with our / dark smiles, raise your pulse.”

Taylur Thu Hien Ngo
Taylur Ngo’s fiction lives in the interstices between what we know and what we expect. A boy and a rooster make a home in a neighborhood where belonging means moving out. The author spins us into the fabric of the boy’s concern for his jury-rigged life, and fosters our understanding that some things can’t be fixed. As Ngo tells us, “A hen’s good eyesight allowed her to face her killer with an awful clarity, but for all the daily squawking, chickens choked once cornered.”