(Masks and Proof of Vaccination Required)
Mary Biddinger’s new poetry collection is Department of Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). Her poems have recently been published in Bennington Review, Crazyhorse, Couplet Poetry, Pithead Chapel, and Thrush Poetry Journal, among others. Flash fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Always Crashing, DIAGRAM, Gone Lawn, On the Seawall, and West Trestle Review. She teaches at the University of Akron and in the NEOMFA program, and edits the Akron Series in Poetry for the University of Akron Press.
Kamden Ishmael Hilliard was born in California and grew up as a military settler in Hawai’i. They are a graduate of Punahou School, The University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (BA, American Studies) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (MFA, Poetry). Kamden is the recipient of grants, fellowships, and residencies. Kamden prefers Kam and published three chapbooks of poetry prior to their debut full-length collection of poems, MissSettl (Nightboat Books, 2022); they are a board member at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, the 2020–2022 Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing, and reader at Flypaper Lit. Kam can always be found on the internet at www.kamdenihilliard.com. They are currently at work on a second book of poems, a fourth chapbook of poems, and a prose collection.
Valerie Hsiung is a poet, writer, interdisciplinary artist, and the author of several poetry and hybrid writing collections, including outside voices, please (CSU Poetry Center, winner of the Open Book Competition, 2021), as well as To love an artist (Essay Press, forthcoming), hummingbird et partygirl (Essay Press, forthcoming), Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners, 2020), YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books, 2020), and ef g (Action, 2016). Her poethics is concerned with thresholds (btw speech & song, the literal & the symbolic, the private & the mythic, the ecologic & the cosmic, the political & the metaphysical, the hypogeal & the levitational, hermitage & pilgrimage, the scientific & the incantatory, the heavy & the petty, deadpan & burlesque, and Mackey’s orphic & orphan), the opaque and the incorrect and the lag as they exist within eco-crip time, modes of decomposition, and ongoingness/chronicity. Her work can be found in places such as The Nation, The Believer, New Delta Review, The Adroit Journal, Ghost Proposal, Black Sun Lit, The Rumpus, Chicago Review, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, and beyond. She has performed at Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance, The Poetry Project, Poetic Research Bureau, and Shapeshifter Lab, and her writing has been commissioned by Montez Press Radio and Downs & Ross. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives between nowhere and somewhere.
