Andrea Lawlor. Photo: Ramin Talaie.

Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, edits fiction for Fence magazine, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their writing has appeared in various literary journals, including Ploughshares, Mutha, The Millions, and Encyclopedia, Vol. II. Their publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Rescue, hardback, 2017; Vintage, paperback, 2019), a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary and CLMP Firecracker Awards.

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An excerpt from Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl:

Paul considered real bookstores (as opposed to sex bookstores) the best places for afternoon cruising, the more serious cruising, date cruising. At night you were all set; you found yourself at a bar or party, drank drinks, met a person, and decamped with that person to a second location. Instant date. No need to arrange or plan, and complete flexibility in the likely case you found a more amenable situation at the last minute. Daytime cruising, when not at a tea dance or beer bust, required more finesse and more certainty. First off, both parties had more time to second-guess between the securing of the phone number and the calling of the phone number. Secondly, you saw the person in the harshest light and without any softening lens such as beer, wine, or whiskey. In Paul’s ranking of all possible daytime cruising locations, gay non-sex-shop bookstores ranked at the top: congregants within were most likely to be both out and literate, qualities Paul valued. He thought fondly of the hours he’d spent at Oscar Wilde or the Different Light back in New York or even the HQ 76 section of the university library’s stacks, though, to his endless disappointment, he’d only ever found library success in men’s rooms. Read More

Jaquira Díaz. Photo: Maria Esquinca.

Jaquira Díaz is the author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir (Algonquin, 2019), a Summer/Fall 2019 Indies Introduce Selection, a Fall 2019 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, a November 2019 Indie Next Pick, and a Library Reads October pick. Her work has been published in Rolling Stone, the Guardian, The FADER, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and The Best American Essays 2016, among other publications. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Kenyon Review, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A former visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s M.F.A. Program in creative writing and consulting editor at the Kenyon Review, she splits her time between Montreal and Miami Beach. Her second book, I Am Deliberate: A Novel, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books.

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An excerpt from Ordinary Girls:

As Papi tried to carry Mami toward our front door, she slid down and got loose, and all the street kids exploded, Pito and Anthony and Eggy calling out, “Light her up! Knock her out! Préndela!” It was the same kind of shouting we heard in our living room during boxing matches, my father and his friends knocking back Medallas in front of the TV, everybody jumping to their feet when Macho Camacho started wailing on José Luis Ramírez, hollering, Knock him out! Light him up! Préndelo!  Read More

Will Arbery. Photo: Victor Llorente.

Will Arbery is a playwright from Texas and Wyoming. His plays include Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Playwrights Horizons), Plano (Clubbed Thumb), Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (New Neighborhood), and Wheelchair (3 Hole). He’s a member of New Dramatists and an alum of The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, P73’s Interstate 73, Colt Coeur, Youngblood, and Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers Group. He’s currently the Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at Playwrights Horizons, where he is also under commission. His plays have received additional support from NYTW, The Vineyard, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Cape Cod Theater Project, The New Group, The Bushwick Starr, Alliance/Kendeda, and Tofte Lake Center. He received his M.F.A. from Northwestern and his B.A. from Kenyon College.

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An excerpt from Heroes of the Fourth Turning:

JUSTIN

I wanted to say something about the liberal… The nice young liberal people. And the system.

TERESA

Okay what.

JUSTIN

So these nice young liberal people are blinded by a system that distracts them from true moral questions and refocuses their attention onto fashionable and facile questions of identity and choice, which gender do you want to be today?, how much sex can you have today?, how many babies do you want? and how do you want them to look?, which is really all part of a larger ideological system that is rooted in an evil, early-twentieth-century quote-unquote progressive trend towards quote-unquote perfection, eugenics, and crypto-racism, endorsed by Margaret Sanger, an American eugenics system which persists, which wants to eliminate anything unclean or imperfect, including black babies and Down syndrome babies, and create a sterilized world based around state-mandated pleasure and narcissism. These are just facts, look it up y’all. Read More

Diannely Antigua. Photo: Savuth Thor.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection, Ugly Music (YesYes, 2019), was the winner of the Pamet River Prize. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and received her M.F.A. at New York University. She is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. Her work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems can be found in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, The Adroit Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere.

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“Praise to the Boys”

………….On Thursdays the boys played basketball
in the church parking lot
………….while Sister Priscilla taught the girls
to sew on buttons, stitch hems, iron collars.
………….She’d lean her rigid body to guide
my hands at the machine, her cabbage breath
………….lingering as she walked to the next girl. Read More

Aria Aber. Photo: Nadine Aber.

Aria Aber was raised in Germany. Her debut book Hard Damage (University of Nebraska, 2019) won the 2018 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She was the 2018–2019 Ron Wallace Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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“Afghan Funeral in Paris”

The aunts here clink Malbec glasses
and parade their grief with musky, expensive scents
that whisper in elevators and hallways.
Each natural passing articulates
the unnatural: every aunt has a son
who fell, or a daughter who hid in rubble
for two years, until that knock of officers
holding a bin bag filled with a dress
and bones. But what do I know? Read More