The Bee Kingdom - Joy Amina Garnett
The Bee Kingdom follows my search for my late grandfather, a prominent 20th century Egyptian poet and beekeeper whose innovations changed the course of modern Arabic literature. This darkly comic saga weaves my own misadventures with long-buried secrets I extract from family members who alternately aid and obstruct my research.
“I think about their life at close quarters in the confines of the small ship. Strangers forced together, exiles in the making. Dining, dancing in the evenings, sunning themselves, walking the decks, taking snapshots of one another smiling against the stark backdrop of open space, a nothingness that stretches in all directions.”
Bio: Joy Amina Garnett finished writing The Bee Kingdom at Yaddo in the spring of 2024. Her stories have appeared in ellipse, Nashville Review, Evergreen Review, Rusted Radishes, Ping-Pong, and The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook. She is the art director of Evergreen Review and lives and writes in Los Angeles.
CAST LIST for a Naturalist Family Play - Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera
A Naturalist Family Play is a memoir in 10 essays, structured like a 3 act play. This experimental structure makes space for the nuances in the question: what makes an immigrant, Afro-Latinx, diasporic family whole? The opening pages introduce this question via the narrative's central characters—Me, Mao, Papi, and Abuelo.
“Falling over ourselves down the stairs, whispering and laughing our way into the kitchen, the plan was to make “smoothies” (pouring a mix of every liquid we could find over ice and daring each other to drink it). Until I laughed too hard at something she said and the bottle of Sprite slipped through my hands, bouncing loudly on the floor, twice, three times. And then, still laugh-crying and reeling from the way joy distorts time, dulls the connection between cause and effect, I picked it up, placed it in the center of the kitchen island, and opened it, casually unleashing an explosion.”
Bio: Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera is a queer AfroLatinx writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has been supported by the HUES Foundation, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Velvet Park Media, and Vermont Studio Center. She’s a Tin House, VONA, and Hunter College MFA alum, and is (perpetually) nearly finished writing her memoir.
A. - Mai Tran
A. (better title forthcoming) is my "insufferable NYC polyamory" project. It follows a relationship I had with a man I met on Grindr, and explores family/friend structures, queerness, and erotica.
"He holds my torso in place with his knees and runs his cock in and out of my throat until I tear up, then kisses me across my neck. After the first time we hooked up, I ghosted A. for two months because it irked me, the way he kept trying to push himself farther into my mouth, but now I like him so much I practice with dildos and poppers and toothbrushes."
Bio: Mai Tran is a writer based in New York. A 2024 Open City fellow, Mai's work has appeared in Reductress, Apogee, The Rumpus, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. Mai is currently an MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College.
When They Wondered Where I Went - Caitlin McGill
For six years, the man I thought I loved convinced me his dead best friend was communicating with us. At sixteen, I couldn’t see that this twenty-two-year-old was controlling me: to do cocaine, take my parents’ money, submit to sex, believe prophecies. For years I lied to my family, who feared that if they forbid me from seeing him, they’d lose me forever.
“This must be when it begins: me trying and trying, day after day, to predict the unpredictable, to find a pattern that might not exist. He’ll be laughing louder than the stereo and then telling you to go fuck yourself. When he balls up his fists I never can predict whether or not his knuckles will puncture a wall. Better to expect they always will.”
Bio: Caitlin McGill’s essays appear in Blackbird, Hunger Mountain, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She won the 2020 Indiana Review Nonfiction Prize, and three of her essays have been notables in The Best American Essays. Read more & sign up for her newsletter at: caitlinmcgill.com, caitlindmcgill.substack.com, and @caitlindmcgill (Instagram & X).
What Kind of Hawk - Sarah Giragosian
What Kind of Hawk is a collection of essays that explore the possibilities and limits of animal representation, the challenges and joys of wildlife rehabilitation (I volunteer as a certified wildlife rehabilitator), as well as the complex, fraught terrain of human and animal ontologies. What does it mean to be a surrogate mother to a baby beaver? Or to tend to the bloody sanctum of an injured raptor's aviary? These essays explore the possibility of reciprocal relation among creatures, human and animal alike. It is also a collection that explores motherhood (including inter-species, biological, and queer motherhood) in all its iterations. In this collection, you will find lyric and hybrid essays, such as catalogue and collage essays.
"There are secrets there, toothed and rubied. She is not to blame, like my cat who won’t give up her hiding spot in the woods out back. Each evening, I call and call, play with the tinkle bell of a spoon against her canned tuna."
Bio: Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017), and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). In 2023, the University of Akron Press released the craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which she co-edited. In 2024, Middle Creek Press published Mother Octopus, a co-winner of the Halcyon Prize. Sarah's writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, Tin House, Pleiades and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.
Congratulations and Condolences - Siavash Saadlou
My father died as a so-called martyr on the very last day of the Iran-Iraq War in July 1988 when I was three months old. Soon enough, I was thrust into a world where “machine gun,” “bomb,” and “shrapnel” became part of my vernacular. Through memoirs shaped by love, loss, and hope, Congratulations and Condolences chronicles my childhood and adolescence attending schools exclusively designed for boys whose fathers had died in the war.
“Hamid’s dad was a jaan-baaz, a word Hamid broke down for us. “Jaan means life, of course,” he said, “and baaz comes from bakhtan—to lose—together, jaan-baaz means someone who has lost a limb in the war.” Because his dad was alive, Hamid knew about firearms more than the rest of us. He even told us his dad had pieces of metal inside his body that made him do “crazy” things from time to time, like yelling at him or beating him for no good reason.”
Bio: Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose work has been noted in the 2023 Best American Essays series by Robert Atwan. He is the winner of the 2024 Susan Atefat Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Constance Rooke Nonfiction Prize, and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation.
I Am Mostly Bad Blood - Starr Davis
I Am Mostly Bad Blood, a nonfiction work, delves into the complexities of motherhood and menstruation. It intertwines deeply personal experiences with broader themes of gender, justice, and bodily autonomy, providing a reflective and thought-provoking narrative.
"On my first night in jail, my period arrived as a secret my body forgot to tell me. There are a few tampons stacked neatly in the window sill. Pads must be purchased with a commissary. I do not know what a commissary is. I force my thighs together like two palms praying nothing leaks out onto the mattress, the one I was told to pick up like a cross and carry into the cell."
Bio: Starr Davis, an accomplished writer and mother, has been published in The Kenyon Review and The Rumpus. With an MFA from City College of New York, she’s a 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow. Her forthcoming poetry book, AFFIDAVIT, will be released by Hanging Loose Press in 2025.
To The End of Love - E. Ehsani
To The End of Love is a memoir-in-essays that reflects on the apocalyptic fervor of our world past and present, and asks the questions, how do we get through life knowing it ends, and what survives us?
“Growing up poor and waiting for the messiah had taught me to never think of the future until it arrived. I’d been raised to believe Armageddon was imminent, that the Antichrist was already among us, and that Jesus was gearing up for the cosmic showdown. And even though I’d long since given up believing in a savior, Jesus or otherwise, I’d remained vigilant to signs of the end, a witness to the inevitable decay of loves and lives in a world undergirded by chaos and uncertainty.”
Bio: E. Ehsani is an Iranian-American writer from Alabama who lives in New York with her husband, kid, and dog. She graduated with an MFA from Columbia University.
Blue Sea and Brown Guns: finding a way back to Cyprus - Katerina Vasiliou
An examination of the fraught relationship between a young woman and the fatherland she has never lived in. The shadows of nationalism, war and spooky eastern otherness hung over her British childhood, but after acquiring Cypriot citizenship in the wake of Brexit twenty years later, she finds herself compelled to return.
"The car turns and speeds in the direction of the tower. As if my feet have been set on fire, sending the flames whooshing up through my body, I believe absolutely that I’m about to die. I will never meet my baby sister. I will never go to school. The four females in the car are telling my dad to turn around, and I want to say that we are screaming, but in truth I don’t remember. "
Bio: Katerina Vasiliou is a British writer and teacher living in Hamburg. She holds an MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh and has written short stories and essays. More about her writing history can be found on her website: www.katerinavasiliou.com
No Man’s Land - Becky Jensen
With my father’s ashes stowed in my backpack, I hiked five weeks along the 500-mile Colorado Trail in a last-ditch effort to start living – or die trying. Depressed, suicidal, I challenged old narratives, unpacking the weight of systemic female conditioning, deciding not just IF I wanted to live, but HOW.
“Squinting up at the partly sunny sky, I shielded my eyes and frowned. Shapeshifting clouds, like the ones that swirled overhead, always looked innocent enough at first. I’d seen them swarm and darken before, build electrical charges, and then swing in great arcs across ridgelines like one-way wrecking balls. My stomach fluttered an early warning.”
Bio: Becky Jensen’s work has appeared in Sierra, Colorado Country Life, The Road She’s Traveled, Wild Women, and Out There podcast. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her essay “Follow the Hula Girl” was the lead story in Rise, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Connect at www.beckyjensenwrites.com
Mouth Garden - Julie Moon
Mouth Garden is a memoir in lyric fragments about my grandmother, me, and 100 years of modern Korean history. Part oral history, part cultural criticism, and part hybrid prose, the book explores finding one's voice through three generations of trauma, ambition, and love.
"After all the papers have been burned, your mother begins spooning the food into the stream. You watch the bright red stew seep into the water, dollop by dollop, like watercolor."
Bio: Julie Moon is a Korean writer and teacher with an MFA in Nonfiction and Literary Translation from Columbia University. She is the winner of The Missouri Review's Audio Prize in Poetry. You can read her publications at www.juliemoon.info.
Eat and Tell - Joan Reminick
Eat and Tell is a memoir of my life as a restaurant critic for a large suburban newspaper. Faced with the tossed salad of human behavior, my family and I gamely chewed through the challenges life dished out. My book explores love, loss, danger, and, of course, food.
With nothing better to do, I studied my dress. It was the exact color of liver, which my mother shriveled under a broiler at least twice a week, believing that the more liver a child ate, the healthier they would be. “I don’t like this dress,” I called to her. “I don’t want to wear it.” I stared at it some more. I felt I was looking at a grainy, stinky slab of overcooked meat. Suddenly, I gagged and threw up all over myself.
Bio: Joan Reminick enjoyed 25 years as a restaurant critic for Newsday. She authored Exploring Long Island with Newsday and co-wrote Newsday’s Long Island Restaurant Guide. She was also editor of the Long Island Zagat Survey of Restaurants. Her stories have been published in The New York Times, CNN Travel, Good Housekeeping, and Playgirl. She lives in New York.
Minor Rebel - Jiadai Lin
Minor Rebel examines the blurred lines between good girl and rebel, silence and expression, ambition and disappointment. Traced through the quiet rebellions of an immigrant daughter, this coming-of-age memoir seeks to recast rebellion as a worthy tool of self-examination, signaling not impulsive defiances but expressions of our truest desires.
“A voice beckons to me from our little room, where my mother perhaps waves her hand, trying to get me to come back to naptime. I shake my head, or I stare at her, and I stay by my sunshine and my rumbling wall. My resistance is simply an act of communication, simply my body saying, I want to stay.”
Bio: Jiadai Lin was born in Beijing and grew up in Wisconsin and New York. In 2015, she left her corporate law job in Manhattan to pursue a writer's life in New Mexico, where she lives now. Her work has been published in Brevity, december, Pigeon Pages, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
When Your Dog Has Too Much Empathy - Camilla JN Lee
Two months after a devastating breast cancer diagnosis, Camilla finds out that her dog, her only family, is diagnosed with the same cancer as well. Together, they embark on a scary and surprisingly hilarious journey—including a cyberattack to her hospital—to navigate American Healthcare and fight cancer.
“A radiologist by the name of Dr. Lucy Liu shows you pictures on the screen and tells you, 'That is tumor. It is definitely cancer.' You stare at the black and white photographs of your breasts. Your mind is black and white. You hold back tears and blink hard. You make your way to the parking lot and sit inside your car. You forget about the time passing until a phone call comes from your work. You wipe your tears and answer. You drive home to your dog.”
Bio: Camilla is a Korean-American writer who moved twelve times before age eighteen. She earned an MFA from Boston University. Her writings appeared in Novus Literary Arts Journal, RipRap Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Cream City Review and a cancer fighter who completed 23 rounds of chemotherapy so far.
Can't Go Back the Way We Came - Wiam El-Tamami
A group of independent volunteers arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos at the height of the refugee crisis in 2015-6. Outside the barbed-wire fortress of the official refugee camp, they begin to create an alternative camp, their vision of how the world could be — an audacious experiment in collective action.
"The beauty of the island as we approached. Ruins of a castle on a green hill.
But this was not the way most boats came."
Bio: Wiam El-Tamami is an Egyptian writer and translator. Her work has been published in many literary journals and anthologies. She won the 2011 Harvill Secker Translation Prize and was a finalist for the 2023 Disquiet Prize. She is currently based in Berlin, while exploring life in alternative rural communities around Europe. wiameltamami.com