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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.