a list of things we could do tonight to avoid studying for our final exams & self-portrait

Alejandro Pérez is a student at Columbia University in New York. He is a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Missouri Review, Boulevard, Passages North, DIAGRAM, and Spanish-language magazines in Venezuela, Chile, and Spain.

Goberkli Tepe; The App; Upanishad, 2019 a.d.; & Babel

Bino A. Realuyo’s The Gods We Worship Live Next Door (University of Utah Press, 2006) was the winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize for Poetry. He has published poems in The Nation, the Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, and recent issues of ZYZZYVA, North American Review, The Common, Another Chicago Magazine, Salamander, and New American Writing. His poems in this issue are from his completed manuscript “#TheRebelSonnets.” In December 2019, the band U2 featured his poem in its Joshua Tree Anniversary Concert Tour in Manila. He lives in New York City, where he is an adult educator and immigrant rights activist and the co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Elegy for the Mall; Peking Garden; & Not Dogs

Adrienne Su’s fifth collection of poems, Peach State, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in spring 2021. Her previous books include Living Quarters (2015), Having None of It (2009), and Sanctuary (2006), all from Manic D Press, and Middle Kingdom (1997), with Alice James Books. Recent poems appear in 32 Poems, Bennington Review, the Cincinnati Review, The New Yorker, and Poem-a-Day. A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Money for Women/ Barbara Deming Fund, she is professor of creative writing and Poet-in-Residence at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

Baby Snake Signs with a Flourish & Brown Bear Is a Confiding Schoolgirl

Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Lana Turner, LIT, and Poetry. He is the author of Try Never (2017) and I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (2012), both from Canarium Books, as well as a “children’s book for adults” called There Was an Old Man with a Springbok (Prelude Books, 2019).

Lakewood

Charles Baxter is the author of twelve books of fiction and a book of poetry, Imaginary Paintings (Paris Review Editions, 1989). His new novel, The Sun Collective, will be published by Pantheon in the fall of 2020. He recently retired from the University of Minnesota’s MFA program in writing. He lives in Minneapolis.

Tragicomic Trigger Warning

Yona Harvey’s poetry collections include You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love (Four Way Books, 2020) and Hemming the Water (Four Way Books, 2013), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She contributed to Marvel Comics’ World of Wakanda series and co-authored with Ta-Nehisi Coates Black Panther and the Crew. She has worked with teenagers writing about mental health issues in collaboration with Creative Nonfiction magazine. 

The Story; Xī’ān Nocturne with Jasmine and Pears; Demolished Landscape with Open Mouth; Memory in a Foreign Language; & Additionally, what freedoms have I been trained to deny myself?

 

Xī’ān Nocturne with Jasmine and Pears

 

I call my mother to tell her about a rare dream
in the first language:

               the fruit vendor’s miniature green pears 
               the soft juice I crave

               she pays but gets the wrong …

Anni Liu is a poet, essayist, translator, editor, sensitivity reader, and educator. Her work is published or forthcoming in Pleiades, Waxwing, The Journal, and elsewhere. Her honors include an Undocupoets Fellowship, a Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship to the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the 2018 Literature Award from the National Society for Arts and Letters for the best writing by a writer under thirty in the state of Indiana. She lives in Minneapolis with her partner and plants and works at Graywolf Press.

A Notable Social Event; A Blight on the Landscape; & Things That Fall from the Sky

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of nine books, including The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories (Pantheon, 2020), from which the three stories in this issue are taken. Some of his earlier contributions to The Georgia Review were reprinted in the Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.

Nest

Ileen Park was born in Los Angeles. She received her BA in English and creative writing from New York University and her BS in nursing from the University of British Columbia. She currently resides in Jackson Heights, New York, where she works as an ICU nurse. “Nest” is her first published story.