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Medium: Digital 2026 About “Serenity”: “Serenity” was created for a 2025 MerMay prompt, an annual community-driven art challenge. The prompt immediately resonated with me, and a mental image of a calm ocean at dusk appeared almost instantly. Different times of day can evoke different feelings of calm and peace, but when I think of “serenity,” …

Shifting—singing—silting: the poems in Continental Drift form a landscape that cradles us all. Mai-Linh Hong’s debut collection (Trio House Press, 2026), winner of the 2025 Trio Award, shows extraordinary tenderness as it imagines pasts, presents, and futures of its subjects. War refugees and forced migrants board boats and find new shores, asking, “Can you say …

Winner of the 2025 49th Parallel Award in Poetry Forget dull facts of shovel, pail, pump,and sail. Instead, shed curl and skin-scalelike gecko in every sweat-rimmed linen. Leavetraces, knowing the body has already gonemissing. Forget the necking up on Tantalus,no more idling cars or privacy in grovesthat decompose to other kinds of shelter. Forgetslick treasure-trove …

Winner of the 2025 Tobias Wolff Fiction Award In the car, Chicken’s head thumps against the window every time the screws rattle, which is always. So it sounds like krrrCHrattle thHumpB and then the spitting of the car’s exhaust. It’s an old beast. It hurts to lay her head against the car’s window, but Chicken’s already committed to the act. She will keep her head here …

Winner of the 2025 Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction Award Button’s work has found homes in The New York Times, Longreads, HuffPost, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, among others. She explores the complications of love, mental illness, and letting go. Her fiction and non-fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, appeared in several anthologies and Modern Love …

Former BR contributor Matthew Torralba Andrews’s How to Build a Bridge Across the Ocean, the C&R Press Summer Tide Pool 2024 Chapbook Awardee (forthcoming, April 2026), is a collection of linked short stories that shimmers like moonlight bouncing off the iridescent underside of seashells washed up on the shore, finally out of the shadows. Throughout …

Title: Theo Oil on panel 48″ x 36″ 2024 About “Theo”:This is Theo, he is the trans sibling that I have known the longest, he is also the youngest. We have known each other for a decade, since he was just seven years old. From Theo: “I’m going to college in the fall for creative …

Title: Enuf Tears to Outweigh the Ocean 11×17, 2020; Medium: Digital Title: The Beginnin’ 11×17, 2020; Medium: Digital Artist Statement:These pieces are two of four digitals works in the series: “MASK OFF: an understanding of slavery thru blk fem bodies.”These pieces are inspired by Christy Clark-Punjara, my professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in her …

We Contain Landscapes by Patrycja Humienik (Tin House, 2025) To ask questions not to receive answers, but simply for the pleasure and perversity of asking them—this is the endearing stubbornness of We Contain Landscapes, Patrycja Humienik’s debut collection of poems. This book is propelled by an endless curiosity, shimmering throughout its pages like clear springwater …

Marginal Verse by Jamie Silvonek (Game Over Books, 2025) Marginal Verse is Jamie Silvonek’s debut poetry collection, which I had the honor of reading as a galley. I was stunned by Silvonek’s poems — which are vulnerable, evocative, viscerally felt, and demanding. I could feel each image pulsate, each line break shatter. Marginal Verse is …