Our Team

Jalina Mhyana, a finalist for the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, won the Dr. Sue Holman Travel Grant for her art history essay at the University of Oxford, which subsidized her research on superstition and talismans in Vienna. Mhyana is the author of five volumes of lyric essays and poems, one of which was a finalist in the Pudding House Publications contest. Her work appears in Five Points, The Southeast Review, The Cincinnati Review, Chautauqua, Lunch Ticket, ROOM, CutBank and others. Her creative nonfiction has won Best of Issue, her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and her poetry was chosen to represent Shadow Day – a commemoration of Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A graduate of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars, Mhyana worked as founding editor of Rock Salt Plum Review and as a columnist for the Herald Union in Germany. She curated the Ekphrasis poetry reading series at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England and moderated literary events and panels at St Marks’ Cultural Center in Florence, Italy. In her capacity as a developmental editor and ghostwriter, Mhyana has worked for The United Nations, the Vermont Historical Society, the Volkskunst Museum, Career Protocol, and many magazines and individuals. A member of the Heidelberg, London, Florence and Paris writers' groups, Jalina has lived overseas for most of her life. She currently spends her time between the Berkshires and her home in France, in a fixer-upper built onto the village's medieval fortifications dating from the Hundred Years' War -- where neighbors leave fruit and eggs on the front steps and the limestone walls still bear 300 year-old "witch's marks" for protection from evil spirits.

Nicholas Skaldetvind was born and raised in New York.

Preeti Kaur Rajpal is the author of membery, a book of poems. Her work has been honored with a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in Literature and a McKnight Artist Fellowship in Creative Writing.

Iliana Rocha is the 2019 winner of the Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry for her newest collection, The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez available from Tupelo Press. Karankawa, her debut, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). The recipient of a 2020 CantoMundo fellowship and 2019 MacDowell fellowship, she has had work featured or forthcoming in the Best New Poets anthology, as well as Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, Latin American Literature Today, Oxford American, and Blackbird> among others, and she serves as Poetry Co-Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal. She earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her three chihuahuas Nilla, Beans, and Migo are the loves of her life.

Dr. Kyle McCord is the author of seven books including National Poetry Series Finalist Magpies in the Valley of Oleanders and the novel Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult. He has work featured or forthcoming in AGNI, Blackbird, Boston Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He's received grants or awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Baltic Writing Residency. Kyle holds an M.F.A. from University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a Ph.D. from the University of North Texas. He served as associate poetry editor of The Nation and currently serves as Executive Editor of Gold Wake Press and Acquisitions Director for Atmosphere Press. He is married to the visual artist Lydia McCord and lives in Des Moines, Iowa.

Javeria Hasnain is the author of SIN (Chestnut Review, 2024), a chapbook of poems about desire, god, and femininity. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Rattle, and beestung, among others. She is a Fulbright scholar from Pakistan, a second-year MFA student at The New School, NY, and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Xiao Yue Shan is a poet, writer, translator, and editor. Born in China and living on Vancouver Island. then telling be the antidote won the Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize and was published in 2023. How Often I Have Chosen Love won the Frontier Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published in 2019.

Beth McDermott is the author of Figure 1 (Pine Row Press), a 2022 finalist for the Foreword Indies and a 2023 finalist for the da Vinci Eye/Eric Hoffer Award; and a chapbook titled How to Leave a Farmhouse (Porkbelly Press). Her poetry appears in journals such as DIAGRAM, Southern Humanities Review, Terrain.org, and Memorious. Reviews appear in American Book Review, After the Art, Kenyon Review Online, and Heavy Feather Review. She has been an editor at Kudzu House Quarterly, RHINO, and Cider Press Review and serves as an Associate for the Center for Humanities Communication (CHC) and Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at University of St. Francis in Joliet, IL.

Ariel Francisco is the author of All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins (Burrow Press, 2024), Under Capitalism If Your Head Aches They Just Yank Off Your Head (Flowersong Press, 2022), and A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020), and the translator of Haitian-Dominican poet Jacques Viau Renaud’s Poet of One Island (Get Fresh Books, 2024) and Guatemalan poet Hael Lopez’s Routines/Goodbyes (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, POETRY Magazine, The New York City Ballet, Latino Book Review, and elsewhere. He is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Hispanic Studies at Louisiana State University.

Ming Di is a Chinese poet and translator currently based in the US. She has co-translated four books into English including Empty Chairs–Poems by Liu Xia (Graywolf Press, 2015), which was a finalist of the Best Translated Book Award and won a translation prize from Poetry Foundation. She has translated seven books into Chinese, including Marianne Moore’s Observations (Sichuan Wenyi, 2018). She has received the Lishan Poetry Award (translation) and 10+ Translator Award in China as well as translation fellowships from the Luce Foundation. Her solo translations have appeared in journals such as World Literature Today, Poetry, New York Review of Books, Poetry International (SDSU), Mānoa, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry South, Rio Grande Review, On the Seawall and Arlington Literary Journal. She has edited and co-translated New Cathay–Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Tupelo Press and Poetry Foundation, 2013) and New Poetry from China 1917–2017 (Black Square Editions, 2019) and co-edited seven other anthologies (published by Vaso Roto, Leviatan, Valparaiso, Kritya, Sonámbulos…) She has co-guest-edited three issues of Mānoa. She has been a partner with Lyrikline (Berlin), editor of China domain of Poetry International Web (Rotterdam) and co-organiser of International Translation Workshops (Beijing). She is the author of eight books of poetry and essays in Chinese and one in collaborative translation: River Merchant's Wife (Marick Press, 2012). Some of her poems have been translated into other languages: Luna fracturada (Valparaiso/Spain, 2014), Histoire de famille (Transignum/France, 2015), Création (Transignum/France, 2015), Distracción (Fundación Casa de Poesia/Costa Rica, 2016), Pájaro Isla (Circulo de Poesía/Mexico, 2019).

Abigail Ardelle Zammit is a Maltese writer and educator whose third poetry collection, Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh, is forthcoming with Etruscan Press, Wilkes University, 2025. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in international journals and anthologies including Black Iris, Matter, Tupelo Quarterly, Boulevard, Gutter, Modern Poetry in Translation, Mslexia, Poetry International, The Ofi Press, The SHOp, Iota, Aesthetica, Ink, Sweat and Tears, High Window, O:JA&L, The Ekphrastic Review, and CounterText (forthcoming). Zammit’s poems have been translated and/or anthologized in Grand Tour - Reisen durch die junge Lyrik Europas (Germany: Hanser, 2018), Smokestack Lightning (Middlesbrough: Smokestack, 2021) and The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2022 (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 2023), among others. Her other poetry collections are Voices from the Land of Trees (Middlesbrough: Smokestack, 2007), and Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin (London: SPM, 2015), which won second prize in the Sentinel Poetry Competition. Zammit translates Maltese poetry and has co-authored two bilingual pamphlets: Half Spine, Half Wild Flower and A Scatter of Leaves. She has also written a critical poetry guide for high-school students and is currently researching desert landscapes across three continents.

Zoë Strachan is the award-winning author of four novels, most recently Catch the Moments As They Fly (Blackwater Press, 2023). She also writes short stories, essays, libretti and plays, and has edited six collections of new writing including three volumes of New Writing Scotland, and in 2024, a special issue of the Scottish Literary Review dedicated to Queer Form. In 2020, she was one of the judges for the Dublin International Literary Award. Zoë has held numerous fellowships including a British Council visiting fellowship at the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa. She has a PhD in Scottish Literature and teaches on the writing programme at University of Glasgow, where she is Professor of Creative and Interdisciplinary Practice.

“Prior to being awarded the PhD, I taught seminars for the English Literature and Cultural Criticism degrees at Cardiff University (1996-1998) and held a temporary lectureship in English Literature at Boston College, Lincolnshire (Spring Semester 1998) while awaiting my viva voce. My first full-time appointment was at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, in the department of 'European Philosophy and Literature' (later renamed 'Philosophy' and then merged with other departments), where I taught European literature and philosophy from 1998 until 2006 and also set up and directed the degree in Comparative Literature. "Over the years I have taught a wide variety of courses which have expanded my already diverse educational background and interests. Starting from strong readings in British and American literature, French literature and Ancient Greek literature, I have also been reading philosophical texts from a young age as well as modern Greek poetry. My other passions include cinema (from all over the world), dance and theatre. Occasionally, these appear in my teaching and research work. Although my doctoral thesis examined Romanticism in a comparative and European perspective, in the last few years, I have focused my teaching and research on British Romanticism as I am working on a monograph study of truth and autobiographical modes in British Romantic writing.”

Amalia Melis was born and raised in New York. She is a freelance hard news/feature writer who has worked from New York and Athens, Greece. Her writing has been published in the following: The New York Times, Glimmer Train, Guernica, Elle, Michigan Quarterly Review, CNN I Reports, National Public Television, Ms., Palm Beach Post, The ART Magazine, The Melbourne Age, KYSO Flash, Ducts, Hunterdon County Democrat, Leaders, Poet & Critic, Sojourner, among others. She has published interviews with two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, Michael Cunningham and Frank McCourt. “Immigrant Daughter,” her first short story, won second place in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers in 2002, and that story inspired the writing of the novel “Where Are All the White Houses?” She is the founder/organizer of the Aegean Arts Circle writing workshops held in Andros, Greece each summer since 2003. An artist as well as writer, her assemblage sculptures have been part of group art exhibits in the U.S., Germany and Greece.

Ebony K. Agboh (PhD 2013) is Associate Professor of American Literature and Civilization at the Faculty of Arts, Université de Lomé, Togo. He served as Head of the Department of English from 2019 to 2021, and since 2022, he has been the Deputy Director of the International Language Center, in charge of the academic coordination of the Professional Interpretation Master’s Program. Dr. Agboh is a researcher and founding member of the Anglophone Studies Research Team. He has published and co-authored numerous scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, both nationally and internationally, covering topics such as survival strategies in hostile environments, societal harmonious development, racial justice, and peace. Since 2009, he has been an Editor of the academic journal Particip’Action.

Komla M. Avono is a faculty at the Department of English, Université de Lomé and the chair of Anglophone studies research team. He is the chief editor of Uirtus, a peer-reviewed journal of humanities and social sciences. He is a Fulbright research fellow and the author of about 25 scholarly articles. He also authored Condamné avec souci (2016), a novel in French. As the director of the university’s language center, he cooperates with Imperial English UK and with international organizations to establish the English learning and a Master’s studies in conference interpretation in French and English. He loves poetry and thinks it is all life, for poetry outlives death.

Dr. Komi Begedou earned his Ph.D. in 2012 and currently serves as a faculty member at the Université de Lomé in Togo, where he is an Associate Professor of American Studies within the Department of English. He was hosted by Texas State University (2014-15) as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. Prior to that, he was hosted by New York University in 2010 for the Study of the United State Institute (SUSI) program. He has authored over twenty peer-reviewed academic papers and has published several significant works, including Narrating Incest in Post-Harlem Renaissance African-American Fiction (2017) and The Sin of Being Black: Intra-Racial Discrimination in Post-Bellum African-American Fiction (2024). He has also co-edited the volume Anglophone Studies in Francophone Africa: Assets, Challenges and Perspectives (2024). An accomplished presenter, Dr. Begedou has delivered numerous academic presentations across Togo, various African countries, and the United States. His contributions extend to chapters in notable publications such as Urban Challenges and Survival Strategies in Africa (Carolina Academic Press, 2017) and entries in the Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]. At the Université de Lomé, he plays an integral role as an active member of the Anglophone Studies Research Team and serves as the Editorial Director of the peer-reviewed journal, Uirtus (www.uirtus.net). His research interests encompass race, gender, ethnicity, environmental studies, and community development. Beyond academia, Dr. Begedou chairs the non-profit organization, Association Togolaise de Lutte Contre l’Echec Scolaire (www.atlces.com ).