Emerging Critics

Jenessa Abrams

Jenessa Abrams is a writer, literary translator, and practitioner of Narrative Medicine. Her fiction, literary criticism, and creative non-fiction has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic, Electric Literature, Words Without Borders, Guernica, BOMB Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, the Norman Mailer Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the New York Public Library, and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in fiction and literary translation. Currently, she teaches writing in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University.

Hannah Bonner

Hannah Bonner‘s criticism has appeared, or is forthcoming in, Another Gaze, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cleveland Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Rumpus. She lives in Iowa.

Taylor Byas

Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. (she/her) is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is an Acquisitions Editor for Variant Literature and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, and the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbooks Bloodwarm and Shutter, and her debut full-length I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in August 2023. She is represented by Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency.

Isabella Corletto

Isabella Corletto is a literary translator from Spanish and Italian. Born in Guatemala City, Guatemala, she holds a literary translation MA from the University of Rochester and a BA from Wesleyan University. Her translations include Amalia Andrade’s Things You Think About When You Bite Your Nails (Penguin Books, 2020) and work published in the Cincinnati Review, Latin American Literature Today, the Arkansas International, and elsewhere. She was the 2022-23 Words Without Borders Editorial Fellow, has received a Bread Loaf scholarship, and is the recipient of the 2023 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature.

Noelle McManus

Noelle McManus is a writer-poet-linguist from Long Island, New York. In 2021, they graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UMass Amherst with degrees in Linguistics and Spanish. Since then, they have worked as an editor at venues such as The Women’s Review of Books, Dottir Press, and LIBER: A Feminist Review. Their writing has also appeared in Eclectica, Redivider, Vagabond City Press, and elsewhere.

Michele Moses

Michele Moses is a writer, editor, and audio producer living in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College.

Tomi Onanajo

Gasira Timir

Gasira Timir is a writer and composer from Toronto, Canada. Currently, she is a joint-degree Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. Her work as a composer and as an affiliate in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies has premiered at CHIMEfest, a gathering of electroacoustic composers and sound artists from the Midwest; and is archived on Echoes.xyz. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Inquiry and The Journal of the Midwest Modern Languages Association.

Olga Zolotareva

Olga Zolotareva recently graduated from Princeton University with a Ph.D. in Slavic Studies. Her dissertation explores how film and photography prompted Russian modernist writers to rethink literature’s place in the world and to reexamine the ethics of their own work. She holds a B.A. in linguistics from Lomonosov Moscow State University, where she focused on teaching English and French as second languages.

Hantian Zhang

Hantian Zhang is a Chinese writer based in San Francisco. He is a data scientist by day. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, The Offing, Waxwing, and elsewhere.