William S. Burroughs: “Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
Robert Mezey: “There are poems about the terror of death, and they are very grim. Such a poem offers no consolation other than itself. Good poems exist as forms of consolation beyond the subjects they explore. Even if a poem asserts that nothing can help assuage the suffering caused by death, the poem itself may help the reader face that suffering. It’s odd how that happens. This is one of the most magical aspects of art.”
Frederick Turner: “I do think the process of saving the world must have poetry at its center. The thing about a true poet is that despite all his or her flaws s/he carries this huge prophetic truth-telling gift that must be given to the world at any cost. The gift is to again and again struggle to create a language that can contain all human meanings. Only with such a language can people work together.”
Judith Teixeira (1880–1959), who wrote in Portuguese, was perhaps the only bisexual women poet to participate openly in Lisbon’s modernist literary scene. Her civil status—born to a single mother in the provincial city of Viseu, divorced at age thirty-three by her first husband, and remarried the following year to the grandson of a viscount—had already made her the subject of scandal. But still more scandalous was the sexually transgressive writing she published under her own name only a few years before the rise of the Salazar dictatorship.
Samantha Pious is a translator, poet, editor, and medievalist with a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her verse translations of Renée Vivien are available as A Crown of Violets (Headmistress Press, 2017); her translation of Christine de Pizan’s One Hundred Ballades of a Lover and His Lady is forthcoming.
Tori McCandless is a teacher, writer, and PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis. They are currently at work on a dissertation about ecological catastrophe, sound, and labor in Modernist poetry. Their writing can be found in ASAP/Journal, Edge Effects, and Beaver Magazine.Twitter.
or wretched as it is here. The air: always a stutter,
a question. I think this house is a bit of a Romantic.
Even the walls try to embrace themselves.
You can find me tucked into an accordion, an
emergency room. The body always analogous
to what’s outside of it: the way we build new homes
to no avail. A song, a symphony, a question.
Art and life: a question. Some women paint
exclusively with their blood and wasn’t that
always meant to be?
Guiying (Angel) Zhong (she/they) is a senior at the University of the Pacific studying psychology and English with minors in writing and ethnic studies. She is an Anaphora Arts Residency alumna. Her work has been published in Calliope, Kelp Magazine, and She Makes Words. She has won the University of the Pacific’s Seamus Heaney Prize for their poetry, as well as the First Runner-Up Arlen Hansen Scholarship for their critical and creative writing. They have also served as the Co-Editor-in-Chief for the University of the Pacific’s student literary and arts magazine, Calliope.
Joy Ladin is the author of ten books of poetry, including 2022's Shekhinah Speaks, National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna, Headmistress Press's gorgeous edition of Fireworks in the Graveyard, and Lambda Literary Award finalists Impersonation and Transmigration. Her poems have appeared this year in a number of publications, including Liber: A Feminist Review, Sojourners, and two anthologies, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, and Queer Nature. She has also published a memoir of gender transition, Through the Door of Life, and a work of trans theology, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective. Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, among other honors.
Ann Tweedy's first full-length book, The Body's Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016. It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Ann also has published three chapbooks, Beleaguered Oases, White Out, and A Registry of Survival. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many other places, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net Awards. A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. She currently teaches at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law.
Diane Silver is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and essayist whose work has been published in Ms, The Progressive, MockingHeart Review, The Coop, the anthology, Kansas Speaks Out: Poems in an Age of Me Too, and many other publications. Her books include the Daily Shot of Hope meditation series.
