SHŌ NO. 7 | Summer 2025
Shō No. 7 features 67 poems by 48 poets.
Order your copy here.
Cover Art:
Tanya Rastogi, Interim, 2025. 20″ x 20″, acrylic on canvas.
Amber Adams is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts fellow and the author of Becoming Ribbons (Unicorn Press, 2022) which was a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Prize. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, American Literary Review, Narrative, Witness, and elsewhere. She received her MA in Literary Studies from the University of Denver and her MA in Counseling from Regis University. She lives in Longmont, Colorado.
Emily Adams-Aucoin is a writer whose poetry has been published in literary magazines such as Electric Literature’s “The Commuter,” Meridian, HAD, North American Review, and Colorado Review. She’s a poetry editor for Kitchen Table Quarterly and a poetry reader for Variant Literature. Emily lives in South Louisiana, and you can find her on social media @emilyapoetry.
Hannah Keziah Agustin is from Manila, Philippines, and lives in New York City. Her work appears in Electric Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, and elsewhere.
Ai Khanoum is an Afghan poet and writer currently pursuing an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rising Phoenix Review, Shō Poetry Journal, Foglifter Press, and Jelly Squid Magazine. When she is not writing, you can find her watching Al Pacino movies or contemplating by the water.
Aldo Amparán is the author of Brother Sleep, winner of the Alice James Award & finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, & The House Has Teeth, forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2026. They have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts & CantoMundo. Amparán’s work has appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, AGNI, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, & elsewhere.
sterling-elizabeth arcadia (she/they) is a Best of the Net winning trans writer and lover of birds, cats, movies, and her friends. She has an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers—Camden, and is a PhD student in English at the University of Connecticut. Her work has appeared in venues including ONLY POEMS, Prose Online, Boxx Press, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Heaven, Ekphrasis is available from Kith Books.
Michael Bazzett is the author of five poetry collections, including The Echo Chamber (Milkweed, 2021) and the forthcoming Cloudwatcher (Copper Canyon, 2026)—as well as a verse translation of the Popol Vuh (Milkweed, 2018), named by the NY Times as one of the best poetry books of 2018. The recipient of NEA fellowships in both poetry and translation, his writing has appeared in The Threepenny Review, 32 Poems, The Paris Review, and The London Magazine.
Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023). He is the co-editor of Poets of Queens 2 (Poets of Queens, 2024). His work can be found at AGNI, The Baltimore Review, Image Journal, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He is the Editor in Chief at Porcupine Literary. You can find him at jaredbeloff.com. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters.
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is the author of Common Grace (Beacon Press, 2022) and Ubasute (Slapering Hol Press, 2021). His honors include a MacDowell Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award. His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, RHINO, Salamander, Consequence, and elsewhere. Caycedo-Kimura teaches creative writing at Trinity College.
M. Cynthia Cheung is the author of Common Disaster (Acre Books, 2025). Her poems can be found in AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, swamp pink, among others, and she is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. She practices internal medicine in Texas.
Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, December, and elsewhere.
Will Cordeiro has poems in 32 Poems, AGNI, Bennington Review, Pleiades, and The Threepenny Review. Will is the author of Trap Street (Able Muse, 2021) and Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024) and coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Will coedits Eggtooth Editions and serves on the board of the Northern Arizona Book Festival.
Crystal Cox is a writer and editor from mid-Missouri. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Idaho where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets University Prize and a Centrum Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Shore, Nimrod, Phoebe, and elsewhere.
Sean Thomas Dougherty‘s last book was Death Prefers the Minor Keys (BOA Editions, 2023). He works as a caregiver and Medtech on the third shift along Lake Erie.
Bobby Elliott‘s debut collection, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in September 2025. Raised in New York City, he earned his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and his MFA from the University of Virginia. His work appears in or is forthcoming from ONLY POEMS, The Cortland Review, RHINO, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.
Danielle Shandiin Emerson is a Diné writer from Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. Her clans are Tłaashchi’i (Red Cheek People), born for Ta’neezaahníí (Tangled People). Her maternal grandfather is Ashííhí (Salt People) and her paternal grandfather is Táchii’nii (Red Running into the Water People). She has a B.A. in Education Studies and Literary Arts from Brown University. Her writing centers healing, kinship, language-learning, and family.
Clare Flanagan is a Brooklyn-based poet, editor, and music writer. Raised in Minnesota, she now resides in New York City, where she was recently a Wiley Birkhofer fellow at NYU. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Poetry Online, OSU’s The Journal, and Poetry Northwest, among others. When she’s not at work on her full-length manuscript, she enjoys reading, long-distance running, and listening to Charli XCX.
Matthew Gellman’s first book, Beforelight, was selected by Tina Chang as the winner of BOA Editions, Ltd.’s A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His second book, The Understudy, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2027. Matthew has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference. He is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
Kelly Gray is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021), The Mating Calls//of the// Specter (Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize, 2023), and Dilapitatia (Moon Tide Press, 2025). Gray’s work can be found in Witness, Cream City Review, Cherry Tree, and Southern Humanities Review, among other places. She lives with her family in the woods.
Saúl Hernández is a queer writer from San Antonio, TX who was raised by former undocumented parents. He is a recipient of a 2025 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His debut poetry collection, How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters, is out now (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024). Saúl is the winner of 2022 Pleiades Prufer Poetry Prize judged by Joy Priest & the winner of the 2021 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize judged by Victoria Chang.
Sara Hovda is a transgender woman from rural Minnesota. She currently attends the MFA program at UC-Riverside while also working as an online entertainer. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines such as Passages North, Nimrod, and Nashville Review, among others.
Amorak Huey is author of Mouth, forthcoming in 2026 from Cornerstone Press, and four previous collections of poetry. Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Olivia Jacobson is an MFA candidate in poetry at Syracuse University. She is the non-fiction and poetry editor at Salt Hill Journal, and is originally from Sheridan, Indiana. Her chapbook, On Junkyards, won the Etchings Press Book Prize for Poetry (Etchings Press, 2025). Her work can also be found in The Shore, Club Plum Literary, and SUNHOUSE Literary Journal.
Vasvi Kejriwal is a former lawyer. Her work has been a Finalist for the Yellowwood Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the Troubadour Poetry Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart. She is the recipient of the AI Young Scholarship from the Community of Writers Conference. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod, SWWIM Every Day, Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, and elsewhere. She is Associate Poetry Editor at The Bombay Literary Magazine.
Daniel Lurie is a Jewish, rural writer from eastern Montana. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho. Daniel is a Poetry reader for Chestnut Review and co-editor of Outskirts Literary Journal. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The Madison Review, Sonora Review, and others. He was recently awarded a 2025-2026 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Find him at danielluriepoetry.com
Jenna Martínez (she/her) is a queer Mexican-American writer and printmaker. She is a Macondista and Literary Cleveland 2023-2024 Breakthrough Writing Resident. Her writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, HAD, Homology Lit, and elsewhere. Originally from San Antonio, Texas, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Malia Maxwell (Kanaka Maoli) is a writer from Seattle, WA. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf Environmental and the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Visit her at maliamaxwell.com.
Rishona Michael is a Brooklyn-based poet. She is a graduate of the Sarah Lawrence College MFA’s program, where she won an Academy of American Poets University Prize.
Tim Moder is a poet from northern Wisconsin. He is an enrolled member of The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. He lives with his cat in a house that is too big. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Cutthroat, South Florida Poetry Journal, One Art, and others. He is the author of the chapbooks All True Heavens (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and American Parade Routes (Seven Kitchens, 2023). Find him at timmoder.com.
Asheley Nova Navarro is a Dominican poet and translator with work featured or forthcoming in Brink, Waxwing Literary Journal, North American Review, and Tahoma Literary Review, among others. She is an incoming student in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is the founding editor of Sontag Mag and a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal.
Ohia, Ernest Chigaemezu is a queer Nigerian poet and editor. He is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Alabama where he serves as the Design Editor for Black Warrior Review. Ernest’s works are published and forthcoming in Lolwe, The Muse, 20:35 Africa, Agbowo, and Rigorous, amongst others.
Kunjana Parashar is a poet from Mumbai. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. Her manuscript They Gather Around Me, the Animals, selected by Diane Seuss, won the 2024 Barbara Stevens Poetry Book Award. She is the recipient of a Toto Funds the Arts award and the Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Prize. She is the Managing Editor (Poetry) at The Bombay Literary Magazine.
Paige Passantino is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Johns Hopkins University. Her work can be found on Poets.org, in Pinhole Poetry, Zenaida, Emulate, and others, and is forthcoming in The Florida Review. She is the recipient of the 2023 Academy of American Poets’ Anne Bradstreet Prize, commended for the 2023 Adroit Prize, and her work has been supported by Tin House. She is an editor and reader for The Massachusetts Review.
Nina C. Peláez is a poet, educator, and cultural producer based in Maui, HI. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, Rattle, Pleiades, Swamp Pink, RHINO, Radar, The Baltimore Review, & Brooklyn Poets. She is working on the manuscript for her first poetry collection.
Sofia Rasic is an enrolled tribal citizen of the Cherokee Nation based in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, but hails from the Hudson Valley, New York and attends school in northwest Connecticut. Despite finding little parts of herself scattered over many, many miles, she can always ground herself in creative writing.
Remi Recchia, PhD, is a Lambda Award-winning poet, essayist, and editor from Kalamazoo, Michigan. An eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared in World Literature Today, Best New Poets 2021, and Prairie Schooner, among others. He is the author of six books and chapbooks, most recently Addiction Apocalypse (Texas Review Press, forthcoming), and is the editor of two contemporary poetry anthologies. Remi has received support from Tin House, PEN America, and the Poetry Foundation.
Mallory Rodenberg is a poet and educator with the Indiana Prison Writers Project. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College, and was awarded the 2023 Levis Poetry Prize from Friends of Writers. Her work has previously appeared in The Swannanoa Review and Leon Literary Review. She lives with her family in Southern Indiana.
Brooke Sahni is the author of Before I Had the Word (Texas Review Press, 2021), which won the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Divining (Orison Books, 2020), which won the Orison Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in journals such as, Denver Quarterly, 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Sixth Finch, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection, In This Distance, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2025. She lives in Arizona.
Joan Jobe Smith, founding editor of Pearl and the Bukowski Review, worked seven years as a go-go girl before receiving her BA from California State University Long Beach and MFA from University of California Irvine. A Pushcart Prize honoree and Forward Prize finalist, she is the author of 24 books, including Moonglow á Go-Go (NYQ Books, 2017) and most recently, the reprint of Jehovah Jukebox (WPA Books, 2025) with a Foreword written by Fred Voss, to whom she was married for almost 35 years until his passing.
February Spikener (they/she) is a Black femme poet from Detroit and an MFA candidate at Randolph College. Her work has been published in Black Warrior Review, Muzzle Magazine, and Poet Lore, among others. Ever inspired by their loved ones, their poems reflect how they navigate through the world and what it means to love and be loved. She lives in Chicago.
Jessica Q. Stark is the author of Buffalo Girl (BOA Editions, 2023), winner of a Florida Book Award, Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, 2020), and four poetry chapbooks, including INNANET (The Offending Adam, 2021). Her poems have been most recently published in The Nation, Best American Poetry, Pleiades, and The Florida Review. She is a Poetry Editor at AGNI and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Florida.
Claire Taylor is the author of multiple chapbooks, including Mother Nature and One Good Thing. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Little Thoughts Press, a literary magazine for young readers. Claire lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, in an old stone house where birds love to roost. You can find her online at clairemtaylor.com.
J.K. Tsosie is Diné — Bitterwater Clan, born for the Many Goats Clan. His work has appeared in the Yellow Medicine Review and the Indiana Review. He is the recipient of the Oberon Herbert Prize, the James Hearst Prize, and the James Welch Prize. He resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he attends the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.
Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and is currently a PhD student in English/Creative Writing at University of Utah, where he edits Quarterly West. His debut collection of poems, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in Fall 2025. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Adroit Journal, and Best New Poets, among others.
Han VanderHart is a queer writer living in Durham, NC. They are the author of Larks (OUP, 2025), winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the chapbook Hawk & Moon (Bottlecap, 2025), and What Pecan Light (Bull City, 2021), and have essays and poetry published in Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI, and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast and, alongside Amorak Huey, co-edits the poetry press River River Books.
Fred Voss (1952-2025) worked as a machinist for over four decades and authored four collections of poetry, including Someday There Will Be Machine Shops Full of Roses (Smokestack Books UK, 2023). A book of his poetry translated into French is forthcoming from L’herbe qui tremble (Paris).
Nicholas Yingling is the author of The Fire Road (Barrow Street Press, 2024). His work has appeared in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, The Adroit Journal, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Aleks Zywicki is the author of ZOUNDS! (selected by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the 2024 Barrow Street Book Prize). He received an MFA from The New School, where he studied poetry. His work appears or is forthcoming in Plume, Gulf Coast, Laurel Review, Bear Review, Landlocked, Right Hand Pointing, The Inquisitive Eater, and elsewhere. He teaches English and creative writing at The Hudson School in Hoboken, New Jersey.
ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST
Tanya Rastogi is an artist and writer from Iowa. Her work has been featured in The Adroit Journal, Gone Lawn, and others, and has received national recognition from YoungArts and the Scholastic Awards. She enjoys long walks and a good horror film.