Earlier this year, we were thrilled to share the 15 incredible voices that made up the summer edition of Issue 16: Proximities. (You can read some really nice things that our editors had to say about their pieces here, and peruse the entire issue here.) And now, as the weather turns, we’re shining a light on the 18 voices who comprise our winter edition of the issue, rounding out a conversation that began back in fall 2022, just about a year ago now. Talk about a full circle moment.
As you may recall, we opened up the call for submissions for this second half of the issue back in June, and we received an overwhelming response — from folks who had previously submitted to this or other issues; from writers who had never submitted before but felt compelled by our call; and from creatives who read the powerful work from our summer cohort and felt inspired to be in conversation with their art.
In the spring, we held two Zoom sessions to share a little insight into what we look for in the work that’s submitted, and in the cover letters that are a part of our submissions process. We also shared a bit about how we form our calls, which are the heartbeat of every issue. (Fun fact: each of our calls for submissions are co-created by past TSW contributors, which helps us build strong bonds of continuity between issues.)
We feel so incredibly honored to bear witness to the continued growth and evolution of our community, and to welcome in such talented, inimitable individuals who are making waves in the world with their stories and their thinking. Everything we do at The Seventh Wave centers around the publication of our annual literary magazine. So we are once again thrilled, honored, and humbled to continue our work of co-creation, this time alongside 18 deeply talented writers and artists, educators and activists. We’ll be publishing their pieces together in December, and can’t wait for you to get to know their voices.
Going forward, we’ll be publishing just one issue a year, but open twice for submissions — once in the fall/winter and once in the spring/summer — so that we can uplift more voices within each issue while also creating a time capsule for two distinct cohorts of writers, artists, and activists. These 18 contributors submitted to our call back in June, and have been working on their pieces with our editors over the past few months. We’ll be publishing the issue in full in December, and we can’t wait for you to sink into these contributors’ works.
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AboutTina Zafreen Alam
Tina Zafreen Alam is a diasporic Bangladeshi poet who doesn’t believe in space, time, or borders. Currently based in Toronto, she loves J Dilla, Wong Kar-Wai, and the Toronto Raptors. When she is not writing, she is watching basketball, listening to music, dancing, or communing with the city’s squirrels.
Aboutemet ezell
emet ezell is part god and part demon. they are the author of BETWEEN EVERY BIRD, OUR BONES, winner of the 2021 Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, as well as the guidebook to Liberation Tarot, a collaborative project published by PM Press. Born and raised in Texas, ezell lives in Berlin, Germany, where they teach writing workshops at Hopscotch Reading Room.
AboutJesse Gabriel González
Jesse Gabriel González is a poet from the great state of New Jersey currently living in Seattle, Washington. He holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a BA from Cornell University. He was a 2021 Anaphora Arts Fellow and the recipient of a 2023 Contributor Award from Bread Loaf. He serves as an editorial assistant at Poetry Northwest.
AboutMeredith Herndon
Meredith Herndon is a writer, editor, and amateur baker raised near Chesapeake Bay, Maryland. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California Davis, where she won the Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Award sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Her work examines generational trauma, grief, religion, and the quicksand of family ties. Her poems have been published in Faultline, Sundog Lit, Copper Nickel, poets.org, and elsewhere. Meredith currently lives in Virginia with her exceptionally sweet dog and husband.
AboutPatrick Holian
Patrick Holian is a Mexican American writer from San Francisco, California. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from St. Mary’s College of California and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill Journal, The Arkansas Review, PRISM international, Bennington Review, The Acentos Review, and Yalobusha Review. He was a 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s fiction finalist, and a finalist for Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2021 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize.
AboutM.E. Macuaga
Originally from Tokyo, M.E. Macuaga is a Japanese/Bolivian storyteller who fell in love with writing at age six. She now enjoys creating in a range of genres and formats: as a film editor, director and executive producer, M.E. crafts both narrative and documentary stories for international film and television audiences; as a writer, her credits include an issue of the anthology series Spider-Man: Unlimited, a Japanese post-apocalyptic piece in the Yukinomachi Short Story Collection, and winning 4th place overall in the 2023 NYC Midnight Short Screenplay Competition, along with Honorable Mentions in both the Flash Fiction and 100-word Micro Fiction categories. A Hedgebrook writer-in-residence and a graduate of Stanford University and the USC School of Cinema-Television, M.E. strives to capture the intensities of life through vivid contrast – death and (re)birth, transience and history, the elusive nature of “home” and the struggle to find and free one’s voice. A mother of two, she is currently working on a children’s book, a short story collection, two novels and a memoir.
AboutCypress Manning
Cypress Manning is a queer + trans writer, artist, and educator from Taos, New Mexico. They received their MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2019, and were a 2022-23 Hugo House Fellow. They are in a two-person cribbage league with their mom, and live in Seattle with their partner and cat, Riso. They teach creative writing.
AboutNick Martino
Nick Martino is a poet and teacher in LA. His work is published or forthcoming from The Southern Review, Narrative, Los Angeles Review, The Seventh Wave, and Washington Square Review, among others. Nick is the recipient of the 2023 Excellence in Poetry Prize from the University of California, Irvine and was a finalist for the 2023 Fugue poetry contest. A 2023 Best New Poets nominee, he is an alumnus of Sewanee Writers Conference and Community of Writers. He reads for Split Lip Magazine.
AboutSarah Matsui
Sarah Matsui is the winner of the 2021 Sewanee Review Nonfiction Contest judged by Stephanie Danler, the 2022 Fractured Lit Contest judged by Deesha Philyaw, and the 2023 Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award. Her poetry is featured in the San Francisco Asian Art Museum’s Bernice Bing Contemporary Art exhibit from June through December 2023. Matsui’s work explores the tensions between mine / yours / ours, dominant narratives and counternarratives, language as a site of connection and conflict, agency and powerlessness, immigrantness, and Asian Americanness. She’s currently working on her debut essay and poetry collections. Born and raised in Honolulu, she now lives in San Francisco.
AboutErin L. McCoy
Erin L. McCoy’s poetry collection, Wrecks, is forthcoming from Noemi Press and is a finalist for the Noemi Book Award. Erin’s poetry and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Narrative, Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Pleiades, and other publications. Her work has appeared in the Best New Poets anthology twice, selected by Natalie Diaz and Kaveh Akbar, and she was a finalist for the Missouri Review’s 2021 Miller Audio Prize. Erin is an assistant poetry editor at Narrative, a proofreader at Penguin Random House, and acquisitions editor for Seattle-based independent publisher Entre Ríos Books. She holds an MFA in creative writing and an MA in Spanish and Latin American literature from the University of Washington. She is from Louisville, Kentucky.
AboutJessica Mooney
Jessica Mooney is a Seattle-based writer whose personal essays, scientific articles, and literary criticism have appeared in The Rumpus, The Seattle Review of Books, Salon, What to Read in the Rain: an 826 Seattle Anthology, The Journal for Health Disparities Research and Practice, and elsewhere. She also works in the field of global health, helping to deliver vaccines in low- and middle-income country settings. A pandemic essay on grief was published in Seattle Magazine and was featured on local NPR-affiliate KUOW. She is a former Hugo House fellow and received grants from Artist Trust and the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.
AboutTaiye Ojo
Taiye Ojo is a Nigerian eco-activist, cultural worker, and artist who uses poetry as a tool to hide his frustration with society. His practice is collaborative and often draws from personal experience or interpretation of climate change, homelessness, migration, as well as a breadth of transversal issues ranging from racism, black identity and mental health. He believes in the power of language to capture the minutiae of daily life and the natural world.
AboutMonique Ouk
Monique Ouk writes poetry from a farm in California.
AboutDaad Sharfi
Daad Sharfi is a poet and immigrant rights advocate from Sudan, raised between Muscat and Chicago. She is called to the page because as Audre Lorde generously offered, poetry serves as “a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” In her work, Daad aims to write against the nation-state, to rebuild home outside its fictitious borders and make visible the joys of living in tender community even amidst struggle. She is forever grateful to her first writing community, ¡Oye! Spoken Word, for holding her words with boundless care and anchoring her to the beautiful reality of poetry as shared experience–a sacred way to create and deepen connection to one another. Her work can be found in the 20.35 Africa anthology (Vol. I), PANK magazine, Sawti, Voicemail Poems and elsewhere. Daad currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
AboutGrace Talusan
Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. Her work as both a writer and teacher is interested in silences, ruptures, and connections. Her memoir, The Body Papers, won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction. Her writing has been supported by the NEA, the Fulbright, US Artists, the Brother Thomas Fund, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and others. She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University and lives outside of Boston.
AboutVeronica Wasson
Veronica Wasson is a trans writer living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in Mulberry Literary, Same Faces Collective, Yellow Arrow, and The Plentitudes.
AboutEllen Wiener
Ellen Wiener is a visual artist whose primary subject matters are myth, landscape, literature and the expansive potentials of reading and looking. Influential sources include: Medieval Illuminations, 15th century engravings, Islamic carpets, science fiction, library ephemera, botanical illustrations and fossil and rock collecting. Her books, prints and paintings range from palm sized miniatures to room sized murals.