Súa Agapé studied graphic design at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala and Digital Creativity at Digital Invaders in Mexico. She teaches illustration at the Landivar University in Guatemala, and since 2015, she has worked on her own as a designer and freelance illustrator. She is currently working on some new projects to develop her illustrations for designs on textiles. These careers complement her passion for illustration.
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Mary Archer is now a University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa graduate with a BA in English. In spring 2015, her essay and narrative fiction piece appeared in Ka Hue Anahā: Journal of Academic & Research Writing, Kapi‘olani Community College’s student periodical. Last year her poetry suite “Drafts of Robert McHenry” appeared in Ms. Aligned: Women Writing About Men. She is a New York native and current Hawai‘i local.
Emily A. Benton is an assistant poetry editor for storySouth and a former poetry editor for The Greensboro Review. Her poems have been published in Hawai‘i Review, Hawai‘i Pacific Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Barn Owl Review, Southern Poetry Review, Harpur Palate, and other journals. She holds a BA in communication from Queens University of Charlotte and an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Originally from Tennessee, she has lived in Hawai‘i since 2012.
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Sion Dayson is an American/French dual citizen splitting her time between the United States and Europe. Her work has appeared in The Writer, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Hunger Mountain, Utne Reader, The Wall Street Journal, Courrier International, Numero Cinq, and several anthologies, including James Baldwin: Challenging Authors, Strangers in Paris, and Seek It: Writers and Artists Do Sleep. She holds an MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has blogged about the quirkier side of the City of Light for several years at paris (im)perfect. Sion has been awarded residencies and grants from the Kerouac House, the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Stone Court Writer-in-Residence program. Her first novel manuscript, which also features a male protagonist, placed on the short list for finalists in the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.
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Amy Holwerda lives and writes in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has been noted in Best American Essays (2013), and has appeared in The Collagist, Hobart, Flash International, The Sycamore Review, Quick Fiction, and elsewhere.
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Lillian Howan spent her early childhood in Tahiti and later graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Her writings have been published in Asian American Literary Review, Café Irreal, Calyx, New England Review, and the anthology Under Western Eyes. She is the editor of Rosebud and Other Stories, a collection by legendary playwright Wakako Yamauchi, and the author of the novel The Charm Buyers.
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Gerda Govine Ituarte’s third poetry collection, Future Awakes in Mouth of NOW, was published by Editions du Cygne (Swan World, Paris, 2016). Her second poetry book, Alterations|Thread Light Through Eye of Storm, was published in 2015 in Mexico City and was a finalist in Red City Review’s poetry contest. Her first book, Oh, Where is My Candle Hat? was published in English and Spanish in Tijuana, Mexico, in 2012. In 2016 Spectrum Magazine selected her as one of the top ten poets in Los Angeles. As CEO of G. Govine Consulting, she conducts diversity and inclusion climate studies, provides training and workshops, and serves as an expert witness, litigation consultant, investigator, and mediator in the areas of gender, race, and age discrimination. Born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, she also serves as a member of the Los Angeles County Women’s Commission and of the City of Pasadena Sister City Advisory Group.
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Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of the poetry books Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown (Finishing Line, 2017) and Diary of the One Swelling Sea (MoonPath, 2013), winner of a Nautilus Book Award, plus the nonfiction chapbook Borderlines (Sweet Publications, 2016). She is series editor for the University of Nebraska Gender Programs anthologies, including Becoming: What Makes a Woman and Being: What Makes a Man. Honors include an Artist Trust grant, an Academy of American Poets Award, the Mari Sandoz Prairie Schooner Prize in Fiction, Scissortale Review’s Editor’s Prize in Poetry, plus the Deborah Tall Memorial Fellowship from Pacific Lutheran University, where she completed her MFA in Creative Writing, and the Louise Van Sickle Fellowship in Poetry from the University of Nebraska, where she received her PhD in English with an Interdisciplinary Specialization in Nineteenth Century Studies. Johnson teaches creative writing and English at Skagit Valley College and is the founding director of Artsmith, a non-profit to support the arts.
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Kristiana Kahakauwila is the author of This is Paradise: Stories (Hogarth, 2013), a Barnes & Noble Discover selection. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University and was a 2015-16 Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. Her most recent work has appeared in Kartika Review, Mistake House, and RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities. Currently, she is working on a multi-generational historical novel set on the island of Maui.
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Cassandra Lane is a former newspaper reporter and high school literature and journalism teacher who has published essays, columns and articles in a variety of newspapers, magazines and anthologies. She is an alum of Voices of Our Nation Arts (VONA) Foundation and A Room of Her Own (AROHO). She received an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University. A Louisiana native, she lives with her family in Los Angeles and is the managing editor of L.A. Parent magazine.
Pat Matsueda is the managing editor of Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing and the author of Stray (2006) and Bedeviled (2016, 2017). She coedited the 2016 edition of Ms. Aligned with Sheyene Foster Heller and has a small business, Peak Services, which helps people produce books and other publications.
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Adele Ne Jame teaches poetry at Hawaii Pacific University. She served for a year as the Poet-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has published four books of poems. Her honors include a Pablo Neruda prize for poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in Poetry, an Elliot Cades Award for Literature, and the 2016 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation Poetry Award. Her poems were exhibited as broadsides in the United Arab Emirates International Biennial 2009. Of the poems in her most recent collection, The South Wind, one reviewer noted that “her continuous awareness of the overlapping realms of life and death are what give her work its emotional heft.”
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Angela Nishimoto was raised on the windward side of O‘ahu, teaches on the leeward side, and lives in Honolulu with her husband. She earned her master-of-science degree in botanical science at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She has published fiction in Hawai‘i Pacific Review, Chaminade Literary Review, Kaimana, Hawai‘i Review, Bamboo Ridge, Writing Raw, Ms. Aligned, and elsewhere.
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Connie Pan, originally from Maui, earned a BA in creative writing from Grand Valley State University and an MFA in fiction from West Virginia University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, Carve Magazine, PRISM international, Rosebud Magazine, Bamboo Ridge, and elsewhere. An excerpt from her novel-in-progress was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A freelance writer and editor, she lives in California.
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Shelly Rodrigue is a poet from New Orleans, Louisiana. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Holy Cross and is currently pursuing an M.F.A at the University of New Orleans. Her poems have appeared in Guide to Kulchur Creative Journal, The Borfski Press, Fourth & Sycamore, and Ellipsis. She is the 2017 recipient of the Andrea Saunders Gereighty Academy of American Poets Poetry Award. When she is not writing, she enjoys playing guitar as well as kayaking. She is the former rhythm guitarist of New Orleans funk-rock band Pulp Deception. Currently, she teaches English as a Second Language to children in China through an online platform. She also works as an ethnographer for U.N.O Chart.
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Rebecca Thomas’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Hunger Mountain, The Massachusetts Review, Fifth Wednesday and other journals. In 2015, she received a Pushcart Prize nomination for fiction. She received her MFA in creative writing from West Virginia University. She received undergraduate degrees in creative writing and screenwriting from Chapman University. Originally from Orange County, California, she now teaches writing in Morgantown, West Virginia.
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