These writers and poets are bringing the heat with their powerful work.
New season, new cohort of incredible TSW contributors. We are over the moon to share with you a glimpse into these 16 writers’ perspectives, processes, and obsessions. Our original call for submissions for Issue 17: The Cost of Waiting opened last November, a tumultuous time rife with grief and uncertainty. As an organization, we view our role within the public discourse to be one of resource gathering and reflection — our call was born of a deep belief in the power of community and in amplifying some incredibly necessary and urgent voices.
Nine years since our founding, we still feel so incredibly honored to bear witness to the evolution of each and every piece that we publish, and to welcome in such talented individuals who are making waves in the world both on and off the page. 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 16 talented writers and poets, educators and activists. We’ll be publishing their pieces collectively in June, and can’t wait for you to get to know their voices.
You can learn a little more about each contributor and their work below.
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Aline Mello
"I cannot separate myself and my work from the political — my being undocumented for so long is a main reason I began writing in the first place. The US's disregard, dismissal, and mistreatment of its immigrant population is ongoing and at the forefront of my writing."
Celeste Chan
"As the queer daughter of a Chinese immigrant father and a Bronx-born Jewish mother, I came into creating art through community organizing and a deep desire to excavate family history. The cost of waiting — during a family emergency, a global pandemic, and a ceasefire needed in Gaza yesterday — can't be underestimated."
Christian Hooper
"I’ve found through poetry workshops and performances that I gravitate towards an “epic” style of writing focused on lofty metaphors made stronger when read aloud. Elevating real life experiences to imprint upon the reader the question of what is exaggerated and what is concrete is something I love doing with my poetry."
Goeun Park
"I wanted to express in fiction how exile and legal limbo could drive a character to desperation. I wanted to show how waiting could make someone a stranger to themselves. I wanted my narrator to show me a way out of the waiting."
Jessica Yuru Zhou
"Living in the heart of empire, grappling with poetry's futility and necessity; this drives me to explore the materiality of other seemingly immaterial and disparate things, like time, our intimate digital lives, the varied ways we are historically connected to one another, presently independent from another, and in relation through the myths of our separateness."
Kate Kastelberg
"The voice that I bring to this issue is one that calls often upon the natural world in unexpected, animistic ways, juxtaposed with humanistic and mythological perspective in the context of modern experience. Stylistically, I incorporate word play, starkness with high detail and experimentation with structural space on the page."
Kathy Jiang
"I worked for a number of years with underserved AAPI youth before entering graduate school to become a psychotherapist, with the goal of serving that same demographic again. Recently, I have begun to play around with incorporating salient points from being a therapist-in-training into my poetry, adding another lens to the process of creative interrogation."
Kayla Blau
"As a Jewish-American, my essay grapples with unlearning white supremacist, settler colonial ideologies, and examines the US’s complicity in ethnic cleansing in Palestine. My hope is to humanize the statistics of genocide, to ask the question: what of apartheid is holy?"
Kurt David
"My work has a utopian streak. Against the grain of relentless global suffering, I imagine otherwise — insisting on joy, humor, gratitude. Not to paper over that suffering, but as a catalyst to confront it."
kyung
"What if waiting were simply stillness, a necessary balancing mechanism to move at the pace of our capacity? The shoulders against the chair, the grief simmering into a letter — these are of the same porous body from which I continue to write, act, and wrestle with others through change."
Mark Spero
"Under late capitalism and climate change, we are all buffeted by absurdities and violence, making it increasingly difficult to create a coherent self. Within my work I want to embody a playfulness and expansive eye for empathy and imagination, striving toward a stronger understanding of our fragmented identities and arriving at a fruitful confrontation with where we sit within the devastation of history."
Mo Fowler
"I want to be legible, to write pieces that are conversations rather than clouded orbs where truths might chance to be glimpsed. As a queer person, I rarely feel understood or legible to the world, and I find my writing to be a place of escape from that confusion."
Nadine Monem
"Never has the connections between colonial violences been more visible. What is the cost of waiting to collectively refuse the logic that makes this violence possible? It is, and has been, far too high."
Sabs Stein
"I draw inspiration from the words of Dr. Bayo Akomolafe on slowing down amidst urgency, from Tricia Hersey and the Nap Ministry's call for rest as resistance, and from the world of rocks where the poetry of time is not forgotten."
Sara Bawany
"As a social worker, I attempt to serve as a decolonial therapist for students and underprivileged minorities. Both this and my previous work within a nonprofit that investigates allegations of abuse against religious leaders has helped me pour a lot into my artistry, as the vicarious trauma I've experienced and the countless stories I've bore witness to have forever changed how I interact with the world, and consequently, with art."
Theodora Ziolkowski
"Across my writing, I am interested in what people/places/ideas we choose to hold on to, even when they may not be serving us, and the personal and cultural beliefs that may initially prevent us from walking away."
