Introducing the 18 voices of Issue 16 winter edition

The second half of the issue is a literary powerhouse.

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.

Tina Zafreen Alam

"So much of what I am trying to contend with comes down to affect. I am chasing beauty; where I define beauty as an encounter with something that arrests me and makes me stop and feel it in my body."

emet ezell

"In times of political speechlessness, how to speak? For guidance, I turn to folktales and fables. In folktales, voices are cracked from the inside. Gnostic and embodied knowledge takes center stage, and linear time is proven again and again to be a myth."

Jesse Gabriel Gonzalez

"I work from an interstitial position, mapping my own lived experience onto the mythic and dragging the mythic to places where it isn't necessarily expected."

Meredith Herndon

"The driving force behind my work is an interest in examining intergenerational trauma through the lens of landscape and place."

Patrick Martin Holian

"The driving forces of my work are experimentation, play, my struggles with reconciling so much about existence — the horrifying and miraculous, the mysterious and disturbing, the depraved and quotidian and mildly amusing — and the exploration of liminal spaces and borderlands."

M.E. Macuaga

"As a half-Japanese, half-Bolivian, bi-continental, multilingual mother of two, I find myself creating from a deep sense of urgency and experience, grappling with issues of identity, migration, gender equality, and our fragile relationships to nature and each other."

Cypress Manning

"I’ve been wondering what it looks like to be able to tell stories about being hurt, without dehumanizing those who hurt us, or ourselves in the process."

Nick Martino

"Proximity and distance are the engines of my poems, which are erasures sequenced in reverse: the erasure begins the poem, and then the full text fills in, like a Polaroid developing over time, or like my understanding of my parents developing over time. It’s my hope that form and voice push against one another: the lyric voice longs for answers made beautiful (and therefore serviceable) by language, and the form suggests no answer is ever perfect or complete."

Sarah Matsui

"Writing is often how I’m able to practice the art of attention, and how I come to better understand myself and the world around me. My work explores the tensions between mine, yours and ours; language as a site of connection and conflict; agency and powerlessness; immigrantness; and, Asian Americanness."

Erin L. McCoy

"Much of my writing investigates how the human–nonhuman binary and the dehumanization it enables makes space for violence—against animals and the environment, but also against other humans."

Jessica Mooney

"My writing explores themes of mental health, loss, and my struggle to eulogize and scatter the ashes of my father whom I'd never known. How do you have a close relationship with someone you don't even know? What does it mean to not know where half of you comes from?"

Taiye Ojo

"My artistic practice began as a reaction to hunger, and at its best retains the spark that comes from delight and curiosity. My eco-poems evoke a multitude of places, emotional hues, and often exploit the imaginative potential of language to capture the minutiae of daily life and the natural world."

Monique Ouk

"Inheritance has defined the entirety of my life. How do I live with the grief that I inherited? How do I honor my parents' survival? How do I honor my own survival? How do I say thank you?"

Daad Sharfi

"My work is concerned with not only writing against the state and its instruments, but also with protecting the tenderness and pleasure we experience within ourselves and in community with one another, even while standing on a hot bed of embers."

Grace Talusan

"I am interested in silences and the violent force of this quiet on my life and others' lives. Writing is my resisting and challenging silence and all the people who told me to shut up and take one for the team."

Veronica Wasson

"For me, my trans identity is inherently destabilized (maybe because I transitioned later in life). That’s made me wary of the idea of stable narratives. I want destabilized narratives. I have a vision of the self as multiple selves superimposed into a composite image."

Ellen Wiener

"I am a visual artist whose primary subject matters are myth, landscape, literature and the expansive potentials of reading and looking. Traditional tenets of home, ancestry and identity are undergoing fierce renovations. Broken boundaries are the basis and crux of transformation."