KATAYOUN AMINI is an Iranian-American writer who spent most of her career writing for television and film in Los Angeles. She wrote her first screenplay, NEEDLES, which she developed at IFP. Then went on to staff on the CBS morning cartoon MYTHIC WARRIORS, the Fox Family show THE ZACK FILES, and the HBO show MIND OF THE MARRIED MAN with Mike Binder. Her development slate includes TV pilots/series such as SCALP HUNTERS for Maysville Television and Y-SOCIETY for Imprint Entertainment. She has produced the independent feature 3…2…1…FRANKIE GO BOOM. And has written and adapted several films, most notably MAX PAYNE. Recently, Katayoun moved more into her producing/development role, running a Comedy TV company at NBC/Universal TV. But her primary home is in Jersey City, NJ, where her neurodivergent son, the youngest of her three kids, lives. She now coaches/teaches writing and has written the first book of a YA trilogy.
VIKKI C. is a British-born, award-nominated writer, poet, musician and author of The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024). Vikki’s poetry and stories are published or forthcoming in Psaltery & Lyre, The Stone Circle Review, Amethyst Review, Ballast Journal, ONE ART Poetry, Dust Poetry Magazine, The Winged Moon, and many other journals. She was named one of the winners of Black Bough Poetry’s 2024 Poetry Chapbook/Collection contest and was also shortlisted in the Jerry Jazz Musician 63rd Short Fiction Contest (US) and DarkWinter Lit’s 2nd Anniversary Contest (Canada).
ROB COUTEAU is a writer and visual artist from Brooklyn whose publications have been praised in Midwest Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Evergreen Review, Witty Partition, and the New Art Examiner. His work is cited in books such as Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Tyrone Simpson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera by Thomas Fahy, Conversations with Ray Bradbury edited by Steven Aggelis, and David Cohen’s Forgotten Millions, a book about the homeless. His interviews include conversations with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Justin Kaplan, Last Exit to Brooklyn novelist Hubert Selby, Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann, Picasso’s model and muse Sylvette David, sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, film star and bibliophile Neil Pearson, and historian Philip Willan, author Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy. In 1985 he won the North American Essay Award, sponsored by the American Humanist Association. He has appeared as a guest on Bob Barrett’s The Best of Our Knowledge (WAMC), Len Osanic’s Black Op Radio, and on Monocle 24 in Europe.
SHOME DASGUPTA is the author of The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), and most recently, the novels The Muu-Antiques (Malarkey Books) and Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West), a prose collection Histories Of Memories (Belle Point Press), a short story collection Atchafalaya Darling (Belle Point Press), and a poetry collection Iron Oxide (Assure Press). His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New Orleans Review, The Emerson Review, Jabberwock Review, American Book Review, Arkansas Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. Dasgupta is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee. He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.
JOSEPH DONAHUE is an American poet, critic, and editor. Born in Dallas, Texas and growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts. Donahue attended Dartmouth College for his undergraduate degree and went on to Columbia University and lived for many years in New York City. He now resides in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a professor at Duke University.
DAVE ESSINGER is a novelist, poet, essayist, and editor. His second novel This World and the Next is available now from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. His first book, Running Out, was released in 2017. Recent work appears in Gargoyle, Mud Season, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere, and his poetry and creative nonfiction have won prizes from Sport Literate and the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is General Editor of the AWP Intro Journals Project, and for many years was a fiction reader for Slice magazine. He teaches creative writing and edits the literary magazine Slippery Elm at the University of Findlay, in Ohio. See more at https://dave-essinger.com/.
PETER GLASSGOLD is an author, editor, and translator, former editor in chief of New Directions. In addition to his Boethius, among his many wide-ranging books are the novel The Angel Max (1998), The Collected Poems of James Laughlin (2014), Hwaet! A Little Old English Anthology of American Modernist Poetry (rev. ed., 2012). His papers are archived in the Houghton Library at Harvard.
ÉLISE GOYETTE is a collagist living in Montreal, Canada. “I spend time everyday connecting images and it’s like being in heaven with shackles on my ankles.”
HEIDE HATRY is a New York-based German artist, former rare book seller, and best known for her work employing animal parts or other discarded, disdained, or “taboo” materials. She has curated numerous exhibitions and has shown her work at museums and galleries all over the world. She has produced more than 200 artist’s books, edited dozens of art catalogues, and four of her larger projects have been documented in monographic books.
EDWARD M. HIRSCH is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller on reading poetry. He published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son which The New Yorker called “a masterpiece of pain.” He also published five prose books on poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City.
JANET KAPLAN is a poet and teacher and the author of two poetry collections, The Groundnote and The Glazier’s Country. She teaches at Hofstra University and Fordham University, where she is currently Poet-in-Residence. Kaplan attended Lehman College and Columbia University and received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
ROBERT FREDE KENTER is a Pushchart-nominated writer, a visual artist with work shown in the US and Canada, and the EIC/publisher at Ice Floe Press (www.icefloepress.net). Robert writes extensively about the intersections of illness, desire, alienation, loneliness, social justice issues, hallucinations, ecologies, music, myths, and pain. His work appears in The Storms Journal, DarkWinter, Acropolis, Grain, Anthropocene, and many other journals. Robert’s books include EDEN (2021) and The Audacity of Form (2019), with a chapbook, FATHER TECHTONIC, forthcoming (Ethelzine Press). His work is anthologized in The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press, 2022), Glisk and Glitter (Sidhe Press, 2022), and Seeing in Tongues (Steel Incisors, 2023). Find him at @icefloe22 on Instagram and @frede_kenter on Twitter(X).
HELLER LEVINSON lives in Hudson, Nueva York. His most recent poetry books are Query Caboodle, Shift Gristle (Black Widow Press, 2023) and The Abyssal Recitations (Concrete Mist Press, 2024). His book, Lure, won the 2022 Big Other Poetry Book Award.
JOHNNY LORENZ is a poet, scholar and translator of Brazilian literature. The son of Brazilian immigrants to the United States, he received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently a professor of English at Montclair State University. In 2003, he was awarded a Fulbright grant to translate the poems of Mario Quintana. He published a book of his own original poems accompanied by translations of poems by Mario Quintana. Education by Windows (Poets & Traitors Press, 2018). Lorenz translated Clarice Lispector’s The Besieged City; in 2013, his translation of A Breath of Lifeby Clarice Lispector (New Directions) was finalist for Best Translated Book.
TOBIAS MEINECKE is an award-winning film director and founder of the creative media company Love Child. He is one of twelve great-grandchildren of early 20th century Berlin publishing legend Hermann Klemm. Along with Eric Darton, he is the author of a semi-ficionalized account of Klemm’s life and times, the opening section of which appears in this issue. In his youth he published Comic Art, a critical magazine dedicated to the emergence of the graphic novel. Currently, in addition to numerous film and television projects, Meinecke is working on his first collection of short fiction.
ALBERT MOBILIO is the author of four books of poetry: Same Faces (2020), Touch Wood (2011), Me with Animal Towering (2002) y The Geographics (1995). In 2017 he published a fiction book, Games and Stunts. His essays and reviews have appeared in Paris Review Daily, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, BOMB, Cabinet y Tin House. He was a 2015 MacDowell Fellow and received an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Fellowship in 2017. A former staff writer at Bookforum, he is currently a staff writer at Hyperallergic and an associate professor of literary studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College.
MARY NEWELL is the author of Tilt/ Hover/ Veer (Codhill Press 2019) and Re-Surge (Trainwreck Press 2021), poems in journals including Talisman, BlazeVox, Spoon River Poetry Review, x-peri, Hopper Literary Magazine, Earth’s Daughters, Written River, About Place, Chronogram, Ethel, Plants and Poetry, and in several anthologies. She has published essays including “When Poetry Rivers” (Interim journal fall 2021). Newell is co-editor of Poetics for the More-than-Human-World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary. She curates the Hudson Highlands Poetry Series and teaches occasional poetry classes. Newell holds an MA from Columbia University, a BA from Berkeley, and a PhD from Fordham University with a focus on environment and embodiment in contemporary women’s writing.
SHAURYA PATHANIA holds a Masters in English Literature. He enjoys poetry, food, and sports. His recent works can be read on JAKE, Ink in Thirds, Mulberry Lit Mag, and elsewhere. He is currently donning his flip-flops, to make him wear his shoes you can send an invitation at @shauryapathani4 on Twitter(X).
JEANNINE M. PITAS is the author of two full-length poetry books: Or/And (Paraclete Press 2023) and Things Seen and Unseen (Mosaic Press 2019). She is the Spanish-English translator/co-translator of twelve books by Latin American authors, most recently Uruguayan poet Silvia Guerra’s A Sea at Dawn, co-translated with Jesse Lee Kercheval for Eulalia Books (2023), where also serves as an editor. Pitas lives in Pittsburgh, teaches at Saint Vincent College in beloved children’s entertainer Fred Rogers’s hometown of Latrobe, PA, and is translation co-editor for Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry. She believes that all human beings have equal dignity and have an inherent right to choose where they live.
PETER RAFFEL is an essayist whose work is published in The Threepenny Review, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Majuscule, and Some Kind of Opening. He taught creative writing at Columbia University as an Early Career Fellow, where he received his MFA in nonfiction in 2023.
ANISA RAHIM is a writer and public interest lawyer. Her hybrid memoir, American Meo: A Tale of Remembering and Forgetting (Sputyen Duyvil Press) about family history and ancestry was longlisted for the 2019 [PANK] Big Book Contest and published last July. Her poetry has been published widely, including in the anthology New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims (Red Hen Press) edited by Kazim Ali. You can find more of her work on her website at anisarahim.com or follow her on Instagram at @anisa_rahim.
LEONARD SCHWARTZ is the author of numerous books of poetry, including, most recently, Actualities I: Transparent, to the Stone, Actualities II and III: Two Burned Hotels, and Actualities IV/V Comic Earth (2021, 2022, 2023, Goats & Compasses). His three books with artist Simon Carr, Horse on Paper, Not a Snake and Salamander: A Bestiary (Chax Press, 2017), are also out and about.
AYFER TUNÇ is a novelist and short story writer who started as a journalist in 1989 and worked for highly circulated periodicals and dailies. She worked as editor-in-chief at Yapı Kredi Publishing House between 1999-2004. Furthermore she wrote many screenplays. Tunç’s work is about the virtues of being a lonely city dweller and a human being, and with deep insight she describes the suffering that comes along with it. With her book My Parents Will Visit You If You Don’t Mind: Our Life in the ‘70s was first published in 2001, she won the international Balkanika Literary Award in 2003 among seven participating countries. The book was translated into six Balkan languages. The same year her screenplay Cloud in the Sky, inspired by Sait Faik’s short stories, was filmed and televised. She has also co-authored a non-fiction study named Two Faced Sexuality with Oya Ayman. She is the founder of the activity center called Yazmak Atölyesi where cinema and literature courses are given and cultural seminars are held.
MATVEI YANKELEVICH is a poet, translator, and editor whose books include Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square), Alpha Donut (United Artists), Boris by the Sea (Octopus), and the chapbook From a Winter Notebook (Alder & Frankia). His translations from Russian include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook) and, with Eugene Ostashevsky, Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), which received the 2014 National Translation Award. Yankelevich founded Ugly Duckling Presse, and is currently founding director of Winter Editions and editor-in-chief of World Poetry Books.
ANDREW ZAWACKI is an American poet, critic, editor, and translator. He published five books of poetry: Unsun : f/11 (2019), Videotape (2013), Petals of Zero Petals of One (2009), Anabranch (2004), and By Reason of Breakings (2002). Some of his poems have been published in prestigious journals such as The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, among others. He also published four books in France and has edited and translated several volumes of contemporary French and Slovak poetry. Andrew Zawacki teaches at the University of Georgia.
CABLE STREET EDITORS
ERIC DARTON is the author of Free City, a novel, first published in 1996 by WW. Norton and recently re-released by Dalkey Archive Press, and the New York Times bestseller Divided We Stand: A Biography of The World Trade Center (Basic Books, 1999, 2011). Other of his writings may be found at bookoftheworldcourant.net, ericdarton.net, and tupeloquarterly.com. Darton is a partner in Love Child, a Berlin-based content developer for film, television, print and online media. He co-wrote, co-produced, and appears in Bill Hayward’s award-winning feature films Asphalt, Muscle & Bone (2019) and Beauty Is No Show – Designing the Dead (forthcoming in 2024). He teaches college-level literature, writing, and urban studies, and leads Writing at the Crossroads, an ongoing interdisciplinary prose workshop. Darton is an Internal Arts International-certified instructor in foundational Ba Gua Zhang.
DANA DELIBOVI is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her new book of translations and essays—Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila—was published by Monkfish Book Publishing in 2024. Her work has appeared in After the Art, Apple Valley Review, Moria, Noon: The Journal of the Short Poem, Psaltery & Lyre, Salamander, and many other journals. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2020 Best American Essays notable essayist. Delibovi’s poems traveled the St. Louis Metro as part of the Poetry in Motion Series sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. She posts at X(Twitter), Bluesky, Instagram, LinkedIn, and https://sweethunter.org/.
HARDY GRIFFIN is a writer and translator whose novel, Broken Kismet won the Eyelands Book Awards grand prize and has been published in Greek from Strange Days Press. He has published writing in Fresh.ink, New Flash Fiction, Alimentum, Assisi, The Washington Post, American Letters & Commentary, and a chapter in The Gotham Guide to Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury). His translations can be found in Words Without Borders, The Istanbul Biennial, and for the award-winning EU-sponsored study Ermeniler, which documents the lives of Armenians living in contemporary Turkey.
BRONWYN MILLS is the author of Beastly’s Tale (a novel) and Night of the Luna Moths (poetry); her education, an MFA from UMass, Amherst, a Ph.D. from NYU. Mentored by James Tate, Samuel Delany, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o she was an Anais Nin Fellow and Fulbright Fellow (La République du Bénin, West Africa) she has lived in Paris, France, New York City, Istanbul, Turkey; Cotonou, Bénin, and Latin America and taught Caribbean literature, African literature, and writing in Istanbul, Bénin, and just outside New York City. Formerly a dance and theatre writer in New England, Bronwyn is a founding co-editor for Cable Street and a Senior Prose Editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Guest-editor for the Turkish issue of Absinthe; New European Writing (#19), her current projects include By the Spoonmaker’s Tomb, a collection of vignettes from her time in Istanbul and the newly finished Canary Club, a novel set in medieval Spain. Most recently, Agni Online has published an excerpt from Spoonmaker. She has also published work on African vodou. More of her work can be found at bronwynmills.org/. Bronwyn now lives and writes in a tiny mountain village far, far away.
† CHRISTOPHER SAWYER-LAUÇANNO, whose memoir, Becoming, was serialized in these pages, authored more than two dozen books including biographies of Paul Bowles, E.E. Cummings, and The Continual Pilgrimage, a group portrait of American writers in Paris 1944-1960. For Cable Street, he translated Salvador Dalí’s prose poem, “San Sebastien,” and several other works. His book translations include work by Paul Eluard, Rafael Alberti, Panaït Istrati, García Lorca, Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautreamont as well as the Mayan Books of Chilam Balam. His work was featured in the inaugural issue of Wet Cement Magazine: www.wetcementpress.com/wcpmag. Night Suite, his most recent book of poems, was published by Talisman House. Other books include, Dix méditations sur quelques mots d’Antonin Artaud, translated by Patricia Pruitt (Paris: Alyscamps, 2018), Remission (Talisman House, 2016), and Mussoorie-Montague Miscellany (Talisman House, 2014). He wrote librettos for Thomas Adès (America: A Prophecy Part I), Faber Music/Warner Classics CD, 2011, and for Andrey Kasparaov (Lorca: An Operatic Cycle in Five Acts. Alyscamps, 2022). Until his retirement, Sawyer-Lauçanno taught writing at MIT for over a quarter-century. Many of his books may be found on Amazon and Bookshop.org.
JAN SCHMIDT is a writer living in New York City. Her short story “Returns Department” was published in Calyx recent issue, Vol 34 no. 3. “Pandora” was a Solstice Fiction Prize finalist and published in their 2023 summer issue. Litro Magazine published “EX-TING-GWISH-ER” online November 9, 2023. Other fiction writing appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, The Wall, Tupelo Quarterly, The Long Story, IKON and New York Stories. Her short story collection “Everything I Need” was a finalist for the Eludia Award, Hidden River Arts, 2019. Her unpublished novel “Sunlight Underground” was a finalist for the Novel Slices Award, 2021. Till 2015, she held the position of Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Some of her published writing can be seen on her website http://contactprod.com/janschmidt/
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