The Subterranean Affiliations of the Trees: A Rail Reading Curated by Zoe Tuck

María José Giménez is a Venezuelan-Canadian poet, translator, editor, and author of the chapbooks CHELATED (Belladonna*) and ENTRETANTO. The 2019–2021 Poet Laureate of Easthampton, Massachusetts, and poetry-in-translation editor for The Massachusetts Review, María José received the 2020 American Academy of Poets Ambroggio Prize for Mara Pastor’s bilingual collection DEUDA NATAL, with Anna Rosenwong.

Serena Lukas Bhandar is a writer, educator, and witch of Punjabi Sikh and Welsh ancestry, as well as a first-year MA student in English at the University of Calgary, where she is pursuing a creative thesis about the poet Sappho transposed to the modern-day world. Serena’s debut chapbook of poetry, this dying body, was published in July with Rahila’s Ghost Press.

Tina Lentz-McMillan is a Filipina/-American/Mestiza poet whose poetry centers mixed identity. Her current work focuses on how this identity can be othering from both sides and interrogates how colonialism can manifest as intergenerational trauma. Symbols manifest, recur, and change across her body of work to engage the reader in mythmaking. She is an MFA candidate at Queens University of Charlotte and currently lives in the lands of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui Tribe, also known as Tucson, Arizona, with her partner and their dog and cat. Next creative steps are exploring a borderless poetic.

germ lynn is a writer, cellist, and curriculum developer working in the field of supported living and self direction for people with disabilities. they live on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Chochenyo Ohlone people. their work can be found in Vice, Butter Press, The Reservoir, and Rendering Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Politics and Poetry. their science fiction short story What You Call was published as a chapbook by Radix Media for their Futures series. Lynn’s first poetry chapbook PRESSURED SPEECH is available as a trade or gift. ask a punk.

Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts. She is the author of Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light) and the chapbooks “Vape Cloud of Unknowing” (Belladonna*) and the “The Book of Bella” (DoubleCross Press), the latter of which is bound in a dos-a-dos edition with Emily Hunerwadel’s “Peach Woman”. In addition to teaching private creative writing and literature classes, Zoe is the co-host of the Northampton-based But Also reading series with Britt Billmeyer-Finn and the co-editor of Hot Pink Magazine with Emily Bark Brown. Since 2019, she has been an active member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, where she has co-curated both the Close Distances and the In-Flux reading series.