Prismatic Prose & Poetry: A Rail Reading curated by Brenda Iijima

Elvia Wilk is a writer living in New York. She is the author of the novel Oval and the essay collection Death by Landscape. She contributes to publications like The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Atlantic, Granta, n+1, Bookforum, Artforum, Frieze, and 4Columns, and is a contributing editor at e-flux journal.

Gia Gonzales is a poet based in New York City, where she was born. Her work has most recently appeared in baest: a journal of queer forms and affects, Femmescapes, Bomb Cyclone: A Journal of Ecopoetics, and variously with the Poetry Project. Her first chapbook, RENDER SLEAZE was published by Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. She is the managing editor at Nightboat Books.

Daisy Hildyard holds a PhD in the history of science, and has previously published essays on the language of science, and on seventeenth-century mathematics. Her first novel Hunters in the Snow received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her nonfiction book The Second Body, a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. She lives with her family in North Yorkshire, where she was born.

Annie Won is a poet, yoga teacher, and a former medicinal chemist who presently resides in Beersheva, Israel while pursuing a degree in medicine. Annie is particularly interested in spaces of mind, body, and page. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a Juniper Writing Institute scholarship recipient. Her chapbook with Brenda Iijima, Once Upon a Building Block, was published with Horse Less Press, and her chapbook, so i can sleep, is from Nous-Zot Press. Her work has appeared in Shampoo and RealPoetik, and is forthcoming from EAOGH, TheThePoetry, TENDE RLION, and New Delta Review. Her critical reviews can be seen at American Microreviews and Interviews.

Anne K. Yoder is the author of the novel The Enhancers. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Fence, BOMB, Tin House, NY Tyrant, and MAKE, and has been recognized in Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks and is a member of the Chicago-based publishing and arts collective, Meekling Press. She writes, lives, and occasionally dispenses pharmaceuticals in Chicago.

Brenda Iijima is a poet, novelist, playwright, choreographer and visual artist. She is the author of nine books of poetry. Her current work engages submerged and occluded histories, other-than-human modes of expression and telluric awareness in all forms. A play, Daily Life in China is forthcoming from elis press in 2023, a novel Presence is forthcoming from Georgia Review Press in 2023. A novella, A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, written in collaboration with Janice Lee is forthcoming from Meekling Press and a collaborative chapbook, The Center for Hierarchical Thinking, written with Annie Won is due out in 2023. Iijima is the founding editor-publisher of Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. She lives in Brooklyn.