Check out our 2026 Featured Writers below:
Ito Romo was born and raised on the border in Laredo, Texas. His work, dubbed “Chicano Gothic” and “Chicano Noir,” shows the dark and gritty life along Interstate 35 through South Texas, where his family has lived for 11 generations. A former Professor of English Language and Literature, Romo was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019. His books include The Border is Burning and El Puente/The Bridge, both published by University of New Mexico Press. He lives in San Antonio.
Cecily Parks received a BA from Rice University in 1999, an MA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 2000, an MFA in poetry from Columbia University in 2005, and a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2011.
Parks is the author of three poetry collections: The Seeds (Alice James Books, 2025), a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award; O’Nights (Alice James Books, 2015); and Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008). Her chapbook Cold Work (Poetry Society of America, 2005) was chosen by Li-Young Lee for the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. She is the editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2016).
Parks teaches at Texas State University and lives in Austin, Texas.
Phillip B. Williams is from Chicago, Illinois, and is the author of two collections of poetry: Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and Mutiny, which was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection and the winner of a 2022 American Book Award. Williams is also the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at New York University and is founding faculty of the Randolph College Low-res MFA.