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Gabriel Antonio Reed to Judge ProForma 20
Grist’s annual ProForma contest is open for submissions. If you want advice on what judge Gabriel Antonio Reed is looking for, look no further.
Poems by Melanie Manuel
Melanie H. Manuel is a Filipina American poet. She attends SDSU for her MFA in poetry. She teaches for the Rhetoric and Writing Studies and English and Comparative Literature departments. Her work has been published by Third Iris Zine, North American Review, Grist: A Literary Journal of Arts, boats against the current, Los Angeles Review, Quillkeepers Press, and The Shore. She also has forthcoming work with minnesota review, Porkbelly Press, and Zone 3 Press. Her debut chapbook, in storyboard, is now out with Bottlecap Press.
Poems by Laura Villareal
Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving, (University of Wisconsin Press 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters’ John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Guernica, AGNI, among others.
Crystal Boys in Taipei
Li Zhuang is a PhD candidate of Creative Writing at Florida State University. In 2019, Li graduated with an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Pleiades, The Common, Denver Quarterly, The Madison Review, and The Collapsar, etc. She is the winner of 2025 SAMLA Graduate Student Creative Writing Award, a finalist for the 2025 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize and a runner up for Grist’s ProForma contest. Her poetry chapbook But Octopi Don’t Sing, published in March 2026, was selected as the runner-up for the Purple Ink Press’s Chapbook Contest by Chen Chen. Li is working on her debut novel about Chinese lesbian romantic relationships in a futuristic New York City, where memories can be altered through mnemonic navigation machines.
Testimonial Grids
Elisávet Makridis, a US-born great-granddaughter of Pontic Greek refugees, is a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominated cross-disciplinary poet and educator. Recipient of the Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award, Elisávet earned an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University where she taught for four years as a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English. Her writing has received multiple awards and honors, selected most recently as a finalist for RHINO Poetry’s 2026 Founders’ Prize and Black Warrior Review’s inaugural Experimental Forms Contest and named a semifinalist for the Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition (Black Lawrence Press). A 2026 McCormack (formerly Tin House) Winter Online Workshop Participant, Elisávet’s work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Canthius, amongst others. Her poetics aim to calibrate otherwise ways of communing with infinite ancestral beloveds across a lineage of forced displacement, refugeehood, and genocide to metabolize a wail that predates her body. Find her online at elisavetmakridis.com.
Polaroid Stories
London-based artist Tash Kahn has a multi-faceted practice that merges painting, Polaroids and sculpture. Working intuitively, images are arrived at spontaneously and chance encounters are embraced through colour, composition and form. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions in London, Sussex and New York. She also works as a freelance editor.
Cathy Rose is a San Francisco, CA writer whose stories have appeared in Sluice, Hunger Mountain, Greensboro Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Fourteen Hills and elsewhere, and in fiction and creative nonfiction anthologies. She holds an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and is a practicing psychologist.
Issue 19
ISSUE 19 Grist’s latest issue appears each spring and boasts exclusive-to-print poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. BACK ISSUES Grist is published annually. To see all subscription options, click the button below and scroll down. Subscribe POETRY Hussain AhmedJo BearFinnegan BlyChase CateAmanda ChiadoDorsey CraftBenjamin FaroMaryam GhafoorSummer J. HartAngie HexumToni HollandRomana IorgaTyler Michael
Could be the last time
Robin LaMer Rahija is the author of Inside Out Egg (Variant Lit 2024). She received her MFA from the University of Kentucky, where she is an administrative assistant in the Department of English. Her poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, FENCE, Spoon River Review, and elsewhere.
Soulmate As a Verb by Kelsey L. Smoot
Reviewed by Bess Cooley | Mar 28, 2026 Dopamine Books, February 2026 Paperback, 120 pages, $16.95 I had the pleasure of hearing Kelsey L. Smoot read his work in a bookstore in the Atlanta area last spring. The room was small, quiet but crowded—in that way poetry readings are meant to
INOPERABLE
Anna Antongiorgi(she/her) is a poet, choreographer, and dancer. She earned her BA in English and Theatre, Dance, and Media at Harvard, followed by an MFA in Poetry at the New School. Her poetry chapbook refinding the rules of gravity(Finishing Line Press, July 2021), was featured in Dance Magazine and included in Flight Path Dance Project’s curriculum. Her original choreopoem, SUNDAY, was presented at the TADA! Theater in October 2022. Individual poems of hers have been featured in The Inquisitive Eater and Big Windows Review. She lives in Brooklyn, works as a freelance choreographer, and dances with the Brooklyn Ballet. You can find her on instagram, @annaantongiorgi.
![This is the painting called "Dancing Couple in the Snow [reverse]" by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It shows a stylised dancing couple in cool colors. The woman's face bears a frown.](https://gristjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/dancing_couple_in_the_snow_reverse_1989.60.1.b-scaled.jpg)
DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE
Brenna Womer (she/they) is a queer, childfree, Latine prose writer and poet. She is the author of Unbrained (FlowerSong Press, 2023), Honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and two chapbooks. Her writing across genres has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, teaching in the MFA program at California State University, Fresno.
Legion
Katherine Indermaur is the author of ‘I|I’ (Seneca Review Books), winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and the 2023 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and two chapbooks. She serves as an editor for Sugar House Review. Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, Frontier Poetry, the Journal, New Delta Review, Ninth Letter, the Normal School, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Current Proforma Contest Winner
Show us your work.
In 2025, we will accept submissions for our ProForma Contest between June 1 and July 15. We will be open to general submissions between August 1 and October 31. We publish our print issue annually and online content more regularly.