Poet of the Week

Chiwenite Onyekwelu’s debut poetry chapbook, EXILED, will be published in 2024 by Red Bird Chapbooks. His poems appear in Adroit Journal, Frontier, Cincinnati Review, Palette, Hudson Review, Lolwe, Chestnut Review, Mizna, and elsewhere. He won the Hudson Review Inaugural Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize, 2020 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Prize 2023.

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections, including the forthcoming The Last Great Adventure is You (Alice James Books, 2027), a sequel to If This is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her work has been commissioned by Paramount, the National September 11th Memorial, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Queens Arts Fund, Cafe Royal Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts and CantoMundo.

Leigh Chadwick is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Your Favorite Poet (Malarkey Books, 2022) and Sophomore Slump (Malarkey Books, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Salamander, Passages North, Identity Theory, and Pithead Chapel, among others. She is currently at work on a YA romance novel set around the Donner Party.

M. Cynthia Cheung is a physician whose poems can be found in The Baltimore Review, Four Way Review, Pleiades, RHINO, swamp pink, Tupelo Quarterly and others, and she is a prior Idyllwild Arts Writers Week fellow. She reads for Bear Review and serves as a judge for Baylor College of Medicine’s annual Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Awards.

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Matthew Nienow is the author of two collections with Alice James Books: House of Water (2016) and If Nothing (Forthcoming, 2025). His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, New England Review, Ploughshares, and POETRY, and has been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently pursuing a degree in Mental Health Counseling.

Amit Majmudar’s new books in 2023 published in the United States are Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books) and Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books). The same year, Penguin India will publish The Book of Vows, the first of three volumes in a Mahabharata retelling, as well as an original mythological story cycle, The Later Adventures of Hanuman.

Arah Ko is a writer from Hawai'i. Her work is published or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Frontier Poetry, Ninth Letter, Threepenny Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in creative writing from the Ohio State University where she edited for The Journal. Arah is a current Poetry Editor at Surging Tide Magazine.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. In addition, she is the co-editor of book reviews for Plume; her own reviews have been published there and in The Los Angeles Review of Books.