In This Issue

Angela Townsend is in her eighteenth year of working at a cat sanctuary, where she gets to bear witness to mercy for all beings. This was not the exact path she expected after divinity school, but love is a wry author of lives. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, Five Points, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College. Her poet mother is her best friend.

Holly Willis is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer whose work examines the materiality of the image within a broader context of new materialist philosophy and the histories of experimental film, video, and photography with the goal to design encounters with media that spark an embodied sense of curiosity and wonder. Using a variety of analog, digital, and computational image-making tools, Willis explores the ways in which we might reimagine our relationship to the world and its varied spaces and landscapes, not as independent beings moving through separate realms, but as transcorporeal forces enmeshed in dense relationships with the matter all around us. She asks if we can imagine the world not as some inert backdrop to human activity but as a dynamic array that we engage with in ongoing relations, how might we care for our world differently? Her body of work overall attempts to capture this sense of active matter, of sensation, and dynamism, and strives for what Anna Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World, calls the “arts of noticing.”