KNOT Magazine
Fall Issue 2022
Pushcart Prize Nominees, 2015
Nahid Rachlin went to Columbia University Writing Program on a Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship and then went on to Stanford University MFA program on a Stegner Fellowship. Her publications include a memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS (Penguin), four novels, JUMPING OVER FIRE (City Lights), FOREIGNER (W.W. Norton),MARRIED TO A STRANGER (E.P.Dutton-Penguin), THE HEART'S DESIRE (City Lights), a collection of short stories,VEILS (City Lights) and CROWD OF SORROWS, (Kindle Singles). Her individual short stories have appeared in more than fifty magazines, including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Redbook, and Shenandoah. One of her stories was adopted by Symphony Space, “Selected Shorts,” and was aired on NPR’s around the country and two stories were nominated for Pushcart Prize.
Her work has received favorable reviews in major magazines and newspapers and translated into Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Dutch, German, Arabic, and Persian. She has been interviewed in NPR stations such as All Things Considered (Terry Gross), P&W magazine, and Writers Chronicle. She has written reviews and essays for New York Times, Newsday, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Other grants and awards she has received include the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
She has taught creative writing at Barnard College, Yale University and at a wide variety of writer’s conferences, including Paris Writers Conference, Geneva Writers Conference, and Yale Writers Conference. She has been judge for several fiction awards and competitions, among them, Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction (2015) sponsored by AWP, Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award sponsored byPoets & Writers, Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize, University of Maryland, English Dept., Teichmann Fiction Prize, Barnard College, English Dept. For more please click on her website: website: http://www.nahidrachlin.com
Jo-Ann Reid
Poetry
"The Kitchen Test"
Jo-Ann Reid is an Associate Professor of English in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Dean College in Franklin, MA. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street and Shaking Like a Mountain. As the daughter of Haitian immigrants, her work explores pushes, blurs and even erases cultural boundaries, while retracing origins of expectation related to ethnicity, gender, restriction and the complexity of social justice. Ms. Reid won a poetry contest judged by Harryette Mullen while earning her MFA at The Pennsylvania State University.
Reid was recently published in The Philadelphia Review of Books and her work is forthcoming in The Ocean State Review.
Lena Zaghmouri has been writing fiction for fifteen years, and her work has been published in Dampen to Bend and The San Joaquin Review.
Lena earned her master’s degrees in English language literature; she wrote her master’s thesis on contemporary Arab American writers, and
she currently works as an English professor.
Host of the Gelato Poetry Series, instigator of the San Diego Poetry Un-Slam, and an editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual, Jon Wesick has published hundreds of poems and short stories in journals such as The Atlanta Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Pearl, Slipstream, and Tales of the Talisman. His recent novel Hunger for Annihilation published in 2015 from Garden Oak Press, and Yellow Lines in October. Both can be found on Amazon.
Deema K. Shehabi is poet, writer, and editor. She is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon, and is co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. Her work has appeared widely in various anthologies and literary journals. Her most recent publication is a collaboration with Marilyn Hacker titled Diaspo/Renga:a collaboration in alternating renga. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Farsi, and French.
Suzanne O’Connell lives in Los Angeles where she is a poet and a clinical social worker. Her work can be found in Forge, Atlanta Review, Blue Lake Review, G.W. Review, Reed Magazine, Permafrost, Mas Tequila Review, The Round, The Griffin, Sanskrit, Foliate Oak, Talking River, Organs of Vision and Speech Literary Magazine, Willow Review, The Tower Journal, Thin Air Magazine, Fre&d, The Manhattanville Review, poeticdiversity, The Evansville Review, Serving House Journal, Silver Birch Press, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Licking River Review. She was a recipient of Willow Review’s annual award for 2014 for the poem "Purple Summers." She is a member of Jack Grapes’ L.A. Poets and Writers Collective. A sample of her work can be viewed at suzanneoconnell-poet.com