Editor’s Note:
How do we continue to love one another amidst a hate-filled world? How do we find solace amidst devastating heartache? How can we open ourselves to moments of wonder in our daily lives? These are some of the urgent and necessary questions that the poems, short stories, and essays in this Winter 2025 issue of Witness contemplate.
This issue also features many works that turn over the question of memory. The art we selected for our cover—Europe 1945-1970 by Reiner Heidorn—is from a larger project that interrogates, questions, and paints over school maps produced during the Nazi regime in Germany. Heidorn’s paintings are organic, fluid, and botanical, speaking to the complex movements of memory and the remaking of borders.
Other pieces in this issue take up similar threads. How do we make visible the permeability, histories, and fictions of the border? How is memory complicated by the ubiquitous presence of machines and routine? What answers can we find—if any—in the archives of human history?
We hope this issue intrigues, delights, and, above all, inspires in the ways that our contributors approach these thought-provoking questions. Enjoy!
Poetry
Cynthia Clifford, “Exceptions”
Stephen Gibson, “Self-Portrait with Little Dancer Aged Fourteen”
Lance Larsen, “Once, in San Gimignano, Waiting for a Bus”
Abbie Kiefer, “Tritina with Relocation”
Sophie Klahr, “Sharing the News (2025)”
John Nieves, “Redefinition: Hands”
Eric Pankey, “The Turquoise Trail”
Chen Poyu, “Polka” – translated from Taiwanese Mandarin by Nicholas Wong
Nonfiction
Julija Šukys, “The Long Shadow: A Campus Shooting in the Archives”
Theresa Lin, “Operation Fiction Writer”
Jen Grow, “This Shouldn’t Be Happening”
Ellen Goldstein, “A Star Is A Memory”
Libby Kalmbach Clark, “Borders as Fictions”
Derek Maiolo, “Hold It In”
Fiction
Elisa Luna Ady, “Cash Only”
Rick Andrews, “Recipe”
Chaya Bhuvaneswar, “The Editor”
Carter Groves, “In Good Spirits”
Cristina Hartmann, “Found in Translation”
Emily Hoang, “The Tradition”
Lyn Di Iorio, “Killing Rock Rogan”
Elizabeth Lee, “The Report”
Suphil Lee Park, “Simmani”
Angela Townsend, “Mr. Keith Contacts Support,” “In Our Nature,” and “Handheld Heads”
Seth Wade, “Born By Blobfish”
Cover Art
Reiner Heidorn, Europa 1945-1970
Masthead
Editor-in-Chief: Wendy Chen
Managing Editor: Sada Malumfashi
Engagement Editor: Seth Kleinschmidt
Design Editor: Wendy Chen
Fiction Editors: Sabrina Shie, Tanya Shirazi, Jenée Skinner, Ahmed Naji
Nonfiction Editors: Krista Diamond, Emad Jabini
Poetry Editors: Seth Kleinschmidt, Arpita Roy, Jo Wallace
Contributing Editors
Fiction: Krista Diamond, Polly Llewellyn, Sara Tausendfreund
Nonfiction: Anesce Dremen, Abel Reyes, Maggie Slepian
Readers
Fiction: Gustavo Alvarenga, Huseyin Arikan, Carrie Bindschadler, Tonya Larson, Lindsay Loughin, Cecil Lycoris, Leah Mell-Carrington, Abel Reyes, Andrea Torres
Nonfiction: Shayla Felix, Ahmed Nagy, Taylor Wright
