May Roundup
Showering you (hopefully not too much) with updates!
Everyone at The Florida Review can’t believe it’s already May. We are happy to bring you all some awesome news before we leave for the summer!
TL;DR:
Issue 49.2 (Spring 2026) coming out soon!
Book releases from former contributors Nicole Santalucia & Hannah Thurman!
National Poetry Month retrospective with Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.
Purchase our most recent chapbook Wednesday Trash Day!
Read our interview with Guggenheim winner Bret Anthony Johnston published in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.
Issue 49.2 (Spring 2026) Teaser!
We hear you. Believe us, we are excited too for our Spring 2026 issue, which will be shipping in late May or early June! While you wait, here’s a preview of our cover!
National Poetry Month Retrospective!
For a month, we published a poem every Monday and Thursday on Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. Be sure to check out each of the poems collected below:
Travis Mossotti, “Inside the cold of January…”
Travis Mossotti is the author of five collections of poetry, including, Apocryphal Genesis (Saturnalia Books, 2024), which won the North American Poetry Book Award for 2025, and Racecar Jesus (BSPG, 2023), which was highly commended for the Forward Prize in the UK.
Sandra Meek, “Corona: A Suite”
Sandra Meek’s seventh collection of poems, Bind, in which “Corona: A Suite” appears, will be released by Persea Books in January 2027. Her most recent book of poems, Still (Persea Books, 2020), was named a “New & Noteworthy Poetry Book” by The New York Times Book Review. Other titles include An Ecology of Elsewhere (Persea, 2016), Road Scatter (Persea, 2012), and Biogeography, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo 2008), as well as an edited anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad, awarded an Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. Recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, three Georgia Author of the Year awards, and two Peace Corps Writers awards, she is Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College.
Charlotte Pence, Two Poems
Charlotte Pence recently served as Mobile, Alabama’s inaugural Poet Laureate and a 2024 Academy of American Poets laureate fellow. Her latest book of poems, Code, received the 2020 Book of the Year award from ASPS and was shortlisted for Best Indie Poetry Books of 2020 by Foreword Reviews. Her first book of poems, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), received a silver Poetry Book of the Year award from Foreword Reviews. She is also the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks and the editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have recently been published in Brevity, Harvard Review, Poetry, Slate, Southern Review, The New York Times, and featured on The Slowdown. She has been a recent fellow at MacDowell, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Vanderbilt’s James Patterson residency. A graduate of Emerson College (MFA) and the University of Tennessee (PhD), she is currently completing a memoir and the new MFA director at Texas State University.
Anna Leonard, “Learning of the Death of a Classmate”
Anna Leonard is a poet and musician pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the Lead Media Editor and Associate Podcast Editor for Blackbird. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, The Greensboro Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. She has songs available to stream on all streaming platforms.
Kelle Groom, “A Garden at Night”
Kelle Groom’s fifth poetry collection, The Book of Miracles, will be published in the Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, Spring 2027. She is the author of four previous collections, Underwater City (University Press of Florida), Luckily, Five Kingdoms, and Spill (Anhinga Press); a memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), a Barnes & Noble Discover selection and New York Times Editors’ Choice; and How to Live: A Memoir in Essays (Tupelo Press). An NEA Fellow, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, and winner of two Florida Book Awards in poetry, Groom’s work appears in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry.
Chelsea Rathburn, Two Poems
Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife. Raised in Miami, she has made Georgia her home since 2001 and has served as the state poet laureate since 2019. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets, and her poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, 32 Poems, and other journals. She currently teaches creative writing at Mercer University in Macon. Her fourth book of poetry, Broken Houses, will be published by LSU Press in July 2026.
Ana Prundaru, “Ghazal for Manatees”
Ana Prundaru is a legal advisor, writer, and artist, whose practice includes collages and erasures. Her work appears in places like the New England Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review.
Jill McCabe Johnson, “Scientists Confirm the Biological Basis of Love”
Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of two chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections, most recently Tangled in Vow & Beseech (MoonPath, 2024), a finalist for the Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and Sally Albiso Poetry Award, plus the memoir Learning to Spar, forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. Honors include Nautilus Awards in Poetry and Nature Writing, Longreads’ Best of 2021 Stories, eight Pushcart Prize nominations, and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Artist Trust, and Hedgebrook. Recent works have been published in Fourth Genre, Terrain.org, Booth, and VerseDaily. Jill is editor-in-chief of Wandering Aengus Press and its imprint, Trail to Table Press.
Jacklin Farley, “Dolly Parton Sings to Burt Reynolds at the End of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (poetry)
Jacklin Farley (she/they, @svvanhilda on Instagram & BlueSky) holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida State University. Their work has most recently appeared / is forthcoming in Allium, The McNeese Review, Blood Orange Review, Gulf Stream, Diode Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. They enjoy clichés and long walks on the beach in Tallahassee (for now).
Upcoming Book Releases from Former Contributors!
We want to give the biggest of shout-outs to former contributors Nicole Santalucia & Hannah Thurman for their new books!
Nicole Santalucia’s poetry collection, Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians released on April 21, 2026 from Bordighera Press. You can read Nicole’s poem, “Captive” here, where it was featured in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.
Hannah Thurman’s debut novel Mercy Hill recently came out on May 05, 2026 from Doubleday. Hannah’s story “Beautiful Fucking Problems” was featured in Issue 48.1 (Fall 2024) of The Florida Review. This issue is available for purchase here.
Congrats again to Nicole and Hannah!
Wednesday Trash Day is Available for Purchase!
Mary Kate Coleman’s Wednesday Trash Day is our fourteenth annual chapbook, purchasable here from our store.
“Gutting and necessary. A grief so delicate and rending that it feels holy. There’s no balm for the wound Wednesday Trash Day will leave in you.”
– Contest Judge Micah Dean Hicks
Mary Kate Coleman is a recent Fulbright scholar and investigator on the digital storytelling project Humanizing Deportation. She’s currently a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Glimmer Train, Redivider, Carve Magazine, and others. Her story “HayDay” was a finalist in the 2025 Puerto Del Sol Prose Contest. She and her husband are working on renovating an 1830s log cabin on the White River in Indianapolis. They have two kids, Ruthie and Woody.
Aquifer Round Up
Apart from poetry, we recently interviewed Guggenheim winner Bret Anthony Johnston in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online:
Bret Anthony Johnston & Rhys Plantilla-Petit, The House Itself: A Conversation with Bret Anthony Johnston (interview)
Bret Anthony Johnston is the internationally bestselling author of the books Encounters with Unexpected Animals, We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This and the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories, as well as the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, Thrasher Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the Sunday Times Short Story Award, he was born and raised in Texas and is the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.
Rhys Plantilla-Petit is a writer based in Central Florida. He is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Central Florida and a senior associate editor at The Florida Review.
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