What we discovered curating this issue—and we hope you’ll note while reading it—is that shame is two-sided. You’ll read about the shame of illness versus the shame of being healthy when others are ill in “The BRCA Tale”; the shame of wanting to escape another’s poor mental health versus needing support for your own in “Confession”; the shame of keeping a painful secret versus the shame of revealing it in “Turnaround in the Dark”; the shame of being victimized versus the idea that you may have caused the victimization of a loved one in “The Ankle-Breaker”; and the shame of passing versus the shame of being incapable or unwilling to protect another in “Delightful Music”. And this is just to name a few. 

This issue features:

POETS  

Leeya Mehta, Carlton D. Fisher, B.J. Reyes, Thomas J. Erickson, Jennifer Neely, Jonathan Duckworth, Leah Mueller, Katy Richey, Jessica Wiseman Lawrence, Chris Campanioni, Raymond Luczak, Adele Brown, José Sebastián Romero, Valorie G. Hallinan, Caroline Johnson, Alan King, Michelle Lin, Caitlin Springer 

WRITERS

Ian Blake Newhem, Ian Seiter, Iqbal Pittalwala, Sergio Troncoso, Madhushree Ghosh, Thaddeus Gunn

An INTERVIEW with Roxane Gay

and ART by Merilee Minshew.