Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions. His poetry is known for its lyrical and expressive language, as well as its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. "Sukun" means serenity or calm, and a sukun is also a form of punctuation in Arabic orthography that denotes a pause over a consonant. This Sukun draws a generous selection from Kazim's six previous full-length collections, and includes 35 new poems. It allows us to trace Ali's passions and concerns, and take the measure of his art: the close attention to the spiritual and the visceral, and the deep language play that is both musical and plain spoken. 

Leslie Carol Roberts' creative nonfiction combines historical research with experiential reportage to tell ecologically minded stories about out-of-the-way places and the people who explore them. Her first book, The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica (University of Nebraska, 2008), draws on her Fulbright-funded research into the continent, as well as her background as a journalist, to portray the constellation of facts and myths that comprise the Antarctic imaginary. Her latest book, Here is Where I Walk (University of Nevada, 2019), adopts similar methods to spin associative yarns about the Presidio of San Francisco. In her telling, the Presidio—a former US military fort located near the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, which became a national park, with residences, in 1996—is a space for quotidian wonder, a pocket of nature woven into the fabric of culture. Roberts’ literary excursions, which probe the borders between public and private life, model ways that individuals can negotiate. 

Darius Stewart is a poet and writer from Knoxville, Tennessee. He is the author of the poetry collection Intimacies in Borrowed Light (EastOver Press 2022) and Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir (Belt Publishing 2024). His poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Arkansas International, The Brooklyn Review, Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Fourth Genre, Salamander, Verse Daily, and others. He holds MFAs from the Michener Center for Writers and the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Currently, he is a Lulu "Merle" Johnson Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Iowa. 

Cate Dicharry received her MFA in Creative Writing from University of California, Riverside. Her debut novel, The Fine Art of Fucking Up, was published by Unnamed Press, and she is currently working on a project that explores the ways in which the humanities can serve as an intervention against dehumanization in healthcare and medical training. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The Nervous Breakdown, Role/Reboot, and elsewhere. In 2016, she started as Youth Program’s Coordinator at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She became director of the Writing and Humanities Program at The University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine in 2019, serving also as Managing Editor of The Examined Life Journal and Director of The Examined Life Conference. She returned to the IWP in March of 2024 as Executive Associate Director of Operations.