Co-Editor-in-Chief: Gabriel Ridout
The winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, Gabriel Ridout is a mixed Filipinx-American poet-scholar, currently a PhD student in English at WashU. Poems are featured or forthcoming on poets.org, in Nightboat Books’s Permanent Record anthology, and elsewhere.
Co-Editor-in-Chief: Elise Thi Tran
Elise (she/her) is a writer, poet, and multimedia artist. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Apogee, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Diode, The Kenyon Review, Salt Hill, and elsewhere.
Co-Nonfiction Editor: JessieAnne D’Amico
JessieAnne D’Amico is a writer and editor from North Carolina currently making a home in the Midwest while pursuing her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work often explores the American South and its coastlines as well as themes of intimacy, identity, family and lineages, and all the complications thereof.
Co-Nonfiction Editor: Ariel Kim
Before embarking on her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at WashU, Ariel was a high school English teacher and department chair in Boston. She has also been a contributing writer for the Women’s Review of Books, and she has a background in modern dance. She grew up in Georgia.
Poetry Editor: Mikaela Hoover
Mikaela is an MFA candidate in Poetry at WashU. When they aren’t writing or teaching poems, they love to spend time at the zoo, rummaging through a creek, or haunting a local coffee shop. They grew up in Iowa.
Readers:
Amaris Bouchard (she/her) is a poet and memoirist. Her lyrical essays often engage with intimacy and memory. She hopes to create work that speaks truthfully while playing with one of her favorite mechanisms: strangeness.
Michaela Esau is an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at WashU. She is originally from Kansas.
Lydia Golitz is an MFA student in Poetry at WashU. She is originally from Chicago.
Jeron Riley Hicks: Strange, odd. Those sorts of things. MFA candidate in Poetry.
Sarah Mayo is a PhD student in English and American Literature at WashU.
Grace McGovern is a poet from Chicago. She is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at WashU. Her work has been published by West Trade Review, The Poetry Society of New York, and others.
Zoe Montague is from St. Johnsbury, Vermont. She is a first-year MFA student in Poetry.
Nia Sampson is a PhD student in English at WashU.
Lorenza Starace is a bilingual writer from Southern Italy.
Faith Terry is an MFA candidate in Fiction at WashU.
Edwardson Ukata is a queer, nonbinary writer from Nigeria. They are the winner of the 2024 C.D. Wright Poetry Prize by The Arkansas International, and graduate fellow in the MFA program at WashU. They have works in POETRY, Lolwe, Channel, FOLIO, Vastarien, Olney, Consequence, among others.
Ethan Wood is a queer writer from rural East Texas. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at WashU. His work has appeared in Just femme and dandy.
Mary Zhou is a multimedia artist from Orange County, California, currently exploring Chinese ancestral spirituality and queer diasporic identity through poetics and movement. They are the author of cave mouth tongue loose (The Head & The Hand Press, 2024) in collaboration with visual artist Nora. E. Luks. Their work is shared or forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Fence, and swamp pink.
Copy Editor:
Cathay Pan Poulsen is an editor and writer from Taiwan and Utah. She graduated from WashU in 2025 with a BA in Linguistics and Writing. When she isn’t scrutinizing a news article’s funky headline or editing essays, she’s either playing Stardew Valley or hanging out with her cat, Noodle.
Production Editor:
Grace Mensah-Fosu is a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature at WashU. Her research interests explore how cultural and linguistic representations influence English language usage in postcolonial multilingual contexts, focusing mainly on West-African and Caribbean literature.
Social Media Managers:
Mikaela Hoover & Sally Paik
Faculty Advisor:
Heather McPherson
Advisory Board:
Mark Longden
David Schuman
Abram Van Engen
Cass Donish, Editor Emeritus
Cass Donish is the author of the poetry collections The Year of the Femme (University of Iowa Press, 2019), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, Beautyberry (Slope Editions, 2018), and the forthcoming Your Dazzling Death (Knopf, 2024). Their nonfiction chapbook On the Mezzanine (2019) was selected by Maggie Nelson as winner of the Gold Line Press Chapbook Competition.
Kelly Caldwell (1988-2020), Founding Editor
The Spectacle was founded by trans poet, writer, visual artist, and scholar Kelly Caldwell, who co-edited the magazine with her partner, Cass Donish. She is the author of Letters to Forget (Penguin Random House, 2024) and her writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Entropy, Fence, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, Seneca Review, The Rumpus, and VICE. Kelly was the winner of the Norma Lowry Memorial Prize and the Cornelison English Award from Washington University in St. Louis, the winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and the winner of the 2019 Greg Grummer Prize, judged by Jos Charles. To learn more about Kelly’s life and work, please read our memorial feature and visit her website.