Archives: Team

Team

Person with chin-length, dark brown hair stands with elbows bent, hands clasped under their chest, wearing a green and white horizontal-striped tank top, red shorts, and strawberry earrings.

Vanessa Couto Johnson

Project: Chapbooks
Role: Editor
Vanessa Couto Johnson (she/they) is the author of the full-length poetry books pH of Au (Parlor Press, Free Verse Editions Series 2022) and Pungent dins concentric (Tolsun Books, 2018), as well as three poetry chapbooks. Most recently, Vanessa’s poems have appeared in The Shore, The Broken City, Vagabond City Lit, and Rough Cut, among others. A Brazilian who was born in Texas (dual citizen), VCJ has taught at Texas State University since 2014.
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Audrey Gidman

Project: Chapbooks
Role: Editor
Audrey Gidman is a queer poet living in Maine. She serves as assistant poetry editor for Gigantic Sequins and chapbooks editor for Newfound. Her chapbook, body psalms, winner of the Elyse Wolf Prize, is forthcoming from Slate Roof Press.

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Photo of poet Rodney Gomezz, a bearded Mexican American, wearing black glasses and a light purple button-down shirt facing camera with hands in his slacks leaning against a wooden fence post.

Rodney Gomez

Project: Board of Directors
Role: Director
Rodney Gomez is a poet and urbanist whose recent collections include Arsenal with Praise Song, recipient of the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for best poetry book from the Texas Institute of Letters, and Geographic Tongue, winner of the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series. His work appears in Poetry, New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, North American Review, and other journals. A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, Gomez was an Academy of American Poets Fellow, a Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at Yale, and 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of McAllen, Texas.

Instagram • Website • Poets.org

White trans woman with black bangs in black T-shirt and clear framed glasses against a corner of white apartment walls.

Crystal Odelle

Project: Board of Directors, Chapbooks
Role: Director, Editor
Crystal Odelle (they/she) is a queer trans writer, chapbooks editor at Newfound, and author of the novel Goodnight. Their stories have appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Gulf Coast, bedfellows, beestung, Passages North, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Crystal was a Tin House Scholar and Lambda Literary fellow, nominated for Best of the Net, and anthologized in We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction. She writes RPGs at Feverdream Games and serves as academic and administrative coordinator for the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Website • Instagram

Leslie McIntosh

Project: Chapbooks
Role: Editor
Leslie McIntosh (all pronouns respectfully used) is black, male presenting, male attracted, autistic, an older millennial, a poet, a fictionist, &. Leslie has received support, in the form of residencies and fellowships, from Breadloaf, Callaloo, Millay Arts, The Watering Hole, Zoeglossia, and more. Leslie’s work has appeared in numerous publications, such as Beloit Poetry Journal, Foglifter, Obsidian, Split This Rock, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, and in the forthcoming anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). A nominee for both Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, as well as a semi-finalist for the 2022 92Y Discovery Award, Leslie is an Assistant Poetry Editor at Newfound and lives on the stolen land of the Munsee Lenape, currently known as Jersey City, NJ, USA.

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Gwynne Middleton

Project: Board of Directors
Role: Director
Gwynne serves on Newfound’s Board of Directors. She co-founded Newfound in 2009 while in graduate school and has served as a managing editor, reviews editor, fiction editor, and blog editor for the publication. She holds an M.F.A. from Texas State University-San Marcos; an M.A. in Literature and Environment from the University of Nevada, Reno; and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Gwynne is a writer, editor, and photographer based in Colorado where she spends as much time as possible outdoors in her ever-expanding garden and exploring Rockies and Great Plains.

Website

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Rujuta Paradkar

Project: Board of Directors
Role: Director
Rujuta Paradkar (M.A, M.F.A, MPhil.) is a writer, editor, and content specialist. Currently, she works as Editorial Director for Packt Publishing. She has worked in the media and communications industry for over 22 years across India, Australia, and the U.S. As a journalist, she reported for news organizations such as the BBC, CNN, Channel 4, Newsweek, Observer Business and Politics, Rediff.com, and India Abroad, among others. She worked as Managing Editor for Encyclopedia Britannica and Head of Arts, North India, at the British Council. As a book editor, she edited fiction and nonfiction manuscripts and mentored several authors. She serves on the Board of Directors at Newfound and was the Executive Editor of Newfound Journal. She was awarded the W. Morgan and Lou Claire Rose Endowed Fellowship in Creative Writing at Texas State University, where she earned an MFA in writing. She holds an MA in Literature from the University of Mumbai and an MPhil in Media Studies from the University of Queensland, Australia. She loves both imaginative as well as across-the-border travels.

LinkedIn • Twitter • Instagram

Head shot of Nicole Yurcaba, a white woman sitting at a table, wearing a black shirt and a black and red hat.

Nicole Yurcaba

Project: Chapbooks
Role: Reviewer
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American poet and essayist. Her reviews, poems, and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, and she frequently reviews books for Colorado Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Southern Review of Books, and Sage Cigarettes. Her poetry collection Triskaidekaphobia is forthcoming from Black Spring Group in 2022, and her novel Unsilent Waters is forthcoming from the Rusyn Literary Society in January 2023. She teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and works as a career counselor for Blue Ridge Community College.

Twitter

Winniebell is a Chinese woman wearing short, curly hair and a light purple linen dress in front of a harbor. She is smiling and looking up to the left.

Winniebell Xinyu Zong

Project: Chapbooks
Role: Editor
Winniebell Xinyu Zong is a Chinese poet and chapbook editor at Newfound. She was the 2020 Frontier Poetry editorial fellow and a spring 2021 publishing intern at Copper Canyon Press. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, Best of Net, and AWP’s Intro Journals Project, Zong holds an MA from Kansas State University and is an MFA poetry candidate at Cornell University.

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