Featured Title & Author

Letters from the Interior

In the early days of January 2011, a series of revolution began to unfold across several Arab cities. Some toppled regimes, others unravelled into bitter, protracted wars still ablaze today. More often than not, the experience of Arab womanhood unfolds against a backdrop of ongoing wars, unravelling freedom movements, and exiles. Women are tasked with the extensive and relentless work of preserving life, of keeping histories and the human beings populating them alive. The poems in Letters from the Interior are artifacts of this work. These poems are sketches of the homes we create on the run and in exile, lyrics of songs that expand to lament much more than our individual heartbreaks, unsent letters to the women who anchor us, and language lessons that navigate the landscapes of time and place.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first book, Water & Salt (Red Hen Press) won the 2018 Washington State Book Award. Her chapbook, Arab in Newsland, won the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Prize. She is the recipient of a 2019 Artist Trust Fellowship and has served as the inaugural Poet-In-Residence at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, in Seattle. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She has been published in Barrow Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day feature.

Featured Poem

Fire Horse

from Diode Poetry Journal 14.1

And every evening, with the downpour
going sour in my mouth, I wanted to be anything

but girl. Listen to the sound of my decaying:
a bedroom mirror in contortion, a rabbit

shrieking beneath dirt.

Annie Cao

Annie Cao is a writer from Colorado. Her work appears in the Kenyon Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, and the Apprentice Writer,  and she has been recognized by the National Scholastic Art &  Writing Awards, the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of  the UK, and Columbia College Chicago, among others.

Featured Organization

RVA Bail Fund

"The Richmond Community Bail Fund exists to post bail for everyone in Central Virginia who needs it in order to help them avoid the many immediate and collateral consequences of incarceration. We work toward the abolition of not just cash bail, but pretrial detention and supervision as well."

Diode Editions has been fortunate to be able to donate to the RVA Community Bail Fund and we hope that you might consider donating as well, if able.