AUTHORS
Ruth Awad
Ruth Awad is an award-winning Lebanese-American poet whose
debut poetry collection Set to Music a Wildfire (forthcom-
ing in 2017) won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from
Southern Indiana Review Press. She is the recipient of a
2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her
work has appeared in New Republic, The Missouri Review Poem
of the Week, Sixth Finch, Crab Orchard Review, CALYX, Di-
ode, Southern Indiana Review, Rattle, The Adroit Journal,
Vinyl Poetry, Epiphany, Drunken Boat, Atticus Review, and
in the anthologies ‘The Hundred Years’ War: Modern War Poems
(Bloodaxe Books, 2014), New Poetry from the Midwest 2014
(New American Press, 2015), and Poets on Growth (Math Pa-
per Press, 2015). She won the 2012 and 2013 Dorothy Sargent
Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poet-
ry Contest, and she was a finalist for the 2013 Ruth Lilly
Fellowship. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois
University Carbondale, and she is the blog editor at Agape
Editions. She writes and lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her
husband, two Pomeranians, and two ungrateful bunnies.
Devon Balwit
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Devon Balwit writes in Portland, OR. She is a poetry editor
for Minute Magazine and has six chapbooks out or forthcom-
ing: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press); Forms
Most Marvelous (dancing girl press); In Front of the Ele-
ments (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was
(Grey Borders Books); The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag
Poetry); and Risk Being/Complicated (self-published with the
artist Lorette Luzajic). Her individual poems can be found
in a previous issue of Shantih, as well as in The Cincinnati
Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, The Still-
water Review, Rattle, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River,
The Free State Review, Rattle, and more.
Tristan Beach
Tristan Beach is a born and raised Washingtonian, and has
lived most of his life in Puget Sound. However, he has spent
the better part of the last three years teaching college
English in China. Prior to his China adventures, he was an
editor for The Conium Review. His poems have appeared in
rawboned and Pitkin Review. He received his MFA from God-
dard College, and teaches at Saint Martin’s University (his
undergraduate alma mater). He is also the current Coordina-
tor of Religious Education at Holy Cross Catholic Church, in
Tacoma.