The Fall 2025 edition of the Santa Monica Review.

Santa Monica Review is sold at the SMR website, SMC’s Campus Store, Beyond Baroque and Small World Books in Venice, and other local booksellers. Copies may also be ordered by mail and subscription. For more information, visit our website 
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Complete contents of the fall issue

Diana Wagman – Time Enough
Matthew Pitt – Lifting the Pall
Barbara Tannenbaum – Days of Future Past: Catching Up with Norman M. Klein
Warren Perkins – Dark Canyon
Garrett Saleen – California Pastoral
D. A. Hosek – Elijah’s Funeral
Kareem Tayyar – The Queen of Snow
Albert Goldbarth – Great Opacity
Michael Cadnum – I Promise Not to Write about Drought and My House Eats Morning
Michael Alessi – Loser Leaves Town
Mona Leigh Rose – Beyonce is Our Lord and Savior
Brian Ma – Lynchburg, VA
Reid Sherline – Hold Onto the Clear Light

Contributors

Michael Alessi, a native of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge Mountains, is the author of the prose chapbooks The Horribles and Call a Body Home. His short stories can be found in Ninth Letter, The Pinch, The Cincinnati Review, and other publications. He holds an MFA from Old Dominion University and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati’s Creative Writing program.

Michael Cadnum, a frequent SMR contributor, has published nearly forty books, both fiction and poetry. His most recent work is in private circulation.

Albert Goldbarth has been publishing well-regarded books of poetry and essays for over half a century, two of which have received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest collection will appear from BOA Editions in 2027. He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his legendary collection of 1950s space toys and his legendary wife Skyler. His fingers have never touched a computer/laptop keyboard: join him in the resistance!

D.A. Hosek’s writing has appeared in Exterminating Angel, Nebo, Meniscus, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Tampa. He lives and writes in Oak Park, IL, and spends his days as an insignificant cog in the machinery of corporate America. dahosek.com

Kenji C. Liu (劉謙司) is an artist, book designer, and author of Monsters I Have Been (Alice James Books 2019), finalist for the 2020 California and Maine Book Awards for poetry, and Map of an Onion, national winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize. His writing can be found in multiple literary journals, several anthologies, and two chapbooks, Craters: A Field Guide (2017) and You Left Without Your Shoes (2009). An alumnus of Kundiman, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Community of Writers, he lives in unceded Tongva land, Los Ángeles. Find him at kenjiliu.com

Brian Ma’s work is forthcoming or appears in The Kenyon Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, and has been anthologized. Ma lives in Seoul, South Korea, where he is at work on a novel.

Warren Perkins is the author of Putrefaction Live, a coming-of-age novel about a Navajo heavy-metal guitarist. He practiced family medicine in Ganado and Flagstaff, Arizona for many years, and now spends hours doing nothing at all, preferably in the mountains and deserts of the West.

Matthew Pitt writes and resides in Ft. Worth, where he is an Associate Professor of English at TCU. He is the author of two story collections: These Are Our Demands (Midwest Book Award winner) and Attention Please Now (Autumn House Prize winner). Matt’s first novella and first novel are both forthcoming in the next calendar year. Works of his have won numerous honors, awards, and pats, along with many scarring rejections.

Mona Leigh Rose’s stories appear or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Sequestrum, Puerto Del Sol, and among others. This is her second appearance in SMR. She is an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine, and is honored that one of her stories appears in the flash fiction anthology The Best Small Fictions guest-edited by Amy Hempel. She lives and writes in Santa Barbara, California, where her neighbors call everything south of Summerland “L.A.”

Garrett Saleen is a writer and visual artist from Southern California. His work has appeared in the Santa Monica Review as well as in many other journals, including, most recently, Propagule and Citric Acid. He’s working on a debut novel entitled Sinus Secrets of the Pharaohs. He lives in Seattle. Instagram: @jan_homm

Reid Sherline’s novella Rapture won the Harvard Review Chapbook Prize in 2023. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley and earned his MFA from UC Irvine. He currently lives in Boston.

Barbara Tannenbaum lives in San Rafael, California. She is a former magazine editor and frequent contributor to museums, including the California Academy of Sciences and Germany’s Bundeskunsthalle. As a freelance writer, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Daily Beast and her fiction in the Chicago Quarterly Review and Catamaran Literary Reader. In 2024, her essays “James Dean in the Rear View Mirror” in Rosebud magazine and “Josephine Baker Through a Queer Lens” in Catamaran were both nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her essay “Catching Up With Norman O. Klein” first appeared online at the Omnium Gatherum Quarterly.

Kareem Tayyar’s most recent collection, Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems, was published in 2022 by Lily Poetry Review Books, and his work has appeared in Poetry, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, and North Dakota Review.

Andrew Tonkovich has edited the Santa Monica Review since 1998. He is the author of two fiction collections, The Dairy of Anne Frank and Keeping Tahoe Blue. He is the founding editor of Citric Acid: An Online Orange County Literary Arts Quarterly of Imagination and Reimagination and host of Bibliocracy Radio on Pacifica Radio KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California and available as a podcast from the Community of Writers.

Diana Wagman is the author of six novels. Her second won the PEN West Award for Fiction. Her fourth was a Pasadena best-seller. She’s had a few stories and essays in lit magazines and anthologies, including Conjunctions and Lit Hub. She teaches a fiction workshop at Vroman’s Bookstore.

 

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