The Fall 2026 edition of the Santa Monica Review.

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Complete contents of the fall issue

Richard Wirick –Mayday

Mary Ore – Trench

Jeffrey Moskowitz –Future Perfect

Brian Conlon –Dead Rat

Joshua Brorby –Eastern Churches

Monona Wali – The Gypsy Dance

Olga Zilberbourg – The Sarah Connor School of Parenting

Yevgenii Kisarauskas – Past and Present

Shane Castle – Blue Eyes

Kareem Tayyar – Arrivals

Bryan D. Price – The Falling Man

Gregory Tower – Chop Suey

Ashley Marie Farmer – Drive Us Home, Diane

Will Bridges – The Metamorphosis

Contributors

Will Bridges is Arthur Satz Professor of the Humanities at the University of Rochester, where he teaches Japanese and African American literature. His writing, which has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere, has been named notable by The Best American Essays and a finalist for The Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize.

Joshua Brorby is an American writer from rural North Dakota. He currently resides in Saint Paul, MN, where he teaches literature and writing. His work appears or is forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine, J Journal, and North Dakota Quarterly.

Brian Conlon’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Prime Number, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Stone Canoe. In his twenties, he studied at the University of Rochester and Harvard Law School. In his thirties, he practiced law in San Francisco. Now forty, he writes and lives in the Bay Area with his wife, two children, and their Samoyed. To read more of his work visit brianconlonfiction.com.

Shane Castle is a writing professor and a senior editor at Alaska Quarterly Review. His stories have appeared in past issues of the Santa Monica Review, West Branch, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, The Common, and elsewhere.

Ashley Marie Farmer writes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her most recent book is the essay collection Dear Damage (Sarabande Books, 2022), winner of the International Rubery Book Award in Nonfiction, the Sarabande Series in Kentucky Literature, and an Independent Publisher Book Award. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with the writer Ryan Ridge.

Yevgenii Kisarauskas is an immigrant from the former Soviet Union who later grew up in the rainforests of Southeast Alaska. His writing draws on these extremes—chaos and quiet — and, sometimes, on his current work teaching science at a Title I high school in Denver.

Jeffrey Moskowitz attended public schools in Rosemead, CA. He currently resides in Los Angeles.

Mary Ore is a Santa Monica-based writer and editor whose journalism has appeared in The New York Times and Dwell. This is her first published work of fiction.

Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023). His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Epiphany Magazine, EPOCH, Bear Review, the Santa Monica Review, Citric Acid, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.

elin o’hara slavick is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, curator, critic, mother, daughter, sister, lover, and comrade who was an Artist-In-Residence at the University of California, Irvine, 2022–2025, the Huntington Research and Art Fellow at CalTech, spring, 2022, and a Professor of Visual Art, Theory and Practice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for twenty-seven years. She received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1991, and her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, 1988. She has exhibited her work internationally and is the author of: Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography, with a foreword by Howard Zinn; After Hiroshima, with an essay by James Elkins; a chapbook of surrealist poetry Cameramouth; and Holding History In Our Hand for the 75th commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She will be teaching Photography at Sarah Lawrence College, Fall, 2026 and is working on a book, Dark Archive.

Kareem Tayyar's work has appeared in a variety of literary journals, including Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. His poem, “Two Poets,” received the 2022 Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, and his novel The Prince of Orange County received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Prize for Young Adult Fiction. In 2020 he was awarded a Glenna Luschei Poetry Prize, and in 2019 he was the recipient of a Wurlitzer Poetry Fellowship. His new collection of poems, Afternoon Constellations, will be released in fall 2026 by Lily Poetry Review Books.

Andrew Tonkovich edits the Santa Monica Review, and is founding editor of the online Orange County literary arts quarterly Citric Acid. He co-edited the landmark Orange County: A Literary Field Guide with Lisa Alvarez, and has authored two fiction collections. He hosts the weekly books show Bibliocracy Radio airing on Pacifica’s KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California, online, and available as a podcast courtesy of the Community of Writers.

Greg Tower is a barista. He’s had two stories published in the Santa Monica Review, one of which won a Pushcart Prize.

Monona Wali is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and filmmaker. Her newest novel, Sutra Americana, is out from University of Wisconsin Press. Her debut novel, My Blue Skin Lover, won the 2015 Independent Book Publishers Gold Award for Multicultural Fiction. Many of her stories and essays have been published in literary journals, including Air/Light, Folio Literary Journal, Juked, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Santa Monica Review. One received Special Mention in the 2025 Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Richard Wirick is the author of two story collections, Kicking In and Fables of Rescue. He has also published a novel, The Devil’s Water, and the essay collection Hat Of Candles. His memoir-story collection One Hundred Siberian Postcards was nominated for a PEN/Bingham award for the best first work by an American author. His next project is a biography of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. He is an environmental lawyer and lives with his family in Santa Monica.

Olga Zilberbourg's English-language debut Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press) explores multicultural identity, bisexuality, and immigrant parenthood. Born in Leningrad, USSR, in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she has published four books of fiction in Russian. She lives in California, where she co-facilitates the San Francisco Writers Workshop and, together with Yelena Furman, runs Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literatures from the former USSR. 

 

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