The Spring 2026 edition of the Santa Monica Review.

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Complete contents of the fall issue

Janet Fitch – Querencia

Yoni Gelernter – Shame (2024)

Diane Lefer – Blip

Craig Chen – As Meager as Windsong

Sam Dunnington – Trophic Cascade

Maceo Montoya – The Book Sale

Rhoda Huffey – Barstow from The Young Hotel

James Warner – Nightingale

Cody Harrison – Phanerogamie

Halina Duraj – Excerpt from Fatherland: A Novel

Dylan Landis – String Tension 1979

Stephen Cooper – John Fante, Unwritten

Contributors

Los Angeles-based artist Andrea Bowers (b. 1965, Ohio) has been recording and amplifying the work of activists present and past for more than two decades. Her multimedia practice includes drawing, video, sculpture, and installation work that foregrounds the experience of the people who dedicate their time and energy to the struggle for gender, racial, environmental, labor, and immigration justice and those who are directly affected by systemic inequality. Over time, her different bodies of work have become a document of the changing language, prerogatives, and dynamics of social justice movements. In 2021 a major mid-career survey of Bowers’ work curated by Michael Darling and Connie Butler opened at the MCA Chicago and traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2022. Other recent solo exhibitions include “Grief and Hope,” Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany, and “Light and Gravity,” Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany. In September 2022, Bowers opened a solo exhibition including both new and existing work at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano as part of an exhibition program organized by the Fondazione Furla. Her solo exhibition at Glenstone Museum opened in March 2026. Bowers is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Kaufmann Repetto, and Jessica Silverman Gallery.

Craig Chen is a fiction writer and poet living in Mountain View, California. His short stories can also be found at Terrain.org, and his poems at Omnidawn, Hole in the Head Review, and Inverted Syntax. He is at work on his first collection of short fiction and a collection of poems.

Stephen Cooper is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant for his fiction and author of Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. He cowrote and produced the Netflix Original Documentary Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski. His short-story collection, River of Angels, appeared in October of last year, and in December he keynoted the John Fante: 30 Years After conference in Venice, Italy. Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach, he was born and still lives in Los Angeles.

Sam Dunnington is a writer and teacher based in Seattle. His work has appeared in many publications, including One Story and Harper’s, and he is at work on a novel and a collection of stories. Find more of his work at SamDunnington.com

Halina Duraj's short story collection, The Family Cannon, was published by Augury Books in 2014; her flash fiction chapbook, Turtles Are Animals That Move With Their Homes, was released by Bottlecap Press in April 2024. She teaches literature and writing at the University of San Diego

Janet Fitch is the author of four novels, White Oleander, Paint it Black, and most recently, a duet, The Revolution of Marina M. and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, following a woman poet's coming of age during Russian Revolution,. Her poetry appears in several anthologies published by Slow Lightning, and in Rattle Magazine. Fitch teaches fiction writing and special topic weekend workshops through the Community of Writers, and posts weekly craft talks on her YouTube channel, Janet Fitch's Writing Wednesday. She lives in Los Angeles. 

Yoni Gelernter is a writer living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Drift, The Baffler, Image Journal, Mississippi Review, and Ninth Letter.

Cody Harrison is a writer living with his wife and daughter in Texas. His work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review and The Forge Literary Journal.

Rhoda Huffey is the author of The Hallelujah Side and 31 Paradiso. Her stories have appeared in Santa Monica Review, Zyzzyva, and other magazines. She lives in Venice Beach, California.

Diane Lefer's most recent novels, Out of Place and Confessions of a Carnivore, were both published by Fomite and set during Bush’s War on Terror. She is the author of three story collections, including California Transit (Mary McCarthy Prize). Lefer lives in Los Angeles with a cat and without a car, and where her only phone is a landline.

Dylan Landis is the author of three works of fiction in the Rainey Royal Cycle: List of All Possible Desires, a forthcoming novel-in-stories that includes the excerpt in this issue; the novel Rainey Royal, a New York Times Editors’ Choice; and the novel-in-stories Normal People Don’t Live Like This. She lives in Los Angeles.

Maceo Montoya is a California-based author, artist, and educator who has published books in a variety of genres, including four works of fiction: The Scoundrel and the Optimist, The Deportation of Wopper Barraza, You Must Fight Them: A Novella and Stories, and Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces. Montoya has also published three works of nonfiction: Letters to the Poet from His Brother, a hybrid book combining images, prose poems, and essays, Chicano Movement for Beginners, which he both wrote and illustrated, and Imaginative Possibilities: Conversations with Twenty-First-Century Latinx Authors, co-authored with Javier O. Huerta.

Andrew Tonkovich edits the Santa Monica Review. He is the author of the 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.

James Warner lives in Long Beach, California. His short stories have appeared most recently in Web Conjunctions, Your Impossible Voice, and Rivet Journal. He spends most of his days rereading things.

 

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