Announcing the 2022-23 Michael Koch Memorial Guest Editors

Each year, EPOCH invites two former assistant editors to serve as guest editors in fiction and poetry. The editorships are named after Michael Koch, editor for more than 30 years, who died in 2022. The Koch Editor in Fiction for Volume 70 is Lena Nguyen, and the Koch Editor in Poetry is Benjamin Garcia.

Benjamin Garcia’s first collection, Thrown in the Throat, won the National Poetry Series and the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, in addition to being a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where he received the Jill Gonzalez Health Educator Award recognizing contributions to HIV treatment and prevention. A CantoMundo and Lambda Literary fellow, he serves as core faculty at Alma College’s low-residency MFA program. His poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in: AGNI, American Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. His video poem “Ode to the Corpse Flower” is available for viewing at the Broad Museum’s website as part of El Poder de la Poesia: Latinx Voices in Response to HIV/AIDS.

The daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Lena Nguyen is a novelist living in the alien desert of the American Southwest. She received her MFA in fiction from Cornell University, where she also taught courses in English, writing, comparative literature, vampires, and zombies. Her debut science fiction novel, We Have Always Been Here (2021), was a Booklist starred review, a Compton Crook Award finalist, and recipient of the Freund Prize. Lena also works as a game developer and is currently working on her second novel.