Announcing the 2023-24 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 71 is Lanre Akinsiku, and the Koch Editor in Poetry is Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers.

Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers (she/they) is the author of two poetry collections, The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons and Chord Box,  as well as the forthcoming Miss Southeast: Essays in the Queer South (and Elsewhere). Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. Her creative nonfiction can be found in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Travel Writing, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus. A former Kenyon Review Fellow, she is now Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, where she also leads the Writers in the Schools Program.

Lanre Akinsiku is a writer from the Bay Area. He is the author of the Blacktop series, which received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and was named as one of 2016's Best Books by the New York Public Library. His short fiction and essays have appeared on NPR, and in The Washington Post, Kenyon Review, Zocalo Public Square, and elsewhere. He's taught creative writing at Rowan University, the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University. He currently lives in Providence, RI.