issue 50.1: on disunion

This issue begins in celebration and foreshadowing with the winners of our 2025 Summer Prizes in Fiction & Poetry: Mohammad Salah Sahragard’s short story “Morphine and the Knight,” chosen by Deesha Philyaw, and Susan Muth’s poem “Main Post Chapel,” chosen by MICHAEL CHANG. Painful, grief-laden, faith-stricken, and raw, these works remind us that stories are a door to deeper listening. They are harbingers of achievement and also, of great labor. Congratulations to our winners, and thank you to our judges for fine and attentive reading.

From celebration, we move into dis(union): a state of. This themed gathering of work asks what it means to live inside of fracture: be it nation, party, household, or self. Fractures made by empire, extraction, silence, and disbelief. Fractures in weather, inheritance, and Earth, where severed roots still reach toward one another underground. The pieces in this issue show us that disunion is felt most in the body. In these pages, we observe the eerie fluorescent abundance of a Whole Foods, systems of surveillance, the debris of memory against the rising tides of an American marketplace that is charged and dangerous, depending on who is allowed to browse.

As we read through submissions for this issue, we were reminded that the state of disunion is not abstract. It lives in the aisles of our daily lives, our family archives, courtroom records, the news cycles, in our dreams. We publish this issue at a time when public life feels crowded with documents emptied of accountability, when networks of crime spill into view all sinew and rot, when spectacle makes a meal of what justice will not touch, and when political division is too often mistaken for a binary map of two sides rather than a deeper crisis of relation. Beneath it all are the eternal questions that art and literature seek to address: Who is believed? Who is protected? Who is made disposable? What forms of truth can survive being handled by power? We are surrounded by disclosures, denials, redactions, accusations, and performances of outrage.

This issue does not offer union as a form of harmony or easy repair. Instead, we sit with the rupture, to remember that even in disunion, the soul can remain, and perhaps even find joy among a state of breaking.

Here something living presses upward, insists we witness, and calls us back toward what we owe the relations that hold us, like a seed split by the life it carries, like thawing river ice breaking so the current can speak again.

You can purchase the issue through our Submittable, or view it on ProjectMuse.

CCR’s 2026 Pushcart Prize Winner: Hannah Licht’s “Consanguinity”

We have just received news that Hannah Licht’s fiction piece, “Consanguinity,” featured in our 49.1 Spring/Summer issue, has won a Pushcart Prize! Congratulations to Hannah, a talented and devoted member of the writing community, that also serves as the fiction editor for Harpur Palate.

At cream city review, we pride ourselves on featuring authors at all stages of their career. This spectacular piece of short fiction was Hannah Licht’s first published publication.

The first page of the piece is excerpted below. You can find it online through ProjectMuse or purchase the issue on our Submittable.

Our 2025 Summer Contest Winners!

We are thrilled to announce Susan Muth and Mohammadsaleh Sahragard as our winners!

Susan Muth’s “Main Post Chapel” was selected by MICHAEL CHANG as the winner for our 2025 Summer Poetry contest!

and

Mohammadsaleh Sahragard’s “Morphine and the Knight” was selected by Deesha Philyaw as the winner for our 2025 Fiction Poetry Contest!

Thank you also to our runner’s up: Ngozi Ekeldo’s “Soliloquoy on the Water” in Fiction and Taylor franson Thiel’s “Bermuda Petrel” in poetry.

cream city review turns 50: a reflection

There is a lot to be said about fifty years. In the scheme of a literary landscape, it is many, many generations, but cream city review’s ethos remains young, vibrant, and contemporary. In these pages is witnessed the tides of many passing eras, trends come and gone, narratives both emerging and seasoned.

Since its founding by Mary Zane Allan in 1975, cream city review has sought to be a reflection of literary culture. The works published, like our namesake bricks, wear their time. Cream City bricks were once prized for their bright, porous clay fired to a pale gold. Over time, those bricks darkened. They absorbed smoke, soot, and the city’s breath, holding on their surface the record of everything the city has lived through. We bare our discolorations as evidence of witness. We exist and thrive in spite of—and perhaps because of—the external environments we absorb.

We have remained as porous as our eponymous bricks. Every cohort of graduate editors leaves its mark, ideas, tastes, experiments, failures, reinventions, all baked into the journal’s evolving surface. We are not a fixed monument; we are a building always mid-renovation, held together by tenacious students who believe in the power of literature enough to give their unpaid hours to it. What you hold now is the patina of that persistence.

In dedication to the voices that came before us, this seminal anniversary issue provides a literary time capsule of our history. You will see pieces from 1975 up to our present time. It is an exhibition of what felt timely, what facets of craft were popular, and what topics felt pressing across different decades. We seek to honor what was relevant then next to what is relevant now. These pieces speak to one another in ways no single generation of editors could have planned: lyric meditations lie next to formal experiments, political urgencies next to quiet devastations. They chart shifting aesthetics, shifting worlds, and a continuity of care running through every issue.

As we put together this anthology, we had the opportunity to reach out to dozens of authors previously printed in cream city review, and so many were proud to claim this journal as their very first publication before taking flight into the literary ether. For others, cream city review was a second, third, or twentieth publication. We remain devoted to all of our incredible authors, despite the events of our current political sphere. As many arts communities have also experienced this year, cream city review editors, readers, interns, and supporters have fought against spending freezes and attacks on the humanities.

In these more difficult moments, we are reminded of our incredible writers and of our namesake; how it demands we uphold our grit, our rigor, our perseverance. We continue because former editors, in whose footsteps we stand, kept the journal alive through crises of their own. Most of all, we exist because of the readers who return to meet us in these pages.

We are proud to be the home to so many fabulous voices in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation. We hope that you find as much joy in these archival pages as we have in putting them together.

Sass Denny editor-in-chief

Sophie Nunberg managing editor

Rebecca Baumann associate editor