Very much a product of its time, Issue 157 features an array of voices interrogating issues of identity. Marina Kraiskaya’s “Sea Rituals,” winner of the 2024 Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry, exists in a fluctuating, liminal space, despite its promise of “clarity.” Alice Hatcher, winner of the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction, manages with “Caesura” to rivet readers to a narrator who doesn’t know—perhaps can’t know—who she is or how she got where she is. The dark and intriguing portfolio of BENJII, winner of the Mary Blair Award for Art, manifests similar uncertainties in his portfolio, presented here as a foldout. In “Breaking Kayfabe,” the Gabriele Rico Challenge for Nonfiction winner Amelia Skinner Saint explores the many ways we confront and manage tragedy. Also in our nonfiction pages, San José high school student Elina Kumra, winner of this year’s Emerging Voices Contest, reflects alongside her loving grandmother-muse on how her own identity will evolve in “Dadi.”