Rina Shamilov is a queer poet and visual artist from Brooklyn, New York, born to Soviet immigrants, and is a second-year poetry candidate at the Notre Dame MFA program. Her recently completed thesis, CRUELTY'S THEATRE, is a three-part multilingual collection in which the body and its multitudinous, bloating/rotting parts are put on display before its spectator. Utilizing the landscape of the page/stage and existing within the confines of language (English and Russian), the body performs, purges itself, and erupts. What remains is the grotesque and gory – a line between the hyperreal and surreal – that blurs as the text and language unfold. 

Rina is the author of the chapbook My Mother's Armoire (Bottlecap Press, 2025) and Hungering: Dance of the Figurines, which was named a finalist in Black Lawrence Press' Immigrant Writing Series and is currently under contract with Alien Buddha Press. She is a nonfiction editor at MAYDAY and a reader for Fence Books. Her poetry and visual art can be found (and are forthcoming) in Ritual Dagger Zine, Ballast, Art of Nothing Press, Antiphony Press, The Laurel Review, Kismet Magazine, and Ranger, among others. The Academy of American Poets has recognized her work, and she received a Best of the Net nomination.