Dusti RW Levy is a queer Gen X disabled poet, essayist, performer, dramaturg, educator, and playwright. They write about love, longing, grief, and ghosts from the Louisiana prairie, and prefer food that tastes like dirt.
They received the the 2026 Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas Early Career Dramaturg Grant as well as a 2025 National Dramaturgy Fellowship at the American College Theatre Festival (formerly at the Kennedy Center). Dusti is on staff at McNeese Review and Thirteen Bridges Review. They founded delicate emissions poetry zine in Seattle, Washington in 2021.
Dusti’s poem “paper chickens (Sidney, Nebraska)” is forthcoming in Chrysalism. You can read their work in Blood + Honey Lit; Granules (at Mouthful of Salt); Boudin; FUCKUS Literary Journal (print only); Eunoia Review; boats against the current; the tide rises, the tide falls; and Windmill: The Art & Literature Journal of Hofstra University, among other places. Dusti is also an artist panel reader for the Jewish Plays Project and American Association for Community Theatre, and a judge for Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
An alum of Theatre AUM at Auburn University at Montgomery, Dusti is an MFA/MA student in creative writing and literature at McNeese State University. Raised mostly in the Southeast and the desert Southwest, and having spent years on the High Plains and in Cascadia, this former social worker/barista/substitute teacher/retail NPC now splits their time between the Louisiana Prairie and Alabama’s coastal plain. Follow them on BlueSky and Instagram.
Cisco Simms Levy, a former dumpster kitty from Elmore County, Alabama, is the Vice-President of Poetry for delicate emissions poetry zine, despite not knowing the difference between yogurt and lotion. He excels at his primary duties: keeping Dusti company and knocking all the collage materials off the table onto the floor.
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