MWC collaborated with Galvin Fine Arts at St. Ambrose University to organize a series of events, activities, and publications around the theme of "Adaptation" throughout the 2025-26 school year.
In the fall of 2025, we held a submission call for poems, stories, and essays from local writers around this theme. The submissions were read blindly by MWC Press who selected 23 works for inclusion in anthology, which our publishing imprint MWC Press published on April 30, 2026.
ANTHOLOGY CONTRIBUTORS
Eleanor Ambler | Sophia Best | Ann Boaden | Vivian Bornhoeft | Lynn Carlsten | Melissa Conway | Claire Dodson | Daniel J Flosi | Nancy Hayes | June Heller | Lyn Kress | Ron Lackey | Farah Marklevits | Molly McGuire | Sam Miller | Daniel Salazar | Anna Terry | Emily Tobin | Elena Vallejo | Morgan Webb | Tysia Webb-Bey | Esther Windt | David Wright
EDITOR’S NOTE
This book is a collection of creative works by Quad Citians exploring the idea of adaption, a broad theme that imagines change and reflects on potential. These pieces touch on our human willingness to move, to be moved, to survive, to carry on, to thrive in whatever environment we find ourselves.
A Jump Between Steps is the third installment in an ongoing
collaboration between the Midwest Writing Center and Galvin Fine Arts Center at St. Ambrose University that aims to showcase the breadth of talent and perspective within our community.
What we found while reading submissions and assembling this
book is an interest in interrogating those adaptations that happen to us—whether we chose them or denied them. Each of these pieces challenges the circumstances in which change occurred.
Most of these pieces recognize growth, however bittersweet, and an insistence in continuing on. Throughout this book—through its authors’ stories—we are transformed through reflections and the ways we reassemble after friction. We adapt by steeling ourselves against, or opening ourselves to, whatever comes.
In these pages, we can see adaptation as evolution, as contrails,
as a pursuit, as an environmental imperative. We see adaptation as callouses, as choice, as parallels, as a melding, as a chemical element, as recognition. We adapt the ways we care for ourselves and show up for our community. Adaptation gives us the room to dream.
We are better when we grow through these changes. We are better for having these 23 writers to show us a way forward.
Thank you for adapting with us on this journey,
Ryan Collins, Sarah Elgatian, Morgan Webb
Editors
Rock Island, IL
February 2026