"You tell me," is the theme of MUDFISH 23. Honesty, emotion, shock, subtlety, poems whose reverberant language and intensity awaken more poems in the reader's mind. Poems that remind us of our own forgotten lives, that stick in our mind like burrs on a woolen sleeve

Donald Hall, in A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, writes: "Jill Hoffman, a painter and a poet and a fiction writer, edits a thick and handsome literary magazine called . Mary Florio in NewPages writes: Mudfish "marries poetry and art in a spellbinding series of verve and verse .... The volume is so well-edited that one has difficulty celebrating any particular poet out of the entire collection." In its generous layout, it is as if every poet is featured. And a story-teller. Mudfish 1984 was the first slender issue and Mudfish gradually expanded to include fiction. Now MUDFISH 23 presents Stephanie Emily Dickinson's Lastness celebrating the life and death of the poet Ted Jonathan, blurring the boundaries between prose and poetry, and fiction and nonfiction. Each work selected is a memorable experience, and each issue is a work of art. The Mudfish Individual Poet Series are companion volumes each featuring the work of a single Mudfish poet. The art, Florio writes, is "exquisite," and "moving," and the poetry "likewise compelling."

Art editing done by Jacques Louis Vidal.

The founding editor Jill Hoffman's first book of poems, Mink Coat, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1973. Her first novel, Jilted, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1993. She founded Box Turtle Press in 1983 and has since published 44 books: 24 issues of Mudfish, starting with Mudfish 1984 and 20 issues of Mudfish Individual Poet Series. Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves is Mudfish Individual Poet Series #20. Before that, Box Turtle Press published her collection black diaries (poems) in 2000 and The Gates of Pearl (a book-length poem) in 2018. In 2023, a second novel, Stoned, was published (Mudfish Fiction Series 1). She is also a painter and has painted the covers for many of these books.

Hoffman has a BA from Bennington, a Master's degree from Columbia and a Ph.D. from Cornell. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 to 1975. She has taught at Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Bard, The University of North Carolina, The New School, and other institutions. Presently she teaches a Mudfish Writing Workshop on Zoom from her Tribeca, New York studio.