DIANA ABU-JABER often writes about the intersection of family and cultural identity. Her novels include Silverworld, Birds of Paradise, Origin, Crescent, and Arabian Jazz. Her memoirs include Life without a Recipe and The Language of Baklava. Her latest work, Fencing with the King, a novel of intrigue and suspense, will be published in March 2022 by W. W. Norton. Diana teaches at Portland State University and lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
TONY BARNSTONE teaches at Whittier College and has authored twenty-one books, a folk CD, and a creativity tool (The Radiant Tarot: Pathway to Creativity). He is the recipient of the Poets’ Prize, Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Festival, Pushcart Prize in Poetry, Benjamin Saltman Award, and John Ciardi Prize in Poetry and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and California Arts Council. His CD of folk-rock and blues songs is Tokyo’s Burning: World War II Songs.
STEPHANIE BURT is Professor of English at Harvard University. Her books include After Callimachus (Princeton University Press, 2020); Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (Basic Books, 2019); and the brand-new chapbook For All Mutants (Rain Taxi/Ohm, 2021), with poems about fantasy and comic book heroes. Her next full-length collection will appear in 2022. She is surprised to report that she now loves dogs.
MAY-LEE CHAI is the author of ten books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her latest short story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, a recipient of the American Book Award. She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at San Francisco State University. Her short prose has appeared widely, including in Longreads, The Paris Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, The Missouri Review, and Los Angeles Times.
DORSEY CRAFT is the author of Plunder (Bauhan, 2020) and winner of the 2019 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry Daily, Shenandoah, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Jacksonville, Florida.
SARAH CROSSLAND has been the recipient of the Boston Review Poetry Prize, an AWP Intro Journals Award, and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, and other journals. She currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she works as the marketing and communications director for New Dominion Bookshop, the oldest independent bookstore in Virginia. Read more of her work at sarahcrossland.com.
LAUREN DARNELL is a Michigan-based independent scholar who received her BA in Spanish with a minor in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also has an MA in Secondary Education from Eastern Michigan University and an MA in Spanish Literature from University of Kansas. She is interested in the history of concepts of nature, race, and ethnicity in colonial Latin America.
MARIA ESQUINCA is a poet and journalist. Her poetry has appeared in Waxwing, The Florida Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cream City Review, and Cotton Xenomorph and is forthcoming from Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. Her book reviews and interviews have appeared in The Adroit Journal and ANMLY, and she is a 2021 PERIPLUS Fellow. A fronteriza, she was born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México, and grew up in El Paso, Texas, where she currently resides.
JANICE FURLONG is a professor at Boston University and a psychotherapist. She studied fiction writing with C. Michael Curtis, fiction editor emeritus at The Atlantic, and at GrubStreet, a creative writing center in Boston. “Just One Day” is her first published story. She is currently working on a short story collection.
JONATHAN GLEASON is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, where he is working on a collection about medicine, illness, and the body. He was a recent finalist for Indiana Review’s nonfiction contest and Boulevard’s emerging writers competition. His work has previously appeared in Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Redivider, Hobart, and others.
LESLIE HARRISON is a poet based out of Baltimore. Her collection of poetry, The Book of Endings (The University of Akron Press, 2017), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first book, Displacement (Mariner Books, 2009), won the Bakeless Prize in poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in New England Review, Pleiades, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
EDWARD HIRSCH’s first teaching job was at Wayne State University. He has published ten books of poems, including Gabriel: A Poem and Stranger by Night, and six books about poetry, most recently 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. His new prose book, The Heart of American Poetry, will be published next spring.
ANNA MARIA HONG is the author of Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition; the novella H & G, winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Book Prize; and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. Her poems are recently published and forthcoming in many publications, including Colorado Review, The Common, Plume, Shenandoah, The Hopkins Review, Ecotone, Smartish Pace, Poetry Daily, The Best American Poetry, and Sonnets from the American: Essays and Poems. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.
JOHN KINSELLA’s most recent volumes of poetry include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980–2015 (Picador, 2016) and Insomnia (W. W. Norton, 2020). His new memoir is Displaced: a rural life (Transit Lounge, 2020), and the final volume of his poetics trilogy, Beyond Ambiguity: Tracing Literary Sites of Activism, is due out in late 2021 (with Manchester University Press). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University and Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, Western Australia.
DAVID KUTZ-MARKS is the author of Violin Playing Herself in a Mirror (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), selected by James Tate, Dara Wier, and James Haug for the 2014 Juniper Prize for Poetry. Recent poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, jubilat, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere.
LAWRENCE LA FOUNTAIN-STOKES is Professor and Chair of the Department of American Culture and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Escenas transcaribeñas: Ensayos sobre teatro, performance y cultura (Isla Negra Editores, 2018); and Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2021).
DENILSON LOPES is a Professor at the School of Communication of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil as well as a CNPq and FAPERJ researcher. He is author of Mário Peixoto antes e depois de “Limite” (2021) and Afetos, relações e encontros com filmes brasileiros contemporâneos (2016), among other books. He is the co-author of Inúteis, frívolos e distantes: À procura dos dândis (2019) with André Antonio Barbosa, Pedro Pinheiro Neves, and Ricardo Duarte Filho.
NAOMI MULVIHILL was a Margaret Murphy endowed fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Salamander, Cimarron Review, West Branch, and others. She has also been featured in Verse Daily and Desperate Literature: The Unamuno Author Series Festival Anthology. She is a bilingual elementary teacher in the Boston Public Schools.
JESSE NATHAN’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Yale Review, and The Nation. He’s a lecturer in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley and lives in Oakland.
PAMELA PAINTER is the award-winning author of five story collections, most recently Fabrications: New and Selected Stories. She is also co-author of the widely used textbook What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Painter’s stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies; have been presented by WORDTheatre in Los Angeles, New York City, and London; and also appear on artist Anthony Russo’s YouTube channel CRONOGEO. She is currently assembling a second collection of “very short stories.”
RAQUEL PARRINE is a PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and a Richard and Lillian Ives Graduate Fellow at the Institute of the Humanities, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has an MA in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil. She is also the author of several articles in the fields of Latin American literature and culture, critical theory, and gender and sexuality studies.
BEN PERKINS is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Florida State University, where he is completing his memoir. He has had journalistic work published at the Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine, Paper, and Tallahassee Democrat.
JOE SACKSTEDER is the author of the short story collection Make/Shift (Sarabande Books) and the novel Driftless Quintet (Schaffner Press). His album of audio collages, Fugitive Traces, is available from Punctum Books. Recent publications in which his work appeared include DIAGRAM, The Offing, West Branch, and New South. He’s a PhD candidate at the University of Utah and Director of Creative Writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts.
BRET SHEPARD is from Alaska and has lived throughout the Pacific and Arctic coasts. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Cabrini University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Crazyhorse, Mississippi Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Place Where Presence Was, which was awarded the 2019 Moon City Poetry Award. He also has published two chapbooks, including The Territorial, which recently won the 2020 Midwest Chapbook Award from the Laurel Review.
MICHAEL SOUTHARD is a fiction writer based out of Boston. His work has earned him admission to the Tin House Workshop, the New York State Writers Institute, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. He is at work on a novel and a collection of stories.
RICHARD TILLINGHAST has published twelve books of poetry and five of creative nonfiction. His most recent publication is Journeys into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places (2017). He has been a faculty member at Harvard University; the University of California, Berkeley; the Converse College low-residency MFA program; and the University of Michigan and is one of the founders of the Bear River Writers’ Conference in Northern Michigan. Richard now lives in Hawaii and summers in Sewanee, Tennessee.
GEORGE UBA’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Poetry Review, The Seattle Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, Two Rivers Review, The Journal of Ethnic Studies, The Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. His book of poetry, Disorient Ballroom, was published by Turning Point. His book Water Thicker Than Blood: A Memoir of a Post-Internment Childhood is forthcoming from Temple University Press. A professor emeritus from California State University, Northridge, he served as Chair of the Department of English and was a founding faculty member and Acting Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies.
JESSICA WRIGHT is a nonfiction writer, poet, and translator. She holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton University, with additional training in history of science. Most recently, her work has appeared in clavmag, Eidolon, and various edited volumes. She has a book forthcoming on the history of the brain and another in progress on ancient and modern ideas about psychiatry. She lives in Leeds.
