Bayo Aderoju is a writer from Nigeria. He has been published in Agbowó, Brittle Paper, Stellium, and Kalahari Review and interviewed in Africa in Dialogue. He was a finalist for Frontier Poetry’s 2023 Global Poetry Prize. He is currently getting an MFA at the University of Memphis, where he will be Poetry Lead Editor for The Pinch this Fall. He tweets @bayo_aderoju.
Hannah Keziah Agustin is from Manila, Philippines. Her work is found and forthcoming in Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.
Michael Bazzett is the author of four books of poetry, including The Echo Chamber (Milkweed Editions, 2021). Recent work has appeared in Granta, AGNI, The Sun, The Nation, and The Paris Review, and his verse translation of the Mayan creation epic The Popol Vuh (Milkweed, 2018) was named one of 2018’s best books of poetry by The New York Times. The recipient of an NEA fellowship, he lives in Minneapolis.
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Stephen Eric Berry is a writer, filmmaker, composer, and recipient of a Hopwood Award at the University of Michigan. His poems and translations have appeared in Puerto del Sol, Tampa Review, Columbia Journal, Asymptote, The Mailer Review, Interim, and the Brazilian publications Belas Infiéis and Voz da Literatura. In 2017, he received an NEH grant to be a visiting scholar at Amherst College. To view his recent film The Children’s Holiday,” exploring the artwork of Detroit-area artist John Elkerr, go to https://vimeo.com/807495629. He lives in Chelsea, Michigan.
Poet and critic Joel Brouwer is the author of the collections Exactly What Happened, Centuries, And So, and Off Message. He teaches literature and writing at the University of Alabama.
Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator, and essayist whose translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull, 2021) won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Decorated with the French Academic Palms and twice awarded NEA literature translation grants, she’s the author of An Infusion of Violets (Seagull Books, 2019), named “New & Noteworthy” by The New York Times. She’s the Translations Editor for On the Seawall.
Thea Chacamaty earned her MFA from the University of Michigan, and her fiction appears or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review and The Southern Review. She is a recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Writing By Writers, and her writing has also been awarded the Henfield Prize, a Hopwood Award, and the Kasdan Scholarship. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is at work on a short story collection and a novel.
Alex Chertok has poems and essays published in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review Online, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, and Best New Poets. He was a finalist in the 2020 Third Coast Poetry Contest, 2021 James Hearst Poetry Prize, 2021 Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Open Prize, and Missouri Review’s 2021 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. He currently teaches through the Cornell Prison Education Program.
P. Scott Cunningham is the author of Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas, 2018), selected by Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, A Public Space, RHINO, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, Monocle, and The Guardian, among others. He lives in Miami, Florida, where serves as the Executive Director of O, Miami.
Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist currently based in Cairo. She holds an MA in Arts Journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in Poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, Best New Poets in 2020 and 2022, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund and Akashic Books, 2021).
Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His most recent book of poems, Floaters, won the 2021 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a professor in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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Cristina Fríes is a Colombian American fiction writer. Her work has appeared in PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018; EPOCH; Action, Spectacle; and War, Literature & the Arts. She is the recipient of a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Tin House Scholarship and is an Adroit Journal Anthony Veasna So Scholarship semifinalist. Her operas have been performed nationally, and she lives in San Francisco.
Liana Fu (they/she) is a queer nonbinary Cantonese writer and organizer from Chicago. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, Lambda Literary Fellow, and Scholastic Art & Writing national silver medalist with an affinity for hybrid forms. Their creative practice playfully reimagines, critiques, and builds upon the Cantonese diasporic archive. You can find their work in Hyphen Magazine, The Margins, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and lianafu.com. In their free time, they enjoy running their food Instagram (@mushroomhatersonly).
Daniel Halpern is the author of nine collections of poetry. He was the editor of the international literary magazine Antaeus and publisher of Ecco. In 2015, he received the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction. For many years, he ran the Columbia University MFA program, and in 1978, with James A. Michener, he founded the National Poetry Series. He is now an Executive Editor at Knopf.
Myronn Hardy is the author of the forthcoming book of poems Aurora Americana (Princeton University Press). His essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The New Republic, and The Georgia Review. He is currently working on his first novel. He teaches at Bates College.
Douglas Haynes is the author of the nonfiction book Every Day We Live Is the Future: Surviving in a City of Disasters and a poetry chapbook, Last Word. His essays have also appeared in Orion, Chautauqua, Terrain.org, Longreads, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He teaches writing and environmental humanities at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
Donna Mancusi-Ungaro Hart is a graduate of Vassar College and received her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. She was awarded the Dante Prize of the Dante Society of America and subsequently published Dante and the Empire (American University Studies, 1987). Since 2005, she has been an instructor and translator of Italian for the University of Michigan. Her translations have recently appeared in Columbia Journal, Belas Infiéis (Brazil), and Interim. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Brian Henry is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Permanent State, and the prose book Things Are Completely Simple: Poetry and Translation. He has translated Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices, Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers, and five books by Aleš Šteger. His work has received numerous honors, including two NEA Fellowships, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and the Best Translated Book Award.
Michelle Herman’s latest book is the novel Close-Up. “Daily Papers” is part of a new collection of essays in progress. Her previous essay collections are The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, happily retired from teaching after a thirty-four-year career at the Ohio State University, where she was a founder of the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Photo credit: Marcus Jackson
Born in the year of the metal goat, Anni Liu is the author of Border Vista (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2022. She’s the recipient of an Undocupoets Fellowship, a Gregory Djanikian Scholarship from The Adroit Journal, and residencies at Civitella Ranieri and the Anderson Center. She’s an editor at Graywolf Press.
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Hassan Mirza is a writer from Lahore, Pakistan. He is an incoming Stegner Fellow in fiction and a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.
Critically acclaimed Samira Negrouche was born in Algiers where she continues to live and work. Author of seven poetry collections and several artist’s books, she is a poet and translator. Involved in various multidisciplinary projects, her recent collaborations include Quai 2I1 with violinist Marianne Piketty and theorbist Bruno Helstroffer. In 2021, Marilyn Hacker’s translation of Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz & Other Poems was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry. Her poems have been translated into over twenty languages.
Pamela Prioetti’s first book of poetry, Il nome bianco, was published by Gattomerlino Edizioni (Rome, Italy) in 2021. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, Columbia Journal, Belas Infiéis (Brazil), Interim, and the Italian newspaper la Repubblica; in La nuova carne poetica, vol. 1, Della femmina intelligenza (PesaNerviPress, 2008); in Il mare è poesia (Edizioni Progetto Cultura, 2015); and on the Lieto Colle and Grazia magazine websites. She has served as an Editorial Director at Metropolis Zero magazine, where she oversaw the “Letters to the Director” section and wrote on the “Mind the Gap” page. Ms. Proietti collaborates with NiedernGasse magazine and the cultural association “House of Ink.” She lives in Rome, Italy.
R. Rice‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in various literary magazines, including Mãnoa, New Letters, North American Review, Quiddity, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and others. Rice is the author of a memoir, Walking into Silence, and lives in Montana on the ancestral homeland of the Absaalooke (Crow) people.
Stephanie Roberts is the author of rushes from the river disappointment (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), an A. M. Klein Prize finalist. Montreal Review of Books called it “a sweeping force of music, pulsing images, clear wit, and tenderness.” Her work has also been featured in Poetry, Shenandoah, Crannóg Magazine, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. She is a Canada Council for the Arts grant recipient for a forthcoming collection and winner of Black Mountain Press’s The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018. www.oceansandfire.com
Yasmine Roukiaya (sic Rukia) is a Lebanese/Appalachian/American lyricist, fictionist, and performing poetess living in-between hyphens, genres, and political streams of consciousness. Her work can be found in The Margins, Koukash Review, Black Warrior Review, Mizna, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, BAHR, Belt Magazine, Gordon Square Review, and elsewhere. She loves her two sons, sparkling water, the sea, and the sound of chickadees on any given Michigan morning.
A. E. Stallings is a US-born poet and translator who lives in Greece. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently Like (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize). A collection of selected poems, This Afterlife, is just out with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. She has been teaching a workshop with refugee and migrant women in Athens at the Melissa Network since 2015.
Tomaž Salamun (1941–2014) published more than fifty books of poetry in Slovenia. Translated into over twenty-five languages, his poetry received numerous awards, including the Jenko Prize, the Prešeren Prize, the European Prize for Poetry, and the Mladost Prize. Kiss the Eyes of Peace: Selected Poems 1964–2014, edited and translated by Brian Henry, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2024.
Jieyan Wang is a college sophomore at Harvard University studying English and East Asian studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Witness, and elsewhere.
Alice Evelyn Yang is a Chinese American writer from Norfolk, Virginia. Her fiction has been sponsored by the Tin House workshop, published in Sine Theta Magazine and Another Chicago Magazine, and is forthcoming in Apogee and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins. She completed her MFA in Fiction at Columbia University, where she was awarded the Felipe P. De Alba Fellowship and nominated for the Henfield Prize.
