Andreas Altmann was born in Hainichen (Saxony) and now lives in Berlin. He studied social pedagogy and works as a social worker. He has published seven collections of poetry and won several poetry prizes, among them the 2012 Prize for Literature of the Saxon Ministry of Art.

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) was an English political analyst and social theorist who in his later years served as editor of the Economist. He was also a co-founder of the British quarterly National Review (1855–1864), in which he published his political analysis as well as his literary assessments of Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickens, Gibbon, Scott, Macaulay, and others. His books include The English Constitution (1867), Physics and Politics (1872), and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873). His essays were collected posthumously in the volumes Literary Studies (1879), Economic Studies (1880), and Biographical Studies (1881).

Laura Bell was born in Ohio and graduated from Douglass College, Rutgers University, studying with Robert Watts. At Goddard College, in Vermont, she did graduate work with painter Anne Tabachnick. For more than a decade she has used photos and found images in her paintings, and has created a collaborative collage series, “The Corpses,” with poet Ian Ganassi. Her work has been exhibited in New York City, Provincetown, New Haven, Philadelphia, Berlin, and elsewhere, and she has been an artist-in-residence at the Millay Colony. She lives and works in the Bronx, New York.

Linda Bierds’s ninth book of poetry, Roget’s Illusion (Putnam, 2014), was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her poems have appeared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry, among others. In addition to being awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, Bierds has received the PEN/West Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the Grace Pollock Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington and lives on Bainbridge Island.

Alexander Booth is a writer and translator currently living in Berlin. A recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler’s in field latin (Seagull Books, 2016), he has also published his own poems and other translations in numerous print and online journals.

Ron Carlson is the author of six story collections and six novels. His fiction has appeared in the Atlantic, Esquire, Harper’s, the New Yorker, and many others, and has been selected for The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and more. He is the Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in Huntington Beach, California.

Gerald Chapple taught German and Comparative Literature at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and is a freelance literary translator. He has published translations of almost a hundred of Günter Kunert’s poems, along with works by Barbara Frischmuth, Josef Haslinger, Stefan Heym, and others. Some have appeared in Fiction, Modern Poetry in Translation, Agni, Grand Street, Osiris, the Literary Review, Antioch Review, and Words without Borders. The winner of an Austrian government Translation Award in 1996, he is at work on a book of translations of Kunert’s poems with the working title A Stranger at Home: Selected Poems 1979–2009.

Peter Chilson teaches literature and writing at Washington State University. His essays, journalism, and fiction have appeared in American Scholar, Audubon, Ascent, High Country News, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Foreign Policy, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. In 2012 he went to Mali for Foreign Policy magazine to write about the civil war.

David Chorlton was born in Spittal-an-der-Drau, Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived for several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. As much as he has come to love the Southwest, he has strong memories of Vienna, the setting for his work of fiction, The Taste of Fog (Rain Mountain Press, 2011). His most recent work includes Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2014) and A Field Guide to Fire, his contribution to the Fires of Change exhibition shown in Flagstaff and Tucson.

Daniela Danz is a German poet and novelist. Her poetry includes the volumes Pontus and V, and her most recent novel is Lange Fluchten. She is widely published in German anthologies and journals. Danz lives in Kranichfeld and is head of the Schillerhaus museum in Rudolstadt.

Tamas Dobozy is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. He has published three books of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003), Last Notes and Other Stories (Arcade, 2006), and most recently Siege 13: Stories (Milkweed Editions, 2013), which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust of Canada Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for both the Governor General’s Award: Fiction and the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He has published over fifty short stories in journals such as One Story, Fiction, Agni, and Granta, and won an O. Henry Prize in 2011.

Iain Galbraith was born in Scotland, and studied languages and Comparative Literature at the universities of Cambridge, Freiburg, and Mainz. A winner of the John Dryden Translation Prize and Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation, he is also editor of five poetry anthologies. His own poems have appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Times Literary Supplement, New Writing, and other journals. His book-length translations include Alfred Kolleritsch’s Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2006), W. G. Sebald’s Across the Land and the Water (Penguin, 2012), and Jan Wagner’s Self-portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015), for which he received the Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize.

Durs Grünbein, born in Dresden, has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, most recently the poetry collection Cyrano oder Die Rückkehr vom Mond (Suhrkamp, 2014) and the volume of memoirs Die Jahre im Zoo: Ein Kaleidoskop (Suhrkamp, 2015). His many awards include the Georg Büchner Prize (1994), Premio Internazionale di Poesia Pier Paolo Pasolini (2006), the Great Cross of Merit with Star (2009), and the Tomas Tranströmer Prize (2012). He lives in Berlin and Rome.

James Allen Hall is the author of Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press, 2008), winner of awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Hall’s memoir in lyric essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, was named the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s essay competition, and will be published in 2017. He teaches creative writing and literature at Washington College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Henry Kearney, IV is from Robersonville, North Carolina, and he received his MFA from Warren Wilson College. His work has appeared in Midwest Quarterly, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cortland Review, and the Collagist.

Esther Kinsky, born in Engelskirchen and currently residing in Berlin, is a poet, novelist, photographer, and translator of Russian, Polish, and English. She has lived in London and Hungary, and studied Slavic Languages and Cultures and English in Bonn and Toronto. In 2009 she was awarded the Paul Celan Prize for translation. Her most recent volume of poetry is Am kalten Hang (2016); her many novels include Sommerfrische (2010) and Am Fluß (2014), for which she was awarded the 2015 Kranichsteiner Literaturpreis. In 2016, Kinsky received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize for her life’s work.

Sarah Kirsch (1935–2013) was one of Germany’s most powerful lyric poets of the postwar era. She lived and worked in East Germany until 1979, when, after political persecution, she moved to the West. In Ice Roses (Carcanet, 2014), comprising around a hundred poems from the ten collections Kirsch published between 1967 and 2001, the translator Anne Stokes introduced Anglophone readers to the full range of Kirsch’s poetry. “Winter” features many elements of what was dubbed the “Sarah sound”: speech cadences, colloquialisms, and a free-flowing syntax that reflects Kirsch’s lifelong resistance to constraint and convention.

Marie Luise Knott has authored, edited, and translated over twenty books. She is a former editor-in-chief of the German edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. Knott has translated and edited volumes into German, including the work of poets Anne Carson and John Cage. Her recent books include Unlearning with Hannah Arendt (Other Press, 2014) and, as editor in both German and English, the Hannah Arendt–Gershom Scholem Correspondence (Suhrkamp, 2010; University of Chicago Press, 2017). She lives and works in Berlin.

Günter Kunert was born in Berlin in 1929, where he survived World War II before being “encouraged” to leave for the West in 1979. In addition to lyric poetry, he has written short stories and a novel, essays and autobiographical works, satires, fairytales, science fiction, radio plays, speeches, travel writing, film scripts, and drama. The poems here, “Legacies” (1974) and “Historical Consciousness” (1980), reflect both Kunert’s debt and his reaction to Brecht, an early mentor. Kunert has received numerous literary awards, including the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1962, the Becher Prize in 1973, and the America Award in Literature in 2009 for “a lifelong contribution to international writing.”

Christine Lavant (1915–1973), from Groß-Edling, Carinthia, southern Austria, was a student of religious, mystical, and philosophical literature. Known by the pen name she took from her native valley, she was the recipient of several major Austrian literary awards, including the Georg Trakl and Anton Wildgans Prizes. The originals of the poems featured in this issue first appeared in Die Bettlerschale [The Begging Bowl] in 1956.

Karen Leeder is a writer, critic, and translator, and is Professor of Modern German Literature at New College, Oxford. Recent publications include Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems (Seagull Books, 2014), with David Constantine, which was commended for the Popescu Poetry Prize in 2015, and the edited collection Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Her translations of Durs Grünbein have appeared in a number of magazines including Poetry Review and Poetry. She was awarded the Stephen Spender Prize in 2013, an English PEN award, and an American PEN/Heim award in 2016.

Margitt Lehbert has published translations of Elizabeth Bishop, Les Murray, Paul Muldoon, and many other poets in German. Her translations into English include The Poems of Georg Trakl (Anvil Press Poetry), Sarah Kirsch’s Winter Music (Anvil Press Poetry), and Michael Augustin’s Koslowski: 52 Pointers from Hearsay (Arc Press). She lived in Sweden for twelve years, where she founded the small press Edition Rugerup. She currently lives and works in Berlin.

Birgit Bunzel Linder has received degrees from the University of Cologne, Germany, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She teaches Chinese and comparative literature, Gothic literatures, madness and literature, and Medical Humanities at the City University of Hong Kong. She has published poetry and photography in Asian Cha, the International Literature Quarterly, Cerebration, Kavya Bharati, Clockwise Cat, Mad Poets Review, and various other anthologies. In 2012, she won the International Proverse Prize for Unpublished Poetry for her 2013 collection Shadows in Deferment, and in 2016 she received the Arts Development Council Award for Literary Arts for her forthcoming collection of poetry Bliss of Bewilderment.

Marius von Mayenburg’s work, which includes The Ugly One, The Stone, Perplex, Martyr, and A Piece of Plastic, has been translated into thirty languages and performed in Germany and abroad. Alongside his activities as playwright, Mayenburg is also a theater director and has translated plays by writers such as William Shakespeare, Martin Crimp, and Sarah Kane.

Leah McCormack is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Dakota. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Redivider, Prairie Fire, Fiction, North Dakota Quarterly, REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters, and Portland Review, among others. She has her PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Cincinnati and her MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York.

Jane Mead is the author of four collections of poems and the recipient of grants and awards from the Whiting, Guggenheim, and Lannan foundations. The selections presented here are from her new book-length poem, World of Made and Unmade (Alice James, 2016). She farms in northern California.

David Mura has written four books of poetry, most recently The Last Incantations (Northwestern University Press, 2014). He is the author of two memoirs, Turning Japanese (Grove Atlantic, 1991), which won the Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality & Identity (Anchor, 1996). Mura teaches at VONA and is Director of Training for the Innocent Classroom, a program that addresses the racial achievement gap by training teachers to improve their relationships with students of color.

Ricardo Pau-Llosa has published seven collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Man (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014). He is also an art critic and curator.

Joseph Pearson was born in Canada and has lived almost a decade in Berlin, where he is a writer and cultural historian. He runs a writing workshop at the Universität der Künste and teaches at New York University Berlin. He is the essayist of the Schaubühne, Germany’s most prominent theater; the voice of the city blog, The Needle; and author of the forthcoming Berlin Cityscopes, a creative nonfiction portrait of the metropolis (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Stanley Plumly is the author of the forthcoming collection Against Sunset (W. W. Norton, 2016) and The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (W. W. Norton, 2014). He is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland.

Lia Purpura is the author of eight collections of essays and poems, most recently It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin, 2015). She is Writer in Residence at the University of Maryland and teaches in the low residency MFA program at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington.

Harry Roddy is a poet, translator, and associate professor of German at the University of South Alabama. He has published scholarship on twentieth- century German literature, as well as translations of the poets Farhad Showghi and Daniela Danz. He lives with his family in Mobile, Alabama.

Ulrike Almut Sandig was born in Saxony in the former East Germany and now lives in Berlin. She has published four volumes of poetry as well as short stories and radio plays. Her newest collection is ich bin ein Feld voller Raps, verstecke die Rehe und leuchte wie dreizehn Ölgemälde übereinandergelegt (2016). She has collaborated on various projects with musicians and sound artists, producing the CD Märzwald (2011). Sandig has won numerous prizes including the Leonce-and-Lena Prize (2009) and the Droste Prize for Emerging Talent (2012).

Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, a town in the eastern part of the state of Thuringia in the former German Democratic Republic. He has published a novel (winner of the German Book Prize in 2014) and over six volumes of poetry, short stories, and essays. He is a member of the Saxon Academy of the Arts, Dresden, and the Academy of Arts, Berlin. He lives outside of Berlin and Stockholm.

Sophie Seita’s published works include Meat (Little Red Leaves, 2015), Fantasias in Counting (BlazeVOX, 2014), 12 Steps (Wide Range, 2012), and I Mean I Dislike That Fate That I Was Made To Where, a translation of Uljana Wolf (Wonder, 2015). Her play Don Carlos, or, Royal Jelly has been performed at Company Gallery in New York. She has received fellowships and awards from Princeton, Buffalo, Cambridge, Columbia, DAAD, and Studienstiftung, and a PEN/Heim award for her translation of Uljana Wolf’s Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna, 2017). She is a Junior Research Fellow in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge.

Anne Stokes’s most recent book-length translation of poetry by Sarah Kirsch, Ice Roses: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2014), features over one hundred poems from Kirsch’s ten collections, and was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld and the Popescu European Translation Prizes in 2015. Her translation of Monika Rinck’s poem “pfingstrosen” [“peonies at pentecost”] was commended by the Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize in the same year. She recently translated into English the German bestseller This House Is Mine (St. Martin’s Press, 2016) by Doerte Hansen. Stokes teaches German and Translation Studies at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of eight collections of poetry and prose, most recently Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2010) and Six: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2016), selected by C. D. Wright as the winner of the AROHO/To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for the Rumpus and Lambda Literary Review. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives on Hollywood Beach.

Jan Wagner studied English in Hamburg, Dublin, and Berlin, where he has lived since 1995. A poet, essayist, and translator of British and American poetry, he has published six volumes of poetry including, most recently, Regentonnenvariationen (Rain Barrel Variations, 2014). His collection of essays, Die Sandale des Propheten [The Prophet’s Sandal ], appeared in 2011, and a selection of poems in English translation, Self-portrait with a Swarm ofBees, came out from Arc Publications in 2015. He has received many awards, including the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2009), the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2011), and the Prize of the Leipzig Bookfair (2015).

Peter Waterhouse, born in 1956 in Berlin to an Austrian mother and British father, has lived in Vienna since 1975. He studied English and German at the University of Vienna, where he completed a doctorate on the poetry of Paul Celan. He is the recipient of the country’s highest literary honor, the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2012). In addition to novels, plays, and essays, he has published half a dozen books of poetry. He is also a translator from English and Italian, and the co-founder of the Viennese translation movement Versatorium, whose collective translations of Charles Bernstein won the City of Münster Prize for International Poetry (2015).

Uljana Wolf lives and works in Berlin and Brooklyn. She has published three volumes of poetry, kochanie ich habe brot gekauft (2005), falsche freunde (2009), and Meine schönste Lengevitch (2013), as well as the essay “Box Office” (2010) and a joint sonnet erasure project with Christian Hawkey, “Sonne from Ort” (2012). Among the English-language poets she has translated into German are Matthea Harvey, Erín Moure, John Asbery, Yoko Ono, and Cole Swensen. Her own work has been translated into more than thirteen languages. She has received numerous prizes for her literary works and translations, including the Peter Huchel Prize and the Dresden Poetry Prize. Wolf teaches German and literary translation at New York University and the Pratt Institute.

Chelika Yapa received her MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she was awarded a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. Her personal essays have appeared in Glamour, Mamm, and Now. “Follow-Up” is her first published fiction, drawn from the experience of having been diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of twenty-two. She is grateful to her writing instructor, Lou Mathews, for his friendship and support.

Maja Zade is a dramaturg at the Schaubühne Berlin, where she has worked with directors such as Thomas Ostermeier, Ivo van Hove, Luk Perceval, Benedict Andrews, and Marius von Mayenburg. Her translations into German include works by Lars von Trier, Arnold Wesker, and Caryl Churchill, and she has translated into English works by Marius von Mayenburg, Roland Schimmelpfennig, Lars Norén, and Falk Richter.

 

Leslie Bazzett’s fiction debuted in New England Review and has received “Special Mention” in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Subsequent work has appeared in NER, NER Digital, Carolina Quarterly, West Branch, and the Louisville Review, among other places. Her most recent story in NER was listed as “Notable” in Best American Short Stories 2015. She has been a finalist for a Rona Jaffe Award, as well as for the NER Award for Emerging Writers.

Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Cave Canem fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee based in Jersey City, New Jersey. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Eleven Eleven, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Iowa Review, the Journal, Pleiades, Rattle, Spillway, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.

Martha Collins is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Admit One: An American Scrapbook (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), as well as three collections of co-translated Vietnamese poetry. She served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing for ten years at Oberlin College, and is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and an editor of the Oberlin College Press. The poem in this issue is from a collection tentatively titled Night Unto Night, which follows her collection Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014).

Mary Ebbott teaches in the Department of Classics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her scholarship focuses on Homeric epic and Greek tragedy. She is the author of Imagining Illegitimacy in Classical Greek Literature (Lexington Books, 2003) and co-author, with Casey Dué, of Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2010).

Ben Eisman is a former federal prosecutor whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Commentary and Hopkins Review. He lives in Washington, DC.

Ian Ganassi’s poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Yale Review, Interim, Blackbox Manifold (England), and Map Literary, among others. His translations of books 1–6 of the Aeneid have appeared previously in NER. His poetry collection Mean Numbers is forthcoming from China Grove Press in 2016.

Becky Hagenston is the author of three story collections: Scavengers (University of Alaska Press, 2016), Strange Weather (Press 53, 2010), and A Gram of Mars (Sarabande Books, 1998). Her work was selected for the O. Henry Award in 1996 and 2015. She is an associate professor of English at Mississippi State University.

Rob Hardy lives in Northfield, Minnesota, where he intermittently teaches Latin and Greek at Carleton College, serves on the school board, plays the lowest bells in the community handbell ensemble, hosts a monthly poetry reading series, and reads books by neglected writers. His essays have appeared in New England Review, North Dakota Quarterly, New Letters, Ploughshares, Critical Flame, Sonora Review, and in various scholarly journals.

Ben Jackson’s poems have appeared in Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Hudson Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His awards include the 2015 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry as well as residencies from Vermont Studio Center, Jentel Artist Residency Program, and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, he is the director of the Writing Salon, a San Francisco Bay Area creative writing school for adults.

John Keats (1795–1821) was an English Romantic poet. His first volume of poems was published in 1817 and attracted little attention. The next year he published Endymion, a long poem (4,050 lines) consisting of four books, based on the Greek myth of Endymion, the shepherd beloved by the moon goddess Selene (Diana). Between 1818 and 1819 he produced his six famous odes and such narrative poems as “Hyperion” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” His third and final volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in 1820. Having contracted tuberculosis in 1819, Keats sailed for Italy in September 1820, seeking a warmer climate for the winter. He died in Rome on February 23, 1821.

Wayne Miller is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Post (Milkweed, 2016) and The City, Our City (Milkweed, 2011). He has co-translated two collections by Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo, most recently Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015). Miller has also co-edited three books, including Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed, 2016) and New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and edits Copper Nickel.

Derek Mong is the author of two poetry collections from Saturnalia Books, Other Romes (2011) and The Identity Thief (2018). He is a blogger at Kenyon Review Online, and the Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College. He holds a doctorate in American Literature from Stanford University. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Louisville, Missouri Review, and the Hopwood Program, he lives in Indiana with his wife and son. New poetry, criticism, and translations have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Brooklyn Rail, Crab Creek Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Thomas Moran is John D. Berninghausen Professor of Chinese at Middlebury College. He lives in Ripton, Vermont, with his wife, the painter Rebecca Purdum.

Nathaniel G. Nesmith holds an MFA in playwriting and a PhD in theater from Columbia University. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Marymount Manhattan College, City College of New York, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and recently completed his Creating Connections Consortium Postdoctoral Fellowship at Middlebury College. He has published articles in American Theatre, the Dramatist, Drama Review, the New York Times, Yale Review, African American Review, and other publications.

Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill (2012) and Dirty Bomb (2015), both from Oberlin College Press. His awards include an NEA Poetry Fellowship, an Indiana Individual Artist grant, the FIELD Poetry Prize, and the Concrete Wolf Press chapbook award for Four of a Kind (Concrete Wolf, 2010).

Ning Ken grew up in one of Beijing’s old hutong (alley) neighborhoods and, after graduating from college, spent several years in Tibet, where he wrote poetry and taught at a local school. His books include two nonfiction collections and five novels, most recently Sange sanchongzou (Three Trios, 2015) and Tian•Zang (Heaven •Tibet, 2010), for which he was awarded his second Lao She Literary Award and the Shi Nai’an Literary Award. He currently lives in Beijing.

Kate Petersen is from Arizona. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Epoch, Paris Review Daily, the Collagist, and elsewhere. She has received a Stegner Fellowship and the Pushcart Prize, and currently teaches at Stanford as a Jones Lecturer.

Anne Raeff’s first novel, Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia (MacAdam/Cage), was published in 2002. “Chinese Opera” is from the forthcoming collection of stories The Jungle Around Us (University of Georgia Press, 2016), which won the 2015 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her stories and essays appear in journals including New England Review, Guernica, and Zyzzyva, and in the anthology What I Didn’t Know: True Stories About Becoming a Teacher (In Fact Books, 2016). Raeff is a high school teacher and lives in San Francisco.

Tyler Sage’s work has appeared in the Common, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Story Quarterly, Greensboro Review, Bright Lights Film Journal, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. He lives in California.

Maxine Scates is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Undone (New Issues, 2011). She is co-editor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford (Copper Canyon, 2001). Her work has received the Starrett Prize, the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and two Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Eric Severn received his MFA from the University of Idaho and has worked as fiction editor for Fugue. His fiction has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Beloit Fiction, and other journals. He is literary editor for the Portland Phoenix.

Mona Nicole Sfeir was born in New York City but grew up in three states and five countries. She holds an MFA in textiles from the California College of Arts, an MA in Children’s Literature and Illustration from San Jose State University, and a BA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her diverse body of work includes large-scale installations, paintings, sculptures, book illustrations, and public artworks, as well as private commissions for clients around the globe. Her work has been exhibited in galleries both in the United States and abroad.

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her first full-length collection, Cannibal, won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). She is the recipient of a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, the Nation, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Bruce Snider is the author of two collections of poetry, Paradise, Indiana (LSU Press, 2012) and The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). With the poet Shara Lessley, he is currently co-editing an anthology of essays, The Poem’s Country: Place and Poetic Practice. He teaches at the University of San Francisco.

Brian Teare, a 2015 Pew Fellow in the Arts, is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the American Antiquarian Society. He is the author of five books, most recently Companion Grasses (Omnidawn, 2013), which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Ahsahta, 2015). An assistant professor at Temple University, he lives in South Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Ryan Teitman is the author of the poetry collection Litany for the City (BOA Editions, 2012). His poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Southern Review, Threepenny Review, and Yale Review, and his awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Kara van de Graaf’s poems have appeared in the Southern Review, AGNI, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is co-founder and editor of Lightbox Poetry, an online educational resource for poetry in the classroom. She lives in Chicago.

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70–19 BC) was a Roman poet of the Augustan period, known for three major works of Latin literature: the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the Aeneid. His Aeneid has been considered the national epic of ancient Rome from the time of its composition to the present day. Virgil’s work has had wide and deep influence on Western literature, most notably Dante’s Divine Comedy (completed in 1321), in which Virgil appears as Dante’s guide through hell and purgatory.

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EDITOR’S NOTE

POETRY
MARTHA COLLINS  Out of Doors
BRIAN TEARE  After a Long Illness
SAFIYA SINCLAIR  Good Hair
BEN JACKSON  Table Bay
BRUCE SNIDER  They Will Not Eat the Bird of Paradise
MAXINE SCATES  My Wilderness
DEREK MONG  Exhausted, Renegade Elephant
RYAN TEITMAN  Margaret-Orthodox / Quakers
MARK NEELY  Animal / Automaton / Bruce’s Faith
CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON  Still Life with Young Black Woman’s Face Etched into a School Desk
WAYNE MILLER  On Progress
KARA VAN DE GRAAF  La Monstrua Vida

FICTION
KATE PETERSEN  After, Before
LESLIE BAZZETT  The Pretenders
BECKY HAGENSTON  Rise
TYLER SAGE  Lionel
ANNE RAEFF  Chinese Opera [audio]
BEN EISMAN  Right-Hearted

NONFICTION
Investigations
MARY EBBOTT  Tell Me How It Hurts: An Intersection of Poetry and Pain in the Iliad
ROB HARDY  Deceit only was forbidden: A Brief Literary Biography of Richard Henry Wilde

Provocations
NING KEN (trans. Thomas Moran)  Writing in the Age of the Ultra-Unreal

Literary Lives
NATHANIEL G. NESMITH  The Life of a Playwright: An Interview with Steve Carter

Testimonies
ERIC SEVERN  A Partial Inventory of Things That Didn’t Work

TRANSLATIONS
VIRGIL  Aenid Book 7
(trans. Ian Ganassi)

REDISCOVERIES
JOHN KEATS  Two Prefaces to Endymion

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES