Kaveh Akbar founded and edits Divedapper. His poems have appeared most recently in Poetry, Tin House, APR, and Boston Review. He is the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), and his debut collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2017. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran. He lives and teaches in Florida.
Elvis Bego was born in Bosnia, became a refugee at the age of twelve, and currently lives in Copenhagen. His fiction and essays have appeared in AGNI, the Common, Kenyon Review Online, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.
Kelsey L. Bennett’s essays, articles, and reviews appear in the New Criterion, Brontë Studies, Colorado Review, and Notes on Contemporary Literature. She is a recipient of a two-year National Endowment for the Humanities grant, and the author of Principle & Propensity: Experience and Religion in the Nineteenth-Century British and American Bildungsroman (University of South Carolina Press, 2014). She lives with her husband and their two children in Gunnison, Colorado, where she directs the Honors Program and teaches literature at Western State Colorado University.
David Brainard lives in Boston and has an MFA from Boston University. This is his first published story.
Fleda Brown is the author of The Woods Are on Fire: New & Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she taught for twenty-seven years and directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001 to 2007.
Thi Bui was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the United States as a child. She studied art and legal studies and at one point wanted to become a civil rights lawyer, but became a public school teacher instead. Bui lives in Berkeley, California, with her son, her husband, and her mother. Her debut graphic novel, The Best We Could Do, will be published by Abrams in 2017.
Ethan Chatagnier is a graduate of Fresno State University, where he won the Larry Levis Prize in poetry, and of Emerson College, where he earned an MA in Publishing and Writing. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Kenyon Review Online, Five Points, Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Witness, among other places. He lives, writes, and teaches in Fresno, California.
Franny Choi is the author of the collection Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She is a Project VOICE teaching artist, an MFA Candidate at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective.
Nandini Dhar is the author of the chapbook Lullabies Are Barbed Wire Nations (Two of Cups Press, 2015). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Chattahoochee Review, Grist, Tusculum Review, West Branch, New South, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of the journal Elsewhere. She hails from Kolkata, India, and divides her time between her hometown and Miami, Florida, where she works as an Assistant Professor of English at Florida International University.
Anna Dibble’s paintings have been featured in numerous solo, group, and invitational exhibitions in museums, cultural centers, and galleries. She has been painting, drawing, making sculpture, and writing for over forty-five years. She was a freelance writer, music composer, and co-concept designer for many animated shorts on Sesame Street. She has designed and created sets for opera and theater, taught workshops in Vermont and Maine schools and art organizations, and in the 1980s worked in commercial and independent animation in Los Angeles, including feature films, television specials, and theatrical shorts for Disney, Marvel, Hanna Barbera, Murakami-Wolf, and Don Bluth.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was a Victorian novelist, social critic, and editor. He began his writing career as a parliamentary reporter and went on to publish his collected Sketches from Boz at age twenty-four. Among his novels, all first published in serial form, are Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1865). He also founded and edited two weeklies, Household Words and All the Year Round; advocated for abolitionism in his American Notes (1842); and gave public readings in England beginning in 1858 and during his second visit to the US in 1867–68.
Christian Gullette, a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, in Scandinavian literatures and languages. He has been selected as a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Award and a semi-finalist for the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest. His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Meridian, Colorado Review, and Smartish Pace. He also serves as a poetry editor for the Cortland Review.
Ellen Hinsey’s collection of essays on democracy, Mastering the Past: Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism, is forthcoming in 2017 (Telos Press). Her book-length dialogue with Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, Magnetic North, will also appear in 2017. She is the author of books of poetry and translation including Update on the Descent (Notre Dame University Press, 2007) and Cities of Memory, which was awarded the Yale University Series Prize in 1996. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Irish Times, among others.
Joseph O. Legaspi, a Fulbright and NYFA fellow, is the author of two poetry collections from CavanKerry Press, Threshold (2017) and Imago (2007, also University of Santo Tomas Press, 2015); and two chapbooks, Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts, 2014) and Subways (Thrush Press, 2013). His poems have appeared and are forthcoming in Poetry, jubilat, Orion, Tuesday; An Art Project, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. He co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a nonprofit organization serving Asian American literature. He lives with his husband in Queens, New York.
Alex McElroy’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, Tin House, Catapult, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2016 Neutrino Prize from Passages North and is currently a Presidential Fellow at the University of Houston, where he is pursuing a PhD in fiction. You can find more work at alexmcelroy.org.
Amy Meng’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, the Literary Review, and Pleiades. She is a Kundiman Fellow and poetry editor at Bodega Magazine, as well as a winner of the 2016 Amy Award from Poets & Writers.
Maciej Miłkowski, born in Łódź, Poland, is a writer, translator, and book critic. He has translated over fifteen books from English, in both fiction and nonfiction. His first collection of short stories, Wist, was published in 2014 by Zeszyty Literackie. He hosts a program on literature for the internet radio station Studnia. His stories have been translated into Dutch, English, German, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Russian. He resides in Kraków.
Miguel Murphy is the author of Detainee (Barrow Street, 2016) and A Book Called Rats (Lynx House, 2005). He lives in Los Angeles where he teaches at Santa Monica College.
Genevieve Plunkett’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Willow Springs, Massachusetts Review, Mud Season Review, and Crazyhorse. She lives in Vermont with her husband and two children.
Carol Potter’s fifth book of poems, Some Slow Bees (Oberlin College Press, 2015), won the 2014 FIELD Poetry Prize. She has poems recently in Kenyon Review, Green Mountains Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and poems forthcoming in River Styx and Massachusetts Review.
Esteban Rodríguez holds an MFA from the University of Texas–Pan American and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Florida Review, American Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, Nashville Review, Sugar House Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Alan Rossi’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Atlantic, Granta, Missouri Review, Florida Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize in fiction. He lives in South Carolina with his wife and various woodland creatures.
Zackariah Rybak lived in Reno, Nevada, his whole life, until he recently moved to Missoula to be part of the MFA program at the University of Montana. This is his first publication.
Stephen Snyder is Dean of Language Schools and Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College. He is the author of Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kafū (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000) and has translated works by Yōko Ogawa and Kenzaburō Ōe, among others. His translation of Ogawa’s Hotel Iris (Picador, 2010) was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011, and his translation of Ogawa’s Revenge (Picador, 2013) was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize in 2014.
Alison Stagner lives in Seattle, where she is the events coordinator for Seattle Arts & Lectures. She is the winner of the 2016 James Wright Poetry Award and is a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, and her work appears in journals such as the Mid-American Review, the Journal, and Southeast Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington.
Robert Stothart has published essays in North Dakota Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Weber Studies, Bellowing Ark, and Black Warrior Review. His essay “American Kestrel” was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2011. He has recently retired as an English teacher in the Humanities Division of Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming. He holds an MFA from the University of Washington, and he and his wife live on a small ranch on Owl Creek, northwest of Thermopolis, Wyoming.
Amy Stuber has been writing and publishing short fiction since the Bill Clinton years and has published in numerous journals including Other Voices, Antioch Review, and Ploughshares. She earned a PhD from the University of Kansas, taught for a decade at several universities, and now works as an education administrator. She lives in a small blue-dot college town in the Midwest.
Noah Warren is the author of The Destroyer in the Glass (Yale, 2016), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. His poems appear in Poetry, Southern Review, AGNI, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, American Poets, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco and is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
James Bradley Wells is the author of the poetry collection Bicycle (Sheep Meadow Press, 2013) and the chapbook The Kazantzakis Guide to Greece (Finishing Line Press, 2015). He is an Associate Professor of Classical Studies at DePauw University and lives in Bloomington, Indiana.
Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me in This (Four Way Books, 2017), Small Porcelain Head (Four Way Books, 2013), selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry, and Self-Portrait with Crayon (CSU Poetry Center, 2009). She teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Justin Wilmes is Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at East Carolina University. His work focuses on post-Soviet cinema and culture, Polish literature, and translation.
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