Steve Almond is the author of three story collections, most recently God Bless America (Lookout Press, 2013). None sold especially well. He lives with his family and his anxiety outside Boston.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a German-born Jewish political theorist, who escaped from Europe during the Holocaust and became an American citizen. Among her many books are The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Between Past and Future (1961), and The Life of the Mind (1978).

Gabrielle Bates is a writer and artist from Birmingham, Alabama, currently living in Seattle, where she works at Open Books: A Poem Emporium and serves on the editorial boards of the Seattle Review, Poetry Northwest, and Broadsided Press. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Mineral School Artist Residency, and the Richard Hugo House. Her work is published or forthcoming in Poetry, Washington Square, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals.

Bruce Beasley is the author of eight collections of poems, most recently Theophobia (2012) and All Soul Parts Returned (2017), both published by BOA Editions.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books, 2007) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press, 2012), as well as three Dusie chapbooks, Sorcery (2007), Good Morning! (2011), and The Sound of Music (2015). His bird poems have appeared in such places as Spork, Fence, South Dakota Review, Denver Quarterly, Entropy, Kenyon Review, and Ping-Pong. He’s the interim chair of the Adjunct Faculty Union–SEIU at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where for ten years he edited the journal Eleven Eleven.

Marianne Boruch’s ninth poetry collection, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (Copper Canyon Press), was cited as a “Most Loved Book of 2016” by the New Yorker. The University of Michigan Press recently brought out her third collection of essays, The Little Death of Self, in its “Poets on Poetry” series.

Maud Casey is the author of three novels, most recently The Man Who Walked Away (Bloomsbury USA, 2014), and a short story collection, Drastic (William Morrow, 2002). She is the grateful recipient of the Calvino Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the St. Francis College Literary Prize. “To Be Undone” is excerpted from The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in January 2018. She lives in Washington, DC, and teaches at the University of Maryland.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Tunsiya/Amrikiya (Bull City Press, 2018). She is the recipient of the 2017–2018 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and Dickinson House, and prizes from the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below 30 contest, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems appear in Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Tin House, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, West Branch, Narrative, the Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Yoon Choi is a graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and a 2017 recipient of a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University. Her work has most recently been published in Michigan Quarterly Review and Chicago Quarterly Review. She lives with her four children and her husband in Anaheim, California.

Jane Davies is a full-time artist working in painting, collage, and encaustic. She offers workshops nationwide, focusing on a personal and playful approach to art making. A graduate of Bennington College, Davies attended the School for American Crafts and was awarded a 2015 residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Davies’s newest book is Abstract Painting: The Elements of Visual Language.

Geri Doran is the author of two books of poetry, Sanderlings (Tupelo Press, 2011) and Resin (Louisiana State University Press, 2005). A new collection, Blue Marble, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Her honors include the Walt Whitman Award, a Stegner Fellowship, an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and residencies from the James Merrill House, Lighthouse Works, and Maison Dora Maar. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon.

Jerzy Ficowski (1924–2006) was a prolific poet, songwriter, and scholar of the Polish Roma population as well as the writer-artist Bruno Schulz. Recent translations of Ficowski’s work in English have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.

Castle Freeman Jr. is a longtime contributor of short fiction to NER, most recently with “Squirrel Trouble at Uplands” (NER 35.4). He lives in southeastern Vermont.

Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016). Psalms of All My Days, translations from the French poet Patrice de La Tour du Pin, appeared from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2014, and Rochester Knockings, by the Tunisian novelist Hubert Haddad, appeared in 2015 from Open Letter. A 2015 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, she teaches poetry and translation at the University of Rochester. She is director of the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference and in 2018 will be the new director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.

David Heronry is a used car salesman who has previously worked as a funeral director’s apprentice, a pet nutritionist, an English teacher in Japan, a Japanese teacher in America, and a crystal healing “expert” in a head shop. He currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he shares a home with a tall man and a small child.

Steven G. Kellman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His books include Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (Norton, 2005), The Translingual Imagination (University of Nebraska Press, 2000), Loving Reading: Erotics of the Text (Archon, 1985), and The Self-Begetting Novel (Columbia University Press, 1980).

Jerome Kohn was Hannah Arendt’s last teaching assistant. Currently he is the Trustee of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust. He has edited four volumes of Arendt’s uncollected and unpublished writings; the fifth volume in the series will be Thinking Without a Banister (Schocken Books, 2018), which will include “The Freedom to Be Free,” published in this issue of NER.

James McCorkle is the author of two collections of poetry, Evidences (Copper Canyon Press, 2003) and The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press, 2014), and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry from the Colonial Era to the Present (Greenwood, 2015). He co-directs the Africana Studies Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

Ben Miller is the author of River Bend Chronicle (Lookout Books, 2013). New prose is forthcoming in St. Petersburg Review, Antioch Review, and Harvard Review. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Since 2014 he has been collecting new translations of the William Carlos Williams poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” in each of the 140-plus languages spoken in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; so far more than a hundred exist.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) was an English aristocrat and writer who was also known for introducing and advocating for smallpox inoculation in Britain. A number of her poems and essays were printed in her lifetime, sometimes anonymously, with or without her knowledge and permission. Her letters from Turkey, for which Lady Mary remains best remembered, were published posthumously in 1763, as Letters Written During Her Travels (Becket and De Hondt), and in later years were frequently reprinted. Other edited volumes of her writing were published after her death, the most significant being Letters and Works, edited by her great-grandson Lord Wharncliffe, published in 1837 and reissued with corrections in 1866. Lady Mary defied convention throughout her life, and interest in her life story has so far outpaced the scholarship on her considerable accomplishments in writing.

Cheswayo Mphanza was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and raised in Chicago, Illinois. He earned a BA in English from Middlebury College. His work has been featured in or is forthcoming from American Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, and RHINO. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Callaloo, Columbia University, and Cave Canem. A recipient of the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers, he is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Rutgers–Newark.

Clarence Orsi is a graduate of the PhD program in writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His essays and fiction have appeared in publications including the American Literary Review, the Believer, Chicago Review, Cincinnati Review, and n+1. He teaches writing at Cecil College in northern Maryland and lives in Baltimore.

Hai-Dang Phan is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and author of a chapbook, Small Wars (Convulsive, 2016). Born in Vietnam, he grew up in Wisconsin and currently teaches at Grinnell College.

Catherine Pierce’s most recent book of poems is The Tornado Is the World (2016). She is also the author of The Girls of Peculiar (2012) and Famous Last Words (2008), all from Saturnalia Books. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

Ismet Prcic was born in 1977 in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and immigrated to the US in 1996. His debut novel, Shards (Grove Press, 2011), won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and many others. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the film Imperial Dreams, which premiered at Sundance and won the audience award in its category. Prcic lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s most recent book is Heavenly Questions (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

Piotr Sommer is the author of Continued (Wesleyan University Press, 2005) and Overdoing It (Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press, 2013). His collected poems, Po Ciemku Też [Also in the Dark], appeared in Poland in 2013.

Analicia Sotelo is the author of the chapbook Nonstop Godhead, selected by Rigoberto González and published by the Poetry Society of America in 2016. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Antioch Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. The 2016 Disquiet International Literary Prize winner in Poetry, she is the recipient of scholarships from Squaw Valley and Image Text Ithaca. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston.

Laura Spence-Ash serves as Editor-at-Large for the Masters Review and writes a monthly blog series for Ploughshares titled “Fiction Responding to Fiction.” Her work has appeared in One Story, the Scofield, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. In 2016 she received her MFA in Fiction from Rutgers–Newark, where she was a Presidential Fellow and taught freshman composition. She is currently working on a collection of linked stories and a novel.

Maura Stanton’s first book of poetry, Snow on Snow (1975), was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. She has published five other books of poetry, including Life Among the Trolls (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998) and Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois Press, 2008), as well as a novel and three books of short stories. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hudson Review, Yale Review, Upstreet, Cincinnati Review, Baltimore Review, Measure, Numero Cinq, and the Golden Shovel Anthology. Her story “Oh Shenandoah,” published in NER, won an O. Henry Award in 2014.

Noah Stetzer is the author of Because I Can See Needing a Knife (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016).

Barrett Swanson is the 2016–2017 Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He is the winner of a 2015 Pushcart Prize, and his short fiction and essays have been distinguished as “notable” in Best American Nonrequired Reading (2014) and Best American Essays (2014 and 2015). His work has appeared most recently in the Guardian, the New Republic, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, Dissent, LA Review of Books, Ninth Letter, the Point, and Mississippi Review, and is forthcoming in Orion, Pacific Standard, the Southern Review, and the New York Times Magazine.

Chase Twichell’s most recent book, Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2010), won the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. A new book, Things as It Is, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2018.

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