Peter Agnone (1948–2011) studied Serbian at the University of Pittsburgh and visited the former Yugoslavia numerous times. He translated David Albahari’s novel Bait (2001) as part of the Northwestern University Press Writings from an Unbound Europe series, and was nominated for the 2003 American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages book prize. He also translated short stories by Goran Petrović, Vidosav Stevanović, and Mihajlo Pantić, which appeared in The Man Who Ate Death: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Stories (2006), and completed a translation of Petrović’s novel The Sixty-Nine Drawers before he died in 2011.

Ash Bowen is the author of The Even Years of Marriage, winner, 2012 Orphic Book Prize. His work has previously appeared in New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He is co-managing editor of Linebreak and teaches undergraduate literature and creative writing at the University of Alabama.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo came to the US undocumented and is currently a Canto Mundo fellow and MFA candidate at the University of Michigan. He teaches summers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and recent work can be found in Jubilat, the Journal, and Drunken Boat, among others.

A. J. Church (1829–1912) was an English classical scholar and professor of Latin at University College, London. With W. J. Brodribb he translated Tacitus and edited Pliny’s letters. He wrote Latin and English verse and published a volume entitled Memories of Men and Books (1908), but he is best known for his English retellings of classical tales and legends for young people.

Patricia Clark is Poet-in-Residence and Professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Sunday Rising (Michigan State, 2013). Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and has appeared in the Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Slate, and Stand. New work is forthcoming in Kenyon Review and Southern Humanities Review.

Peter Cooley has recently published his ninth book of poetry, Night Bus to the Afterlife (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014). He is the Senior Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University, and the winner of the 2014 Marble Faun Poetry Prize from the Faulkner Society in New Orleans.

Stephen Dixon has published thirty books of fiction: fifteen novels and fifteen story collections, most recently the novel His Wife Leaves Him (2013) and the three-volume story collection What Is All This? (2011), both published by Fantagraphics Books. “That First Time” and “Cochran,” which appeared in NER 34.2, are part of the interlinked collection Late Stories, which the author completed on June 16, 2014.

Joanne Dominique Dwyer lives in Northern New Mexico where she works with teens through a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as with the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project. Her first collection of poems is Belle Laide (Sarabande Books, 2013).

Debora Greger is Poet-in-Residence at the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida, and is the author of By Herself (Penguin, 2012), her most recent book of poems.

Sands Hall is the author of the novel Catching Heaven (Ballantine, 2000) and a book of essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft (Moving Finger Press, 2005). Her essays and stories have appeared in 2paragraphs.com, Green Mountains Review, and the Iowa Review; the latter, “Hide and Go Seek,” was listed among 100 Other Notable Stories in Best American Short Stories, 2009. She is also a singer/songwriter and playwright; her produced plays include an adaptation of Alcott’s Little Women and the comic drama Fair Use.

Bob Hicok is associate professor of English at Virginia Tech University. He is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Words for Empty and Words for Full (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Jerome J. Shestack Prize, and four Pushcart Prizes.

James Hoch is the author of A Parade of Hands (Silverfish Review Press, 2003) and Miscreants (W. W. Norton, 2007). He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences, St. Albans School for Boys, and the Frost Place. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and Guest Faculty at Sarah Lawrence.

Duncan Johnson earned a BFA at Pratt Institute in 1987 and lives and works in Vermont. He was awarded a Pollack Krasner Foundation Artist Grant in 2010, an Academy of Arts and Letters award in 2009, and an Individual Artist Grant from the Vermont Arts Council, also in 2009. He has exhibited in museums and art centers including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, Sam Houston Memorial Museum, and Pelham Arts Center, among others.

Jessica Langan-Peck was born and raised in upstate New York. Her stories have appeared in Switchback, New Ohio Review, and DailyLit (Rooster). She currently teaches and writes in Tucson, Arizona.

Kate Lebo’s poems and prose have appeared in Best New Poets, the Rumpus, Gastronomica, Willow Springs, and Poetry Northwest. She is also the author of two books about the folk art of pie-making, A Commonplace Book of Pie (Chin Music Press, 2013) and Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour, and Butter (Sasquatch Books, 2014). She teaches writing workshops nationally. For more, visit katelebo.com.

Savyon Liebrecht was born in Munich and emigrated to Israel when she was a child. She studied literature and philosophy at Tel Aviv University and has published numerous novels, collections of short stories, TV scripts, and plays. Her books have been translated from Hebrew into English, German, Italian, and French; her most recent novel in English is The Women My Father Knew (Persea Books, 2010). She is a four-time winner of Israel’s Playwright of the Year award, and her work has been staged in the US, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, the Philippines, Austria, and Turkey. “Freud’s Women” was performed as a staged reading in Boston in 2014 by Israeli Stage, which exposes audiences to world premieres of Israeli plays. It was originally written in Hebrew and translated by the author.

Matthew Lippman’s three poetry collections are American Chew (Burnside Review Press, 2013), winner of the Burnside Review Book Prize; Monkey Bars (Typecast Publishing, 2010); and The New Year of Yellow (Sarabande Books, 2007), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of the 2014 Georgetown Review Magazine Prize and the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review.

Lucian (ca. 115–120 CE to ca. 180 CE) was a Greek satirist under the Roman Empire. He wrote rhetorical, critical, and biographical works, as well as romances, dialogues, and poems. His better known writings include True History, Dialogues of the Dead, and Lucius, or The Ass.

Lou Mathews’s story “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others” is from a shiny new manuscript, Hollywoodski, stories by and about Dale Davis, a self-described “faded screenwriter.” Another story from Hollywoodski,“Not Oliver Stone,” will be published in Black Clock #19 this November. Mathews’s work has also appeared in Tin House, Failbetter, Mother Jones, Short Story, and The Pushcart Prize. His first novel, L.A. Breakdown (Malvern, 1999), was a Los Angeles Times Best Book.

Ben Miller is the author of River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa (Lookout Books, 2013). He has published in AGNI, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, and other journals. His essay “Bix and Flannery” appeared in Best American Essays, 2004, and his awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

James Naremore is Emeritus Chancellors’ Professor at Indiana University and the author of several books on film, including Acting in the Cinema (University of California Press, 1988), The Magic World of Orson Welles (Oxford and SMU, 1989), More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (rev. ed., California, 1998), On Kubrick (British Film Institute, 2007), and An Invention Without a Future: Essays on Cinema (University of California Press, 2014).

John R. Nelson has contributed to Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, Harvard Review, Harvard Magazine, and various birding magazines in the US and England. His essay “Brolga the Dancing Crane Girl,” on birds and dance, was awarded the Carter Prize for the best nonfiction work published in Shenandoah during the 2011–12 season.

January Gill O’Neil is the author ofUnderlife (CavanKerry Press, 2009) and Misery Islands (CavanKerry Press, 2014). She is the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and an assistant professor of English at Salem State University.

April Ossmann is the author of As If Light Could Save Us (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2017) and Anxious Music (Four Way Books, 2007) and has published her poetry widely in journals and anthologies. Her poetry awards include a 2013 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and a Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award. Former executive director of Alice James Books, she owns a poetry consulting business, offering manuscript editing, publishing advice, tutorials, and workshops. She is Editor-in-Residence for the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Sierra Nevada College. She lives in West Windsor, Vermont, and can be found at www.aprilossmann.com.

Goran Petrovic has published dozens of books, including five collections of short stories, three novels, several plays, a book of essays, and a novella. His books have been translated into more than sixteen languages and have been adapted for theater, television, and radio. His awards include the NIN Award for the Novel of the Year, the Ivo Andrić Award for the Book of Short Stories of the Year, and the National Library of Serbia Award for the Most Read Book of the Year. He is the member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Serbian PEN Centre. The novel excerpted in this issue of NER has been published in sixteen languages other than English, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish, and Russian.

Carl Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Silverchest (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013). A book of prose, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination, has just been publisehd by Graywolf. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Christopher Robinson’s debut novel, War of the Encyclopaedists, co-authored with Gavin Kovite, will be published by Scribner in 2015. His work has appeared most recently in  Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Post Road, and Gettysburg Review. He is a recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, among others. His secret lair is somewhere in Seattle.

Wesley Rothman’s poems and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Collagist, Crab Orchard Review, Post Road, Prairie Schooner, Vinyl, and White Review, among other publications. Recipient of a grant from the Vermont Studio Center and a Pushcart Prize nomination, he teaches writing and cultural literatures throughout Boston.

Matthew Thorburn is the author of three books of poems, most recently This Time Tomorrow (Waywiser Press, 2013). “Like Hours of Rain on Piles of Brown Leaves” is from a new collection, Never Going Back Again, a work in progress. He lives in New York City, where he works as the communications manager for an international law firm.

Sean Warren’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Washington Square, FiveChapters, and The Better of McSweeney’s, Volume ii (2010). He earned his MFA in fiction from the Creative Writing Program at Portland State University, where he currently teaches.