STEPHEN BENZ has published two books of travel essays—Guatemalan Journey (University of Texas Press, 1996) and Green Dreams: Travels in Central America (Lonely Planet, 1998). Two of his essays have been selected for The Best American Travel Writing (2003, 2015). Topographies, a new book of essays, will be published by Etruscan Press in 2019. Formerly a writer for Tropic, the Sunday magazine of the Miami Herald, he now teaches professional writing at the University of New Mexico and is working on a book about American travelers in Cuba.

DAVID BIESPIEL’s most recent books include a collection of poems, Republic Café (University of Washington Press, 2019), and a memoir, The Education of a Young Poet (Counterpoint, 2017). A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award, he is poet-in-residence at Oregon State University, a core faculty member in the Rainier Writing Workshop, and president of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters.

NOAH BOGDONOFF is a writer and clinical social work student living in Providence, Rhode Island. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Carve, Passages North, and Catapult. He has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Writing By Writers, and the AWP. He has a degree in Environmental Studies and a cat named Alaska.

MICHAEL BYERS has taught at the MFA program of the University of Michigan since 2006. He is the author of the collection of stories The Coast of Good Intentions (Houghton Mifflin, 1998) and two novels, Long for This World (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) and Percival’s Planet (Henry Holt, 2010). His stories have been anthologized several times in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories, and his work has received recognition from the Henfield Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Whiting Foundation. His novella, The Broken Man (PS Publishing, UK, 2011), was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award.

JEAN-PAUL DE DADELSEN (1913–1957) was born in Strasbourg, Alsace. During World War II, he joined de Gaulle’s Free French Army in London and was a correspondent for Albert Camus’s newspaper, Combat. After the war he served as a journalist for the BBC’s French Service. He died of a brain tumor in 1957. Most of his poetry was published posthumously. His complete poems were published in the Poésie Gallimard series in 2005.

CHELSEA DINGMAN’s first book, Thaw (University of Georgia Press, 2017), was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series. She is also the author of a chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). Her prizes include Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, Water~Stone Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s Creative Writing Award for Poetry. Her work is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Redivider, and Southern Review, among others. Visit her website at chelseadingman.com. chelseadingman.com.

EMILIA DUBICKI’s work has been exhibited most recently at the Fred Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has received residencies from the I-Park Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. She is based in New Haven and shows her work nationally and internationally.

GAVIN YUAN GAO is a bilingual poet who graduated with a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in Bodega, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in Brisbane, Australia.

BENJAMIN GARCIA provides HIV/HCV/STD and opioid overdose prevention education to higher risk communities throughout New York’s Finger Lakes region. He had the honor of being the 2017 Latinx Scholar at the Frost Place, the 2018 CantoMundo Fellow at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and winner of the 2018 Puerto Del Sol Poetry Contest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2018, Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, and Gulf Coast. Find him on Twitter at bengarciapoet.

DIANE GLANCY is professor emerita at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, who currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Carlow University in Pittsburgh. Her latest books include It Was Over There by That Place (Atlas Review Press Award Chapbook Series, 2018) and The Book of Bearings (Wipf & Stock, Cascade Imprint, Poiema Series, 2019). Her other books and awards are on her website, www.dianeglancy.com.

NIKOLAI GOGOL (1809-1852) was a Ukrainian-born Russian writer distinguished by his absurdist humor and playful—sometimes verging on surreal—literary style. His best-known works, which often center on satirical critiques of Russian society and bureaucracy, include his short stories “The Nose” (1836) and “The Overcoat” (1842), his play The Government Inspector (1836), and his novel Dead Souls (1842). Gogol served as an influence for later Russian writers, including Dostoevsky, and is often credited for helping build the foundation for the rich literary tradition that emerged in nineteenth-century Russia.

ELLA MARTINSEN GORHAM lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. Her fiction has appeared in ZYZZVA, and she is at work on a collection of stories and a novel.

MARILYN HACKER is the author of thirteen books of poems and sixteen collections of poems translated from the French.

MICHAEL R. KATZ is the C. V. Starr Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College. He has published translations of over fifteen Russian novels, including works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chernyshevsky.

TREVOR KETNER is the author of Major Arcana: Minneapolis, winner of the 2017 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest judged by Diane Seuss. Their poems have been or will be published in Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, West Branch, Pleiades, Diagram, Memorious, and elsewhere, and their essays and reviews can be found in Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Lambda Literary, and elsewhere. They hold an MFA from the University of Minnesota and have been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. They live in Manhattan with their husband.

PETER LASALLE is the author of several books, most recently two short story collections, Sleeping Mask (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017) and What I Found Out About Her (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), as well as a collection of essays on literature and travel, The City at Three P.M.: Writing, Reading, and Traveling (Dzanc Books, 2015). His travel writing has appeared in theNation, Worldview, Agni, Tin House, and Southern Review, among others, and has twice been selected for The Best American Travel Writing—in 2010, edited by Bill Buford, and 2014, edited by Paul Theroux. He teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.

JOAN LEEGANT is the author of a novel, Wherever You Go (W. W. Norton, 2010), and a story collection, An Hour in Paradise (W. W. Norton, 2003), winner of the PEN/New England Book Award, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. For five years, she was the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv, and from 2014 to 2016 she was writer-in-residence at Hugo House in Seattle. She’s now back in her longtime home outside Boston. Formerly a lawyer, she began writing fiction at the age of forty.

JOAN LI is a New England native transplanted in Chicago. Her work has been published in Chicago Quarterly Review, Seventh Wave, and Carve. She has been recognized as a finalist in Joyland Magazine’s 2018 Open Border Fiction Prize and earned an honorable mention in The Best American Essays 2017.

SUSAN MITCHELL has published three books of poems and has been honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her collection Rapture (HarperCollins, 1992) won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a National Book Award Finalist. Her poems have appeared in numerous volumes of Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Mitchell grew up in New York City and now lives in Boca Raton, where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Florida Atlantic University.

PAISLEY REKDAL is the author of multiple collections of poetry and three books of nonfiction. Her newest collection of poems, Nightingale, is forthcoming in spring 2019 from Copper Canyon Press. She is Utah’s poet laureate.

BARBARA JANE REYES is the author, most recently, of Invocation to Daughters (City Lights, 2017). Born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including PoetaenSan Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005) and Diwata(BOA Editions, 2010). Her sixth book, Letters to a Young Brown Girl, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2020.

CHRISTOPHER SALERNO is the author of four books of poems and the editor of Saturnalia Books. His newest collection, Sun & Urn (University of Georgia Press, 2017), was selected by Thomas Lux for the Georgia Poetry Prize. He is a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellow, and his poems have appeared in the New York Times, American Poetry Review, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Jubilat, Fence, and elsewhere. He’s an Associate Professor at William Paterson University where he teaches in the BA and MFA Programs in Creative and Professional Writing. Find him at csalernopoet.com.

DOUGLAS SILVER’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Cincinnati Review, Epoch, Chicago Review Printers Row, the Rumpus, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. A former writer-in-residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and an Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient, he lives in New York City. Read more at www.DouglasSilver.com.

KATHERINE E. STANDEFER’s debut book Lightning Flowers, forthcoming in 2020 from Little, Brown, was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Works-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Her work appears in The Best American Essays2016 and won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona and teaches in Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA program. She lives in Tucson.

JENNIFER STOCK is a writer and new media artist based in New Haven, Connecticut. She is currently working on an essay collection that examines the resonance of objects inherited from her collector parents. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Iowa Review, Georgia Review, the Normal School, Hotel Amerika, and Salmagundi.

JON WILLIAM STOUT was born in Colorado and lived in Parkland, Washington, before moving to Iowa City. Jon received a BA from Pacific Lutheran University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Prelude Magazine, Iowa Review Online, Omniverse, Poetry Is Dead, Tulane Review, Canada Quarterly, Horsethief, Lana Turner Journal, and elsewhere. His poetry chapbook, The Dream ofZukofsky, is a two-time finalist for the 2017 Omnidawn Chapbook Poetry Prize. He teaches Rhetoric at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

LYNNE THOMPSON is the author of three chapbooks as well as the poetry collections Startwitha Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2013) and Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press, 2007), winner of the Perugia Book Award and the Great Lakes College’s New Writers Award. In 2018, Jane Hirshfield selected her manuscript, Fretwork, as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Thompson’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in Ecotone, Salamander, Barrow Street, Fourth River, and Poetry, among others. Thompson is the editor of reviews and essays for the literary journal Spillway.

JANE WONG’s poems can be found in The Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, Agni, Poetry, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the US Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and Bread Loaf. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016) and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON (1840–1894), the author of novels, poetry, short stories, and travel essays, was best known for her fictions about the Great Lakes region, the American South, and American expatriates in Europe. Her first volume of short stories, Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (1875), centered around Mackinac Island, and was followed by a second volume, Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880), depicting the Reconstruction South. She then published four novels, including the For the Major (1883), one of her most respected fictions. A collection of travel sketches and two volumes of her short stories, written during her years in Italy, were published posthumously.

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