Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Hourglass Museum (White Pine Press, 2014). Other books include Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press, 2010), winner of the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Prize in Poetry; Small Knots (WordTech, 2004); and the chapbook Geography (Floating Bridges, 2003). She is the co-founder of Two Sylvias Press and lives in a small seaside town in the Northwest where she is an avid mountain biker and paddleboarder. Her website is www.agodon.com.

W. C. Brownell (1851–1928) was an American literary essayist who also served for forty years as an editor at Scribners. He began as a reporter and editor at the New York World and later wrote articles on literature for the Nation. His first books were French Traits (1889) and French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture (1892), followed by Victorian Prose Masters (1901) and American Prose Masters (1909), which remains his best known work. In his later years, Brownell published Criticism (1914), Standards (1917), The Genius of Style (1924), and Democratic Distinction in America (1927).

Steve Dolph is the founding editor of Calque, a journal of literature in translation. His translation of Juan JoséSaer’s Scars was a finalist for the 2012 Best Translated Book Award. He lives in Philadelphia where he spends his summers rooting for the Phillies.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Red Army Red (TriQuarterly, 2012) and Stateside (TriQuarterly, 2010). In 2015, University of New Mexico Press will publish her fifth book of poems, The Arranged Marriage. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. She is the Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House and an associate professor of creative writing at Washington College, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

William Fargason received a BA in English from Auburn University. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New Orleans Review, Eclectica Magazine, Grist, Nashville Review, Bayou Magazine, New World Writing, and other publications. He is currently a poetry MFA candidate at the University of Maryland, where he teaches creative writing. He lives with himself in Hyattsville, Maryland.

Rebecca Morgan Frank’s first book, Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon Poetry, 2012), was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and she received the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for her manuscript-in-progress. The editor of the online magazine Memorious, she is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers.

Robert E. Goodwin is a member of the faculty of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He is the author of The Playworld of Sanskrit Drama (1998) and the translator of Markus Werner’s novel On the Edge (2012).

Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.’s work has appeared in Little Star, Poetry International, Mantis, Kenyon Review Online, Harvard Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Her translations of classical and contemporary Persian poetry include The Green Sea of Heaven: Fifty Ghazals from the Diwan-i Hafiz-i Shiraz (White Cloud Press, 1995) and Iran: Poems of Dissent (Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, 2013). Four Way Books will publish her series of poems centered in South India in 2015. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University, and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her website is www.elizabethtgrayjr.com.

David Guterson is the author of ten books, including the novel Snow Falling on Cedars, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award. His most recent books include the poetry collection Songs for a Summons (Lost Horse Press, 2013) and Descent: A Memoir of Madness (Vintage, 2013). A new collection of short stories, Problems with People, is forthcoming from Knopf in June.

Joshua Harmon’s collections of essays, The Annotated Mixtape, and short fiction, History of Cold Seasons, will be published simultaneously by Dzanc Books in November 2014; portions of both these books first appeared in New England Review. He lives in western Massachusetts.

Steven Heighton is a novelist, short story writer, poet, and fiction reviewer for the New York Times Book Review. His novel Afterlands (Knopf Canada, 2005) has appeared in six countries; was a best-of-year choice in ten publications in Canada, the US, and the UK; and has been optioned for film. His poems and stories have appeared in London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, Best American Poetry, Agni, the Literary Review, London Magazine, and other publications, and have received four gold National Magazine Awards.

David Hernandez’s most recent collection of poems, Hoodwinked, won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and was published by Sarabande Books in 2011. Visit his website at www.DavidAHernandez.com.

Barbara F. Ichiishi received a BA in French literature from Mount Holyoke College, an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in Spanish from the University of Iowa. She is the author of The Apple of Earthly Love: Female Development in Esther Tusquets’ Fiction and the translator of some of Tusquets’s major works, including her novel Never to Return, her story collection Seven Views of the Same Landscape, her memoir Private Correspondence, and her historical memoir We Had Won the War. She has published articles on Spanish and Latin American women’s literature, and is co-translator of Edouard Glissant’s historical drama Monsieur Toussaint.

Troy Jollimore is the author of At Lake Scugog: Poems (Princeton, 2011) and Tom Thomson in Purgatory (Margie/Intuit House, 2006), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. As a philosopher he has authored On Loyalty (Routledge, 2012) and Love’s Vision (Princeton, 2011). He has published poems in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Poetry, Believer, and elsewhere. Jollimore is the recipient of fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow.

Kathryn Kramer is the author of three novels, including Sweet Water (Knopf, 1998). “The Holy Grail” is an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir about her education, Missing History: The Covert Education of a Child of the Great Books. She teaches at Middlebury College.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. Her novels and essays have been widely translated and her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and Internazionale. She has collaborated with artists in numerous multidisciplinary projects; among those, she has written a ballet libretto for the British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, which was performed by the New York City Ballet in Lincoln Center. She teaches Creative Writing at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana and is studying for a PhD in Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her first novel, Faces in the Crowd, and an English translation of her essays, Sidewalks, are forthcoming from Coffee House Press.

Christina MacSweeney has an MA in literary translation from the University of East Anglia and specializes in Latin American fiction. Her translations have previously appeared in a variety of online sites and literary magazines. She has also translated Valeria Luiselli’s first novel, Faces in the Crowd.

Campbell McGrath is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (Ecco, 2012). He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University and lives with his family in Miami Beach.

Ricardo Nuila teaches hospital medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and medical humanities at the University of Houston Honors College. He is currently writing a collection of short stories focused on patient care. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Journal of Medicine, and Best American Short Stories 2011.

Larry I. Palmer is an emeritus professor of law at Cornell University. His professional work has focused on health policy and bioethics, and his published works include Endings and Beginnings: Law, Medicine, and Society in Assisted Life and Death (Praeger, 2000) and Law, Medicine and Social Justice (1989). A previous essay, “Checkerboard Segregation in the 1950 s,” which appeared in Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers ­­Brown v. Board of Education (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), and the essay in this issue of NER are excerpts from a memoir he is currently writing. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Carl Phillips’s most recent book is Silverchest (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013). A book of prose, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination, will be out from Graywolf in fall 2014. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Glen Pourciau’s story collection, Invite, won the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His stories have been published by Agni Online, Antioch Review, Epoch, Literarian, Little Star Weekly, New Ohio Review, Paris Review, and other magazines. His second collection of stories, some of which first appeared in NER, is forthcoming from Four Way Books.

Rachel Richardson is the author of Copperhead (2011) and the forthcoming Canticle in the Fish’s Belly (2016), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. She recently received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her poems have appeared most recently in Michigan Quarterly Review, Texas Review, and Birmingham Poetry Review. She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Polly Rosenwaike’s fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, New Delta Review, WomenArts Quarterly Journal, and elsewhere, and is included in O. Henry Prize Stories 2013. She has published book reviews and essays in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times Book Review,the Millions, and Brooklyn Rail. She served as the 2013 Summer Prose Resident at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

Juan José Saer (1937–2005), born in Santa Fé, Argentina, was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation. In 1968, he moved to Paris and taught literature at the University of Rennes. The author of numerous novels and short story collections (including The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, Scars, The One Before, and The Clouds—all in print or forthcoming from Open Letter), Saer was awarded Spain’s prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event. The piece in this issue of NER was excerpted from his final novel, La Grande, which will be published by Open Letter in June 2014.

Rüdiger Safranski’s books in English include Nietzsche: A Political Biography (2001), Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (1998), and Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (1990). His works have received numerous awards and have been translated into twenty-nine languages. He lives in Germany.

Laura Lee Smith’s first novel, Heart of Palm, was released by Grove Press in 2013. Her short fiction was selected by guest editor Amy Hempel for inclusion in New Stories from the South 2010: The Year’s Best. Her work has also appeared in Florida Review, Natural Bridge, Bayou, and other journals. She lives in Florida and works as an advertising copywriter.

Elizabeth Spires is the author of six collections of poems, most recently The Wave-Maker (W. W. Norton, 2010), and six books for children. Poems from a new manuscript have appeared in American Poetry Review, the Atlantic, and Poetry. She lives in Baltimore and is a professor of English at Goucher College.

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collection Rough Honey, winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Harvard Review, Best New Poets, and other publications, and she has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and elsewhere. She is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.

Francis-Noël Thomas taught art history at Truman College, City Colleges of Chicago for twenty-nine years. He is joint author with the cognitive scientist Mark Turner of Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Princeton University Press, 1994; second edition 2011). His previous essays in New England Review include “Tea” (33.1) and “On the rue Saint-André-des-arts” (31.2).

Esther Tusquets (1936–2012) is the author of a highly praised narrative cycle, translated into English as the novels The Same Sea as Every Summer, Love Is a Solitary Game, Stranded, and Never to Return. She published six novels, three story collections, five autobiographical works, and two children’s books. From 1960 until her retirement in 2000, Tusquets directed the Barcelona publishing house Editorial Lumen, which promoted the freedom of intellectual and artistic expression as the country evolved from an authoritarian dictatorship into a modern democracy.

Raïssa Venables’s photographs have been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Jersey City Museum, Roswell Art Museum, in Kunstvereinen throughout Germany, and elsewhere. Group exhibitions including her work have appeared, among elsewhere, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Emden Museum, Marta Herford Museum, and Städel Museum. Hatje Cantz Publishers released a monograph of her work in 2006, and the British American Tobacco Company awarded her an exhibition catalogue in 2010. Venables received an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute. She is represented by Gallery Wagner + Partner in Berlin, Germany.