Matthew Baker is the author of If You Find This (Little Brown, 2014), a novel for children. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, and Best of the Net. He knows how to use a low orbit ion cannon. Visit him online at www.mwektaehtabr.com.

Luke Brekke lives with his wife and two daughters in Wisconsin where he makes a living roasting coffee for a small roastery. This is his first publication.

Kelly Grey Carlisle’s personal essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Sun, Ploughshares, Rumpus, Subtropics, and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. She teaches writing at Trinity University and edits the new literary magazine 1966: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction.

Kevin Craft is the editor of Poetry Northwest. His books include Solar Prominence (Cloudbank Books, 2005) and five volumes of the anthology Mare Nostrum, an annual collection of Italian translation and Mediterranean-inspired writing. A Bread Loaf Scholar in 1996, he has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, 4Culture, and Artist Trust. He lives in Seattle and directs both the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College and the Creative Writing in Rome Program at the University of Washington.

Laurence de Looze publishes fiction, essays, and books on a variety of topics, including medieval literature. A native US citizen, he has lived for years in Canada where he teaches a variety of university courses. His fiction has appeared in the Antioch Review and Ontario Review, and his book The Letter and the Cosmos: How the Alphabet Has Shaped the Western View of the World, is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press. He is sorely tempted to move permanently to Portugal.

Susan Engberg has published four collections of stories and novellas, Pastorale (University of Illinois, 1982), A Stay by the River (Viking Penguin, 1985), Sarah’s Laughter (Knopf, 1991), and Above the Houses (Delphinium Books, 2008). Her stories have appeared in several issues of Epoch and Sewanee Review and have been selected for three O. Henry Prize volumes, a Pushcart Prize collection, and the Ploughshares Reader.

Castle Freeman Jr., the author of four novels and many stories and essays, is a longtime contributor of short fiction to NER, most recently with “Who’s Stopping You” (NER 34.3-4). He lives in southeastern Vermont.

William Gilson is an American living in England. He is co-author of Carved in Stone: The Artistry of Early New England Gravestones (photographs by Thomas E. Gilson; Wesleyan University Press, 2012) and author of the novella At the Dark End of the Street. Versions of both appeared first in New England Review. His story “The Visit” was published in the Warwick Review.

Andrew Grace’s manuscript-in-progress is The Last Will and Testament of Said Gun. Other sections of the manuscript are forthcoming or appear in recent issues of the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, Shenandoah,Guernica, Poet Lore, and 32 Poems. He teaches at Kenyon College.

Philip F. Gura is the William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His many books include Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Early American Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and American Transcendentalism: A History (Hill and Wang, 2008), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Ela Harrison is a scholar of classical languages and literatures, and of linguistics and philology, as well as being a translator and editor, writer and researcher. Her writing has appeared in Cirque Journal and F Magazine, and her poem “Legion” was runner-up in the Fairbanks Arts Association’s 2012 poetry competition.

Allegra Hyde’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, Southwest Review, Passages North, Chattahoochee Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. She is the prose editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review and curates similes at www.allegrahyde.com.

Bill Johnston’s translation of Wiesław Myśliwski’s novel Stone Upon Stone (Archipelago Books, 2011) won the PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2012. His most recent translations include Magdalena Tulli’s In Red (Archipelago Books, 2011), Wiesław Myśliwski’s A Treatise on Shelling Beans (Archipelago Books, 2013), and Tomasz Różycki’s mock-epic poem Twelve Stations (Zephyr Press, 2015). He is currently working on a new translation of Adam Mickiewicz’s 1834 Pan Tadeusz, the Polish national epic, a project for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches literary translation at Indiana University.

Elizabeth Kadetsky is the author of the memoir First There Is a Mountain (Little Brown, 2004), the story collection The Poison that Purifies You (C&R Press, 2014), and the novella On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World, forthcoming from Nouvella Books. Her fiction has been included in the Pushcart Prize Best New American Voices and received a notable citation in Best American Short Stories; her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. She is assistant professor of creative writing at Penn State, and can be found at www.elizabethkadetsky.com.

Joanna Klink’s most recent book is Raptus (Penguin Books, 2010). Her new collection, Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2015.

Joan Larkin’s fifth book of poems, Blue Hanuman, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2014. Her previous work includes My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose, 2007), recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and Legs Tipped with Small Claws, an Argos Books hand-sewn chapbook (2012). Her honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, among others. A teacher for many years, she is currently Conkling Writer in Residence at Smith College.

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) was born in New Jersey, raised in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Harvard, where he enrolled at age sixteen. He spent two years in the Pacific Theater during World War II, and drew on his experiences for his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), which instantly established the twenty-five-year-old as one of the most influential writers of his time. His next novels were Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), followed by Advertisements for Myself (1959), a collection of fiction, nonfiction, and commentary. He won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Armies of the Night (1968), a “nonfiction novel” about the October 1967 antiwar March on the Pentagon. He won another Pulitzer Prize for The Executioner’s Song (1979), a novelization of the life and death of murderer Gary Gilmore. His last novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007), was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. A cofounder of the Village Voice, Mailer published more than thirty novels and works of nonfiction in all and won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. His newly released Selected Letters (2014) contains 716 of the more than forty thousand letters he wrote during the course of his life.

Chris Nelson is a writer living in New York City.

Michelle Peñaloza grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Asian American Literary Review, TriQuarterly, Hobart, Hyphen, and INCH. She is a 2014 Jack Straw Writer and the recipient of the Miriam McFall Starlin Poetry Award from the University of Oregon and fellowships from Kundiman, the Richard Hugo House, and Oregon Literary Arts, as well as scholarships from VONA Voices, Vermont Studio Center, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She lives in Seattle where she is at work on her latest project, landscape / heartbreak, forthcoming from Two Sylvias Press in Spring 2015.

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) was an English novelist, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and poet who lectured extensively in the US and England. He published around sixty books throughout his career, including such works as The Art of Happiness (1923), The Meaning of Culture (1929), and In Spite of (1953). His first book was Odes and Other Poems (1896), followed soon after by several volumes of poetry and nonfiction. Though his first novel came out in 1915, he achieved critical and financial success as a novelist later in his career, with Wolf Solent (1929), the first of a series of novels that includes his best-known book, A Glastonbury Romance (1932).

Patrick Rosal is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently Boneshepherds (Persea, 2011). His poems and essays have appeared widely in Gulf Coast, Tin House, Best American Poetry, Grantland, Hyphen, Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers-Camden.

Richard Siken’s poetry collection Crush (Yale University Press, 2005) won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, two Lannan Residencies, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His second poetry collection, War of the Foxes, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2015.

Austin Smith grew up on a dairy farm in Illinois. His poems and stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry, Yale Review, Sewanee Review, Narrative, VQR, and ZYZZYVA, among others. His first collection of poems, Almanac, was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. He is currently finishing a story collection and working on a novel, both about the rural Midwest.

Andrzej Stasiuk, one of the foremost writers of his generation in Central Europe, is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. His work available in English includes Tales of Galicia (Twisted Spoon, 2003), translated by Margarita Nafpaktitis, and Fado (Dalkey Archive, 2009) and Dukla (Dalkey Archive, 2011), both translated by Bill Johnston. His most recent book is Grochów (2012), a set of short lyrical essays on the subject of dying and the dead, from which “Dog” is taken. He lives in a remote village in southeastern Poland and travels extensively in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Arthur Sze’s latest book of poetry is Compass Rose (Copper Canyon, 2014). He received the 2013 Jackson Poetry Prize and is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Eleanor Wilner’s most recent books are Tourist in Hell (University of Chicago, 2010), The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon, 2004), and The Rag-Picker’s Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process, coedited with Maurice Manning (University of Michigan, 2013).

Margaret Withers’s paintings have been shown extensively in the United States, Europe, China, and Russia, and she has received numerous awards including residencies to the Vermont Studio Center and the Millay Colony. She currently lives in Manhattan. See more at www.margaretwithers.com.

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