Kazim Ali’s many books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction include All One’s Blue: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins India, 2015) and Resident Alien: On Border Crossing and the Undocumented Divine (University of Michigan Press, 2015). He teaches in the Creative Writing and Comparative Literature programs at Oberlin College.

David Baker is the author, most recently, of Scavenger Loop (W. W. Norton, 2015), and is poetry editor of Kenyon Review. To compose “Storm Psalm,” he referred to or quoted passages from Geoffrey Hill’s “To William Corbett,” Psalm 29 and Psalm 119 from The Bay Psalm Book, and Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno.

Christopher Bakken’s third book of poetry, Eternity & Oranges, is forthcoming from the Pitt Poetry Series. He is also the author of Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table (University of California Press, 2013), a book of travel writing.

Joshua Bennett is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University and has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, and the Ford Foundation. He is winner of the 2014 Lucille Clifton and the 2015 Erskine J. Poetry Prizes. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Anti-, Blackbird, Callaloo, Obsidian, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. Bennett is the founding editor of Kinfolks: a journal of black expression.

Bruce Bond is the author of fifteen books, including the forthcoming Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa Press), Gold Bee (Crab Orchard Open Competition Award, Southern Illinois Press), Sacrum (Four Way Books), and The Other Sky (Etruscan Press). He is Regents Professor at the University of North Texas.

Marianne Boruch, author of Cadaver, Speak (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), will publish her ninth poetry collection, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing, next year. The Book of Hours won the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. Her prose includes two essay collections on poetry and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation, APR, Poetry, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. A 2012 Fulbright/Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh, she teaches at Purdue University and in the low residency graduate Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Steve De Jarnatt splits his time between Port Townsend, Washington, and Venice, California. His writing has appeared in Santa Monica Review, Meridian, Joyland, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review (2014 Prose Audio Contest winner), New England Review, New Stories from the Midwest 2013, and Best American Short Stories 2009. He was a fiction scholar at the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences in 2012 and 2013, respectively. He is also the director of two cult feature films, Miracle Mile and Cherry 2000.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006). She is the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009) and co-editor of From the Fishouse poetry anthology (2009). Her honors include an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, a California Book Award silver medal, and a fellowship from the NEA. Recent essays have appeared in VQR, Ecotone, and Tupelo Quarterly. Dungy is currently a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.

Luisa A. Igloria is the author of the e-chapbook Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press, 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser, selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize (Utah State University Press, 2014), Night Willow: Prose Poems (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), and others. Igloria has degrees from the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was a Fulbright Fellow from 1992 to 1995. She currently teaches in and directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University.

Vandana Khanna was born in New Delhi, India, and attended the University of Virginia and Indiana University, where she earned her MFA. Her first collection, Train to Agra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, and her second collection, Afternoon Masala (University of Arkansas Press, 2014), was the co-winner of the 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Missouri Review, 32 Poems, and Prairie Schooner, among others.

William Ralph Inge (1860–1954) was an English author and newspaper columnist, an Anglican priest, professor of divinity at Cambridge, and from 1911 to 1934 the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. His more than thirty-five books include Society in Rome Under the Caesars (1888), The Church and the Age (1912), Outspoken Essays (1919), Lay Thoughts of a Dean (1926), Assessments and Anticipations (1929), God and the Astronomers (1934), Our Present Discontents (1938), Talks in a Free Country (1943), and The End of an Age and Other Essays (1948).

Joann Kobin’s stories have appeared in the Antioch Review, Boston Globe Magazine, New England Review, North American Review, Virginia Quarterly, and many other journals and anthologies. A novel-in-stories was published by Delphinium Books. She’s taught fiction writing at Mt. Holyoke and Hampshire Colleges, and although she’s spent more of her adult life in the Northampton area, a substratum of Upper Westsider persists.

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). He is also the recipient of a 2013 Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA and a 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Other honors include fellowships and scholarships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, and a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his MFA. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Callaloo, Feminist Studies, Fence, the New Republic, Oxford American, Poetry, and many others. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently resides in Brooklyn.

Christopher Lupke is professor of Chinese at Washington State University, where he coordinates Asian Languages. He was classically trained in Chinese in Taiwan and at the Middlebury College Chinese School, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Cornell University, where he received his PhD in 1993, writing his dissertation on modernism and the diaspora. His scholarship has focused on modern China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and he has published books on the notion of ming (“fate, destiny, or life’s allotment”), contemporary Chinese poetry, and the cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, and articles on a broad range of subjects pertaining to modern Chinese culture. He has steadily published translations of Chinese literature in English but still considers himself “early in his career” (if not young), as he hopes to publish the poetry of Xiao Kaiyu as a book.

James Naremore is Chancellors’ Professor Emeritus at Indiana University and the author of several books on film, including Acting in the Cinema (University of California Press, 1988), 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). A revised, updated edition of his 1989 book, The Magic World of Orson Welles, is just out from University of Illinois Press, and his essay “The Cinema According to James Agee” appeared in NER 35.2.

Thomas Moran is John D. Berninghausen Professor of Chinese at Middlebury College. His current research interest is contemporary Chinese writing about nature and the environment. He translated Wei An’s Life on Earth while in Beijing in spring 2012 as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar.

Carla Panciera has published two books of poetry, One of the Cimalores (Cider Press, 2005) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera, 2010). Her collection of short stories, Bewildered (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), received the 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her work has appeared in several journals including New England Review, Chattahoochee Review, Nimrod, Painted Bride, and Clackamas Review. A high school English teacher, Carla lives in Rowley, Massachusetts.

Katrina Roberts has published four books of poems, most recently Underdog (University of Washington Press, 2011), and has edited the anthology Because You Asked: A Book of Answers on the Art & Craft of the Writing Life (Lost Horse Press, 2015). She teaches at Whitman College, curates the Visiting Writers Reading Series, and, with her husband, founded and operates Walla Walla Distilling Company, the first licensed craft distillery in Southeastern Washington state, where she lives on a farm with her husband and three children.

Merrill Shatzman is a Professor of the Practice of Visual Art at Duke University. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work has been exhibited in one-woman, invitational, group, and juried shows throughout the United States and internationally, with her prints are found in many museum and corporate collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Fogg Museum; UCLA’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Smithsonian Institution.

Ed Skoog is the author of Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), Rough Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), and the forthcoming Run the Red Lights.

Sharon Solwitz’s novel Once, in Lourdes was just purchased by the Random House imprint Spiegel and Grau. She has published two books with Sarabande, and her short story prizes include a Pushcart and the Nelson Algren. One of her stories was reprinted in Best American Short Stories 2012. She lives in Chicago and teaches fiction at Purdue University.

Jeff Staiger has published criticism on contemporary authors and poetics in various literary reviews. His reflections on the aesthetic deficiencies of e-books, “Kindle 451,” appeared in NER 34.3–4. He holds a PhD in English from Berkeley and is the Literature Librarian at the University of Oregon. He is currently working on several big writing projects.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is the author of two poetry collections, My Funeral Gondola (El Leon Literary Arts, 2013) and Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010), and several translations of contemporary Chinese, French, and American poets. She lives in France and works as a zheng harpist and editor.

Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, China. He received his MFA from Purdue, has a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University, and won a 2010 AWP Intro Award in fiction. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Prick of the Spindle, Day One, Driftwood Press, and Juked, among others. His chapbook, A Minor Revolution (StoryFront, 2013), is available from Amazon. He will begin teaching at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, in the fall.

Wei An was the penname of Ma Jianguo (1960–1999). He grew up on the outskirts of Beijing and studied philosophy at People’s University. While in college he was influenced by the Misty poets and their work, befriended Gu Cheng, and published his first poem in 1982. In 1986 the poet Haizi introduced Wei An to Thoreau’s Walden and, inspired, he turned to prose nonfiction and began Things on Earth, sections of which were first published in 1991. Wei wrote essays about birch trees, beekeepers, bird’s nests, wasps, his travels to Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, people he knew, things he believed, and writers he admired. Wei An’s name is unfamiliar to most Chinese readers but he is well remembered by poets, writers, and critics. Wei An was an idealist, a pacifist, a deep ecologist, and a vegetarian at a time when these qualities made him highly unusual in China.

Wendy Willis is a poet and essayist living in Portland, Oregon, whose first book of poems is Blood Sisters of the Republic (Press 53, 2012). She is also the Executive Director of Kitchen Table Democracy, a national nonprofit dedicated to improving democratic governance.

Eric Wilson’s work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Epoch, Carolina Quarterly, Witness, Boundary 2, German Quarterly, and O. Henry Prize Stories. After a Fulbright year at the Free University of Berlin, he went on to receive a PhD in German Literature at Stanford. Wilson taught German at UCLA and Pomona College; Harper & Row published his college-level German textbook Es geht weiter in 1977. Subsequently he was a freelance writer and translator, and taught fiction writing at UCLA Extension for thirty years.

Xiao Kaiyu was born in the village of Heping, Zhongjiang County, Sichuan Province, in 1960. Beginning in his youth, he was interested in literature and traditional Chinese culture, although he pursued Chinese medicine in college, graduating with a degree in 1979. After several years of practicing traditional Chinese medicine in Sichuan and writing poetry on the side, he moved to Shanghai in 1993, where he served as an editor, taught at university, and began publishing his poems. He spent several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Germany, learning the language and reading widely in European literature. After returning to China, he accepted a position as Professor of Chinese at Henan University in Kaifeng, where he currently works.

Ya Shi is the author of four collections of poetry and one of prose, including a special issue of the magazine Blade devoted to his work. He is a winner of the Liu Li’an prize and has served as the editor of several influential unofficial poetry journals. A graduate of Beijing University, he is currently a professor of mathematics and lives outside the city of Chengdu.

Yin Lichuan, poet, fiction writer, film director, and scriptwriter, rose to literary notoriety as a founder and the most prominent member of the “Lower Body” movement, based in Beijing during the early 2000s. Born in 1973 in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, she studied French at Beijing University and earned a graduate degree in filmmaking in Paris at École supérieure libre d’études cinématographiques (ESEC). Her publications include a collection of selected writings, Feel a Bit More Comfort (2001); a novel, Bitch (2002); and three volumes of poetry, Karma (2006), Wet Paint (2007), and The Doors (2015). A volume of selected poems, Karma, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Since 2006, Yin has devoted herself to filmmaking; her debut feature, The Park, was released in 2007, and Knitting premiered at the Cannes Festival in 2008. She lives in Beijing.