Dilruba Ahmed’s book, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, PEN America, Poetry, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.

Elina Alter is a writer and translator in New York. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Paris Review Daily, Modern Poetry in Translation, Guernica, Slice, Brooklyn Magazine, and Southeast Review. She is the editor of Circumference: Poetry in Translation.

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collections Once Removed (Persea Books, 2015), Approaching Ice  (Persea Books, 2010), Interpretive Work (Red Hen Press, 2008), and the forthcoming Toward Antarctica (Red Hen Press, 2019). Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, West Branch, and Orion, and her awards include a Stegner Fellowship and the Audre Lorde Prize. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she lives on Cape Cod, works as a naturalist locally as well as on expedition ships around the globe, and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University.

Maud Casey is the author of three novels, most recently The Man Who Walked Away (Bloomsbury, 2014); a short story collection, Drastic (William Morrow, 2002); andThe Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions (Graywolf Press, 2018).  She is the grateful recipient of the Calvino Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the St. Francis College Literary Prize. She lives in Washington, DC, and teaches at the University of Maryland.

Jennifer Chang is the author of two collections of poetry, The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Booksand Volta, and her poems are forthcoming in the New Yorker and the Literary Review. She teaches at George Washington University and lives in Washington, DC.

Heather Christle is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Heliopause (Wesleyan University Press, 2015). She lives in a small village in Ohio.

Tiana Clark is the 2017–2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Her first full-length collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She is the author of Equilibrium (Bull City Press,2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2015, BOAAT, the Journal, and elsewhere.

François Scarborough Clemmons is a singer, actor, and writer who had a long career as an opera singer, performing with the New York City Opera, Cincinnati Opera, and more. He created and played the role of Officer Clemmons on the children’s TV show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and founded and directed the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble. He was Alexander Twilight Artist in Residence at Middlebury College from 1997 to 2013, where he directed the Martin Luther King Spiritual Choir. He is currently working on a series of children’s books and a memoir, DivaMan: My Life in Song.

Daupo lives in Ridgewood, Queens, and works in every medium under the sun, having yet to master one. His illustrations have appeared in the Nation, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere, and he has had a long and fruitful collaboration with Flux Factory.

Geffrey Davis is the author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist. His honors include fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center, the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems have been published in Massachusetts Review, the New York Times Magazine, and Ploughshares, among other places. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches at the University of Arkansas.

Sylvie Durbec was born in Marseille and lives in Provence. She writes texts in both prose and poetry, paints and makes collages, as well as running a monthly bookshop for independent French poetry publishers from her home. Her numerous publications include Marseille: éclats et quartiers [Marseille, fragments and quarters] which won the prestigious Jean Follain prize of the City of Saint Lô; Prendre place [Taking  place]; Sanpatri [Nohomeland]; and the long poem “Soutine,” which appeared in English translation in the Common.

Castle Freeman Jr. is a longtime contributor of short fiction to NER, most recently with “Enough of Billy” (NER 38.2, 2017). He lives in southeastern Vermont.

Chandra Graham Garcia is a commercial real estate analyst and emerging writer. She is a contributor at the conceptual humor quarterly Razed. Us and a two-time finalist in the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Competition for short fiction. She lives in Arizona, and this is her first fiction publication.

Alla Gorbunova, born in Leningrad in 1985, is a poet, prose writer, translator, and critic. She has published five books of poetry and one book of short prose, and her work has been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Latvian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Czech.

Bob Hicok’s ninth book, Hold, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2018.

Denis Hirson lived in South Africa until the age of twenty-two, then settled in France in 1975. His first seven books are concerned with the memory of South Africa under apartheid, including the poetry collection Gardening in the Dark (Jacana Media, 2007).His most recent publications are Footnotes for the Panther: Conversations between William Kentridge and Denis Hirson (Fourthwall Books, 2017) and Ma langue au chat (Éditions du Seuil, 2017), about the torture and delight experienced by an Anglophone when speaking and writing in French.

Richie Hofmanis the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and the author of Second Empire (Alice James Books, 2015), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award. He is a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.

Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai‘i, and grew up in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays (University of Michigan Press, 2017). His most recent book of poems is Coral Road (Knopf, 2011). He teaches at the University of Oregon.

Skip Horack is the author of three books: the novels The Other Joseph (Ecco, 2015) and The Eden Hunter (Counterpoint, 2010), and the story collection The Southern Cross (Mariner Books, 2009). He teaches at Florida State University.

Luther Hughes is a Seattle native and author of Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018). He is the founder/editor-in-chief of Shade Journal and associate poetry editor for the Offing. A Cave Canem fellow and Windy City Times Chicago: 30 Under 30Honoree, he has published his work in Columbia Poetry Review, BOAAT, TriQuarterly, Adroit Journal, and others. He is currently an MFA candidate in the Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis. You can follow him on Twitter @lutherxhughes. He thinks you are beautiful.

Sacha Idell is a writer and translator from Northern California. His stories appear in the Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, and elsewhere, and his translations include stories by the Japanese mystery writer Kyūsaku Yumeno. He is fiction editor of the Arkansas Internationaland an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas, where he has received fellowships in both fiction and literary translation.

Van Jordan is the author of four poetry collections: Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001), which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (W. W. Norton, 2004), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by the London Times ; Quantum Lyrics (W. W. Norton, 2007); and The Cineaste (W. W. Norton, 2013). Jordan has received a Whiting Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award. He currently serves as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan.

Jenny Kemp earned an MFA in painting from the University at Albany and a BS in Art from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work has been exhibited nationally, most recently at Surface 4 in Brooklyn and in When We Were Young: Rethinking Abstraction from the University at Albany Art Collection. She has been featured in 100 Painters of Tomorrow, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, Apogee, and more. A recipient of the 2015 NYFA fellowship in painting, and of the 2015 Emerging Artist Award from the Art Center of the Capital Region in Troy, New York, where she lives and works, Kemp sits on the board of Collar Works, a not-for-profit, artist-run exhibition space.

Christopher Kempf is the author of Late in the Empire of Men, which won the 2015 Levis Prize in Poetry (Four Way Books, 2017). He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New Republic, PEN America, and Ploughshares, among other places. A recent Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, he is a doctoral student in English Literature at the University of Chicago.

Keetje Kuipers has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellow, and Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Her work has been published widely, and her poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prizeand Best American Poetry anthologies. She is the author of the poetry collections Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA, 2010), The Keys to the Jail (BOA, 2014), and the forthcoming Outside the Refugium (BOA, 2019). An associate editor at Poetry Northwest and teacher at Hugo House, she lives with her family at the edge of the Salish Sea where she is at work on a novel and a memoir.

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was a German novelist and essayist, and winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature. Among his most celebrated works are Buddenbrooks (1900), Death in Venice (1913), The Magic Mountain (1924), a tetralogy entitled Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1943), and Doctor Faustus (1947). He remained in Germany through World War I, but shortly after Hitler came into power in 1933 he moved to Switzerland and was formally expatriated in 1936. He became an American citizen in 1940 and settled in California. He visited Europe frequently after the war and in 1952 returned to Europe to live in Switzerland, until his death in 1955.

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande, 2017), The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs, 2016), and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl(Sarabande, 2009). Her poems have recently appeared in Kenyon Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Georgia Review, Witness, and 32 Poems. She earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and was recently the Diane Middlebrook Fellow in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis.

Kristi McKim is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Hendrix College, where she was awarded the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shivley Odyssey Professorship, honored as the 2014–15 United Methodist Exemplary Professor, and nominated for a CASE US Professor of the Year Award. Her publications include Love in the Time of Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (Routledge, 2013), and essays in Bennington Review, Camera Obscura, Studies in French Cinema, Senses of Cinema, and The Cine-Files. Her current project stretches academic film study into lyrical essays on pedagogy and film experience.

Morgan Meis has a PhD in philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for the New Yorker, n+1, theBeliever, Harper’s, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He won the Whiting Award in 2013 and is the author of Ruins (Fallen Bros. Press, 2013) and Dead People (Zero Books, 2016).

Michael Parker is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. His most recent book, Everything, Then and Since (Bull City Press, 2017), contains two O. Henry Award–winning stories, one of which was published in New England Review (NER 38.1). A new novel, Only the Horse Knew the Way, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books in 2019.

Patrick Phillips is the author of three poetry collections, including Elegy for a Broken Machine (Knopf, 2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His first nonfiction book, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W. W. Norton, 2016), received the American Book Award and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian. Phillips teaches writing and literature at Stanford.

Holly Beth Pratt was born in South Africa. In 2014, she moved to the US to pursue her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Florida. She is currently an editorial intern at Tin House Books and a book reviewer for Kirkus. She lives in Spokane, Washington.

India Hixon Radfar lives in Los Angeles and has published four books of poetry: India Poem (Pir Press, 2002), the desire to meet with the beautiful(Tender Buttons Press, 2003), Breathe (Shivastan Publications, 2004), and Position & Relation (Station Hill/Barrytown Books, 2009). As a Certified Applied Poetry Facilitator with the International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy, she writes alongside people living with challenges and has edited four collections of their work, which can be found on her website at indiaradfar.com. She has twice been the recipient of Artist-in-Residence Grants from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs to work with homeless veterans, in 2015–2016 and again in 2017–18.

Imad Rahman is the author of I Dream of Microwaves (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004), a collection of connected stories. His work has appeared in One Story, Gulf Coast, Fairy Tale Review, Chelsea, NER Digital, and the anthology xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths (Penguin, 2013), among other venues. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture. He currently teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University.

Susan Rich’s most recent book, Cloud Pharmacy (2014), was shortlisted for the Julie Suk Prize. Other books include The Alchemist’s Kitchen (2010), Cures Include Travel (2006), and The Cartographer’s Tongue (2000), all from White Pine Press. She is co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Crossing Borders, published by the Poetry Foundation. Her awards include a PEN USA Award, a Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, and a TLS Award. Rich’s work has appeared in O Magazine, Pleiades, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She is co-founder of Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women and teaches at Highline College, outside Seattle.

Justin St. Germain is the author of the memoir Son of a Gun (Random House, 2013). His essays have recently appeared in Tin House, DIAGRAM, and Barrelhouse. He teaches at Oregon State University.

Jeffrey Skinner’s most recent collection, Chance Divine, won the Field Prize and was published by Oberlin Press in 2017. Other of his recent poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Plume. He is the recipient of a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Maureen Stanton’s essays have been published in Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, Florida Review, the Sun, Iowa Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She is the author of Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting (Penguin, 2011), which won the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. She teaches creative nonfiction and literary journalism at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Janet Towle grew up between forest fires. She has an MFA from the University of Arizona, and her short stories have appeared in Carve, Eleven Eleven, the Normal School, and Passages North.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American poet of Palestinian, Syrian, and Jordanian heritage. She is the author of Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017) and Arab inNewsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize. She earned her MFA in Poetry at the Rainier Writing Workshop of Pacific Lutheran University. Her poems and essays have been published in Kenyon Review Online,World Literature Today, Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, and Winter Tangerine. This year, she is the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, in Seattle.

Cady Vishniacis a Big Ten Academic Alliance Traveling Scholar in Jewish studies at the University of Michigan and a Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. Most recently, her work has appeared in Glimmer Train and Salamander, where she won the 2017 Fiction Contest.

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