Tara Bray is the author of Small Mothers of Fright (LSU Press, 2015) and Mistaken for Song (Persea Books, 2009). Her recent poems have appeared in Poetry, Agni, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and the Hudson Review, and have been featured by Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. She grew up in Georgia, and now lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Jane Breakell has been writing fiction since 2011. In 2014, she earned her MFA from Hunter College. The recipient of a Fulbright Award for Creative Writing and a grantee of the Elizabeth George Foundation, she is currently at work on her first novel.

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of The Low Passions (W. W. Norton, 2019). His work has appeared in BuzzFeed, the Nation, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Best New Poets, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His chapbook, Dynamite, won the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conferences. He lives in Minneapolis.

Laurence de Looze is a Canadian-American whose heart and soul bounce between French and Hispanic cultures. He has published fiction in a number of reviews. His most recent book is The Letter and the Cosmos: How the Alphabet Has Shaped the Western View of the World (University of Toronto Press, 2016), which is now being translated into Chinese.

Joanne Diaz is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is the author of My Favorite Tyrants (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) and The Lessons (Silverfish Review Press, 2011). With Ian Morris, she is co-editor of The Little Magazine in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press, 2015). She is an associate professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Xujun Eberlein has lived half a life each in China and the United States. Author of the story collection Apologies Forthcoming (Livingston Press, 2008), winner of the Tartts First Fiction Award, she writes and translates from Boston. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Agni, Asia Literary Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Night Train, Post Road, Prism International, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere. She received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, and her personal essays have been recognized in The Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize. She is currently finishing a memoir set in China.

John Gallaher’s forthcoming collection, Brand New Spacesuit, will be out in spring 2020 from BOA editions. He lives in rural Missouri and co-edits the Laurel Review.

Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of nine books including the recent novel True (Little A, 2018). His work appears in the Paris Review, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He is currently a writer for the television drama Ray Donovan.

Tony Hoagland is the author, most recently, of Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, a collection of poems (Graywolf Press, 2018), and the forthcoming craft book, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice (W. W. Norton, 2019). A book of translations from Celtic poetry, Rough Gods, of which the present work is a sample, will be published by Graywolf in 2020.

Kimberly Johnson is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Uncommon Prayer (Persea, 2014), and of book-length translations of works by Hesiod (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and Virgil (Penguin Classics, 2009). The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mellon Foundation, she has recent and forthcoming work in Kenyon Review, Boulevard, and PMLA.

Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, Affrilachian author and Kundiman alum, is the Tickner Writing Fellow and recipient of a Provincetown FAWC fellowship. He belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York. Peep his work from last year in Best New Poets, Boston Review, the Poetry Review, and Tin House, among others. His first book will come out this fall: Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot (Backwaters Press, winner of the Backwaters Prize, selected by Bob Hicok).

Raven Leilani’s work has appeared in Granta, Narrative Magazine, Columbia Literary Journal, New Delta Review, Forge, Bat City Review, Split Lip Magazine, Pigeon Pages, and Florida Review. She is the fiction editor at Ruminate Magazine and currently completing her MFA at New York University.

Samantha Libby is an artist and human rights activist with a focus in freedom of expression, theater, and war. Over the last decade, she has worked and lived around the world, from Hanoi, Vietnam, to Bangui, Central African Republic. Her writing has won various awards and human rights prizes. A 2018 Ragdale fellow, she recently completed her first novel.

Corey Marks is the author of Renunciation (University of Illinois Press, 2000), a National Poetry Series selection, and The Radio Tree (New Issues, 2012), winner of the Green Rose Prize. He teaches poetry at the University of North Texas.

Reece McCormack is a writer and carer, living in Gloucestershire, England. He is currently a student of the University of Gloucestershire’s Creative Writing Masters program.

W. C. Morrow (1853–1923) was a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His stories, some best described as science fiction and others as horror or conte cruel, were collected in The Ape, the Idiot, and Other People (1897). His other books include Bohemian Paris of To-day (1900), Lentala of the South-Seas: The Romantic Tale of a Lost Colony (1908), and The Logic of Punctuation,  for All Who Have to Do with It (1926).

Paul Otremba is the author of two poetry collections, Pax Americana (Four Way Books, 2015) and The Currency (Four Way Books, 2009). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in West Branch, Kenyon Review, Bennington Review, and Copper Nickel. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Rice University and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Naheed Patel is a writer and translator living in New York City. She graduated from the MFA program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2016. She has a law degree from Nagpur University, Nagpur, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism from Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.

Supritha Rajan is an associate professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her poems have been published in such journals as Literary Imagination, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, and the Antioch Review.

Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Her debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is forthcoming (Copper Canyon Press, 2019).

Martin Shaw (translator with Tony Hoagland) is a mythologist, storyteller, and author of three books, including The Snowy Tower (2014), a retelling of the Parsifal story, and Scatterlings: Getting Claimed in the Age of Amnesia (2016), both published by White Cloud Press.

Christine Sneed has published short stories in past issues of New England Review, as well as in The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, Southern Review, and Ploughshares. She is the author of the novels Little Known Facts (2010) and Paris, He Said (2013), and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry (2015) and The Virginity of Famous Men (2016), all published by Bloomsbury. She lives in Pasadena, California.

Karen Solie is the author of four collections of poems, most recently The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (House of Anansi Press, 2015). A volume of selected poems, The Living Option, was published in the UK in 2013. A new collection, The Caiplie Caves, is forthcoming (House of Anansi Press, 2019). She is associate director for poetry for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio program, and lives in Toronto.

Shawn Spencer is a painter living in Boston. She is represented by the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York. Her artist’s website can be found at shawnspencer.com.

Phoebe Stone is a painter, poet, and author of seven novels for young adults published by Arthur A. Levine Books at Scholastic and three picture books published by Little, Brown and Co. Phoebe grew up in a family of poets and novelists and has spent most of her life painting and writing. She is presently working on a series of memoir/short stories for a book. These two pieces are the first from that series to appear in publication.

Geeta Tewari is a writer and human rights lawyer, born in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, after her parents emigrated from India. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Narrative Magazine, NY Tyrant, and Caustic Frolic. She has a BA from Cornell, a JD from Fordham Law School, and an MFA from Columbia. Tewari now lives in New York, where she is raising her three daughters.

Amber Flora Thomas is the author of two collections of poetry: Eye of Water, winner of the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Chicago Press, 2012). A recipient of the Dylan Thomas American Poet Prize, Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, and Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in Tin House, Callaloo, Orion, Alaska Quarterly Review, Saranac Review, and Third Coast Magazine, as well as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and numerous other journals and anthologies. Her collection Red Channel in the Rupture is forthcoming (Red Hen Press, 2018).

Francis-Noël Thomas taught art history at Truman College, City Colleges of Chicago, for twenty-nine years. He and the cognitive scientist Mark Turner were awarded a Prix du rayonnement de la langue et la littérature françaises by the Académie française for their study of classic prose style, Clear and Simple as the Truth (Princeton University Press, second edition, 2011). His previous essays in New England Reviewinclude “Rogier van der Weyden and James Ensor” (35.1), “Tea” (33.1), and “On the rue Saint-André-des-arts” (31.2).

Wang Zengqi (1920–1997) is well known in China for his short stories and essays, though his work has been little translated. His writing had two peak periods: the 1940s (before the Communist era) and 1980s (after the Cultural Revolution). During the last two decades of his life he was pivotal in reestablishing the value of culturally rich language after years of politically conformant literature in China. “Revenge” is Wang’s earliest known story and one of the first in Chinese to use the stream-of-consciousness style.

Eric Wilson has had two personal essays published in NER, one of which was selected for the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses (2017). In addition, his work has appeared in Carve, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Massachusetts Review, Epoch, Carolina Quarterly, German Quarterly, and O. Henry Prize Stories. After a Fulbright year at the Free University of Berlin, he went on to receive a Stanford PhD in German Literature with a dissertation on Thomas Mann’s Comic Artist Felix Krull. Wilson taught German at UCLA and Pomona College. Subsequently he was a freelance writer and translator, and taught fiction writing at UCLA Extension for thirty years.

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