Leslie Bazzett’s fiction debuted in New England Review and has received “Special Mention” in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Subsequent work has appeared in NER, NER Digital, Carolina Quarterly, West Branch, and the Louisville Review, among other places. Her most recent story in NER was listed as “Notable” in Best American Short Stories 2015. She has been a finalist for a Rona Jaffe Award, as well as for the NER Award for Emerging Writers.

Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Cave Canem fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee based in Jersey City, New Jersey. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Eleven Eleven, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Iowa Review, the Journal, Pleiades, Rattle, Spillway, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.

Martha Collins is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Admit One: An American Scrapbook (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), as well as three collections of co-translated Vietnamese poetry. She served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing for ten years at Oberlin College, and is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and an editor of the Oberlin College Press. The poem in this issue is from a collection tentatively titled Night Unto Night, which follows her collection Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014).

Mary Ebbott teaches in the Department of Classics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her scholarship focuses on Homeric epic and Greek tragedy. She is the author of Imagining Illegitimacy in Classical Greek Literature (Lexington Books, 2003) and co-author, with Casey Dué, of Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2010).

Ben Eisman is a former federal prosecutor whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Commentary and Hopkins Review. He lives in Washington, DC.

Ian Ganassi’s poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Yale Review, Interim, Blackbox Manifold (England), and Map Literary, among others. His translations of books 1–6 of the Aeneid have appeared previously in NER. His poetry collection Mean Numbers is forthcoming from China Grove Press in 2016.

Becky Hagenston is the author of three story collections: Scavengers (University of Alaska Press, 2016), Strange Weather (Press 53, 2010), and A Gram of Mars (Sarabande Books, 1998). Her work was selected for the O. Henry Award in 1996 and 2015. She is an associate professor of English at Mississippi State University.

Rob Hardy lives in Northfield, Minnesota, where he intermittently teaches Latin and Greek at Carleton College, serves on the school board, plays the lowest bells in the community handbell ensemble, hosts a monthly poetry reading series, and reads books by neglected writers. His essays have appeared in New England Review, North Dakota Quarterly, New Letters, Ploughshares, Critical Flame, Sonora Review, and in various scholarly journals.

Ben Jackson’s poems have appeared in Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Hudson Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His awards include the 2015 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry as well as residencies from Vermont Studio Center, Jentel Artist Residency Program, and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, he is the director of the Writing Salon, a San Francisco Bay Area creative writing school for adults.

John Keats (1795–1821) was an English Romantic poet. His first volume of poems was published in 1817 and attracted little attention. The next year he published Endymion, a long poem (4,050 lines) consisting of four books, based on the Greek myth of Endymion, the shepherd beloved by the moon goddess Selene (Diana). Between 1818 and 1819 he produced his six famous odes and such narrative poems as “Hyperion” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” His third and final volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in 1820. Having contracted tuberculosis in 1819, Keats sailed for Italy in September 1820, seeking a warmer climate for the winter. He died in Rome on February 23, 1821.

Wayne Miller is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Post (Milkweed, 2016) and The City, Our City (Milkweed, 2011). He has co-translated two collections by Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo, most recently Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015). Miller has also co-edited three books, including Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed, 2016) and New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and edits Copper Nickel.

Derek Mong is the author of two poetry collections from Saturnalia Books, Other Romes (2011) and The Identity Thief (2018). He is a blogger at Kenyon Review Online, and the Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College. He holds a doctorate in American Literature from Stanford University. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Louisville, Missouri Review, and the Hopwood Program, he lives in Indiana with his wife and son. New poetry, criticism, and translations have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Brooklyn Rail, Crab Creek Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Thomas Moran is John D. Berninghausen Professor of Chinese at Middlebury College. He lives in Ripton, Vermont, with his wife, the painter Rebecca Purdum.

Nathaniel G. Nesmith holds an MFA in playwriting and a PhD in theater from Columbia University. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Marymount Manhattan College, City College of New York, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and recently completed his Creating Connections Consortium Postdoctoral Fellowship at Middlebury College. He has published articles in American Theatre, the Dramatist, Drama Review, the New York Times, Yale Review, African American Review, and other publications.

Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill (2012) and Dirty Bomb (2015), both from Oberlin College Press. His awards include an NEA Poetry Fellowship, an Indiana Individual Artist grant, the FIELD Poetry Prize, and the Concrete Wolf Press chapbook award for Four of a Kind (Concrete Wolf, 2010).

Ning Ken grew up in one of Beijing’s old hutong (alley) neighborhoods and, after graduating from college, spent several years in Tibet, where he wrote poetry and taught at a local school. His books include two nonfiction collections and five novels, most recently Sange sanchongzou (Three Trios, 2015) and Tian•Zang (Heaven •Tibet, 2010), for which he was awarded his second Lao She Literary Award and the Shi Nai’an Literary Award. He currently lives in Beijing.

Kate Petersen is from Arizona. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Epoch, Paris Review Daily, the Collagist, and elsewhere. She has received a Stegner Fellowship and the Pushcart Prize, and currently teaches at Stanford as a Jones Lecturer.

Anne Raeff’s first novel, Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia (MacAdam/Cage), was published in 2002. “Chinese Opera” is from the forthcoming collection of stories The Jungle Around Us (University of Georgia Press, 2016), which won the 2015 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her stories and essays appear in journals including New England Review, Guernica, and Zyzzyva, and in the anthology What I Didn’t Know: True Stories About Becoming a Teacher (In Fact Books, 2016). Raeff is a high school teacher and lives in San Francisco.

Tyler Sage’s work has appeared in the Common, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Story Quarterly, Greensboro Review, Bright Lights Film Journal, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. He lives in California.

Maxine Scates is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Undone (New Issues, 2011). She is co-editor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford (Copper Canyon, 2001). Her work has received the Starrett Prize, the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and two Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Eric Severn received his MFA from the University of Idaho and has worked as fiction editor for Fugue. His fiction has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Beloit Fiction, and other journals. He is literary editor for the Portland Phoenix.

Mona Nicole Sfeir was born in New York City but grew up in three states and five countries. She holds an MFA in textiles from the California College of Arts, an MA in Children’s Literature and Illustration from San Jose State University, and a BA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her diverse body of work includes large-scale installations, paintings, sculptures, book illustrations, and public artworks, as well as private commissions for clients around the globe. Her work has been exhibited in galleries both in the United States and abroad.

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her first full-length collection, Cannibal, won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). She is the recipient of a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, the Nation, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Bruce Snider is the author of two collections of poetry, Paradise, Indiana (LSU Press, 2012) and The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). With the poet Shara Lessley, he is currently co-editing an anthology of essays, The Poem’s Country: Place and Poetic Practice. He teaches at the University of San Francisco.

Brian Teare, a 2015 Pew Fellow in the Arts, is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the American Antiquarian Society. He is the author of five books, most recently Companion Grasses (Omnidawn, 2013), which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Ahsahta, 2015). An assistant professor at Temple University, he lives in South Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Ryan Teitman is the author of the poetry collection Litany for the City (BOA Editions, 2012). His poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Southern Review, Threepenny Review, and Yale Review, and his awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Kara van de Graaf’s poems have appeared in the Southern Review, AGNI, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is co-founder and editor of Lightbox Poetry, an online educational resource for poetry in the classroom. She lives in Chicago.

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70–19 BC) was a Roman poet of the Augustan period, known for three major works of Latin literature: the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the Aeneid. His Aeneid has been considered the national epic of ancient Rome from the time of its composition to the present day. Virgil’s work has had wide and deep influence on Western literature, most notably Dante’s Divine Comedy (completed in 1321), in which Virgil appears as Dante’s guide through hell and purgatory.

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