Aldo Amparán is the author of Brother Sleep (Alice James Books, forthcoming 2022), winner of the 2020 Alice James Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and CantoMundo. His work has appeared most recently in the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day,” AGNI, Best New Poets, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He lives in the border cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, CHIH, México. 

Scott Blackwood’s novel See How Small (Little, Brown, 2015) won the 2016 PEN USA Award for fiction, was named a Great Reads best book by NPR and an Editor’s Choice book by the New York Times, and was selected as a Texas Book of the decade by the Texas Observer. His first novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here (New Issues, 2009), won the AWP Prize for the novel and a 2011 Whiting Award for fiction. His first book, a collection of stories, In the Shadow of Our House (Southern Methodist University Press, 2015), was named a best collection of the year by Forward magazine.

Hisham Bustani is an award-winning Jordanian author of five collections of short fiction and poetry. His fiction and poetry have been translated into many languages, with English-language translations appearing in the Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly. His book The Perception of Meaning (Syracuse University Press, 2015) won the University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. Hisham is the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Fellowship for Artists and Writers for 2017. His book The Monotonous Chaos of Existence is forthcoming in January 2022 from Mason Jar Press.

May-lee Chai is the author of ten books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her latest short story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants (Blair, 2018), recipient of the American Book Award. She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at San Francisco State University. Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman (selected by Tayari Jones), and an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature; her work has also been named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book and received an honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards.

John Cotter is the author of the forthcoming memoir Losing Music (Milkweed Editions, 2023) and the novella Under the Small Lights (Miami University Press, 2010). His essays and fiction have appeared in Raritan, Guernica, Electric Literature’s “Recommended Reading,” Washington Square, Georgia Review, Literary Review, and Commonweal. In January 2022 he’ll be a writer in residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. The monologue “Shelter in Place” was originally commissioned for Vis-à-vis, an evening of monologues at Endangered Species Theater Project in Frederick, Maryland, directed by Aaron Angello and performed by Jordan Hill.

Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), and her work has appeared recently in Four Way Review, Poetry, Thrush, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals. She’s the coordinator of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she teaches courses in poetry and publishing.

Nicole Cuffy is a DC-based writer with a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the New School. When she is not writing, she is reading, and when she is not reading, she is probably dancing. Her work can be found in Mason’s Road, the Master’s Review Volume VI, Chautauqua, and Blue Mesa Review, and her chapbook, Atlas of the Body (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), was an editor’s choice and finalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition. She can be found muddling her way through Twitter at @nicolethecuffy.

Melissa Dadourian is a Brooklyn-based artist working in textile media, painting, and sculpture. She received a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Hunter College. Recently she created an 8,000-square-foot mural for Manhattan Park Pool on Roosevelt Island as well as exhibitions at the Albany Airport, the University of Buffalo, Transmitter Gallery, and the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn. Residencies include Vermont Studio Center, MASS MoCA, the Textile Arts Center, the American Academy in Rome, and the Citè Internationale des Artes in Paris.

Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina, and a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of two poetry collections, River Hymns (2017), an APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner, and Cardinal (2020), both from Copper Canyon Press.

Shangyang Fang is from Chengdu, China. A Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he is author of the poetry collection Burying the Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 2021).

Alice Greenway’s first novel, White Ghost Girls (Atlantic Books, 2006), set in Hong Kong in the 1960s, won the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and was on the Orange Prize long list. Her second novel, The Bird Skinner (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2014), about an ornithologist who served in the Second World War, was shortlisted for the New England Book Award. Her novella in this issue, “Past Perfect,” takes place on the Greek island of Samos in 2016, when 1,200 refugees crowded into a camp built for 650. After that time, conditions on Samos grew much worse, with thousands of people camping out on a hillside without water or electricity.

Sarah Gridley has written four books of poetry: Weather Eye Open (University of California Press, 2005), Green Is the Orator (University of California Press, 2010), Loom (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013), and Insofar (New Issues, 2020). She is working on an MA in Theological and Religious Studies at John Carroll University. 

Emelie Griffin is a PhD student at the University of Houston and the managing editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.

Alice Guthrie is an independent translator, editor, and curator specializing in contemporary Arabic literature and media. Widely published since 2008, her work has often focused on subaltern voices, “activist” art, and queerness/queering (winning her the Jules Chametzky Translation Prize 2019). As a commissioning editor she is currently compiling the first ever anthology of LGBTQIA+ Arabic writing, set to appear in parallel Arabic and English editions. Her forthcoming translations include books by Malika Moustadraf, Mohamed Zafzaf, and Hisham Bustani. She teaches Arabic–English translation at the University of Birmingham and the University of Exeter, and is based in Bristol, UK.

Blair Hurley is the author of The Devoted (W. W. Norton, 2018), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her work is published or forthcoming in Electric Literature, Georgia Review, Story, Ninth Letter, Guernica, Paris Review Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. She received a 2018 Pushcart Prize and two Pushcart Prize nominations in 2019.

Christopher Kondrich is the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series, by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019, and as a finalist for the Believer Book Award in Poetry, as well as the book-length poem Contrapuntal (Free Verse Editions, 2013). Recent poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Believer, Bennington Review, Paris Review, and Poetry Northwest. He teaches creative writing at George Washington University and is an associate editor for 32 Poems.

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, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Middlebury College. He has published articles in American Theatre, the Dramatist, Drama Review, the New York Times, Yale Review, African American Review, Black Scholar, and other publications. His interviews with John Guare, Charles Johnson, and Steve Carter have appeared in previous issues of NER.

Oscar Oswald’s first book of poetry, Irredenta (Nightboat Books, 2021), engages the pastoral tradition from the context of Thoreau, Stein, and Niedecker, interrogating American civics and citizenry from a pastoral position. His poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Lana Turner, Blackbox Manifold, New American Writing, and VOLT, among other journals. Oscar has served as an Assistant Editor for Noemi Press and as the Poetry Editor for Witness, and he has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Benjamin Paloff’s books include the poetry collections And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both from Carnegie Mellon, and many translations from Polish, Czech, Russian, and Yiddish. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Guesthouse, Laurel Review, New York Review of Books, and others. Twice a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, he is professor of comparative literature at the University of Michigan, where he is also director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Suphil Lee Park is the author of the poetry collection Present Tense Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021), winner of the 2020 Marystina Santiestevan Prize. She spent more than half her life all over the Korean peninsula before landing in the American Northeast. Her poems and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Republic, Poetry Daily, and the Iowa Review, among many others. Most recently she received a third prize in the Writer’s Digest short short story competition and won the 2021 Indiana Review Fiction Prize. 

Julie Riddle is the author of the memoir The Solace of Stones: Finding a Way through Wilderness (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Her essay “Shadow Animals” appeared in the Georgia Review and received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. She serves as the craft essay editor for Brevity, as the creative nonfiction editor for Rock & Sling, and as an editor for Wandering Aengus Press. She works as senior development writer at Whitworth University and is editor of Whitworth Today magazine. She lives with her family in Spokane, Washington.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is the author of Lima: Limón (Copper Canyon Press 2019) and The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing, 2015). She has won Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a CantoMundo fellowship. She currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of South Florida.

Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House), was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in nonfiction. Her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart Prize, and she was awarded the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism. She has a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin.

Gregory Spatz is the author of three novels and three short story collections, most recently the collection of connected novellas and stories What Could Be Saved (Tupelo Press, 2019). His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, Santa Monica Review, Post Road, Epoch, and elsewhere. He directs and teaches in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University. This is his sixth appearance in New England Review.

Yerra Sugarman is the author of three poetry collections: Aunt Bird (forthcoming from Four Way Books, 2022), The Bag of Broken Glass (Sheep Meadow, 2008), and Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow, 2002). She has received an NEA Poetry Fellowship as well as the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award and Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, among other honors. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, the Nation, AGNI, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. She lives in New York City.

Leath Tonino is a freelance magazine writer and the author of two essay collections, both published by Trinity University Press: The Animal One Thousand Miles Long (2018) and The West Will Swallow You (2019).

Emma Trelles is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize; she is writing a second book of poems, Courage and the Clock. Her work is anthologized in Verse Daily, Best American Poetry, and others. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Chiricú Journal, Terrain’s “Letter to America” series, South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM, Zócalo Public Square, and Colorado Review. She is the poet laureate of Santa Barbara.

Yanyi is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World/Random House, forthcoming 2022) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press, 2019), selected by Carl Phillips for the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. His work has been featured in NPR’s All Things Considered, Tin House, and Granta, and he is the recipient of fellowships from T. S. Eliot House, James Merrill House, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Currently, he is poetry editor at Foundry and gives writing advice at The Reading. 

Marek Zagańczyk served for many years as deputy editor-in-chief of the literary quarterly Zeszyty Literackie. He has edited the correspondence of various twentieth-century Polish writers and is the author of three volumes of literary and travel essays: Krajobrazy i portrety (Landscapes and portraits), Droga do Sieny (Road to Siena), and Cyprysy i topole (Cypresses and poplars). The director of the publishing house Próby, he lives in Warsaw.

Jakob Ziguras is an Australian poet and translator of Polish and Greek heritage. He has published two collections of poetry: Chains of Snow (Pitt Street Poetry, 2013) and The Sepia Carousel (Pitt Street Poetry, 2016). As a translator, he has published translations of Polish poetry and prose, including, most recently, Jan Kott’s Kaddish: Pages on Tadeusz Kantor (Seagull Books, 2020). He is currently living in Poland and working on his third collection of poetry, Venetian Mirrors.

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