Taghrid Abdelal, a Palestinian born in Nahr El Bared refugee camp in Lebanon in 1984, is a visual artist, essayist, the author of three poetry collections, and a recent winner of the Young Poets of Palestine Prize by the Qattan Foundation.

Tarek Abi Samra is a writer and translator from Lebanon. He writes regularly for the L’Orient littéraire in French, as well as for the independent online outlet Megaphone News in Arabic, and his work has also appeared in other publications in both languages. His short story “The Bastard” was included in its English translation in the Beirut Noir anthology published by Akashic books. He has translated, from French to Arabic, the Goncourt prize-winning novel, Boussole (Compass), by Mathias Énard.

Manal Abu-Shaheen is a Lebanese-American photographer. Her solo exhibitions include Beirut, Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK (2022); Mapping Utopia, Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, Oregon (2021); 2d Skin, Soloway, Brooklyn, New York (2019); Theater of Dreams, Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University (2018); and Beta World City, LORD LUDD, Philadelphia (2017). She is a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency, A.I.R Gallery Fellowship, and AIM Residency at the Bronx Museum. She holds an MFA in photography from Yale School of Art. She teaches at The City College of New York.

Milia Ayache is an actor, writer, and Linux enthusiast from Beirut, Lebanon. Her writing has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, Contemporary Theatre Review, Rusted Radishes, Marsah: Theatre Texts, as well as in the collection Stages of Resistance: Theatre and Politics in the Capitalocene (NoPassport Press, 2018). She is a recent Hedgebrook alumna and holds an MFA from the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theatre Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.

Ritta Baddoura was born in Lebanon in 1980. She has published seven books of French poetry in Lebanon, France, and Belgium, including Ritta parmi les bombes (Dar Al Saqi, 2008) and Parler étrangement (L’Arbre à Paroles/iF, 2014), which was awarded the Max Jacob Poetry Prize in 2015. Her readings have a climate of presence and sometimes explore, solo or with musicians, the encounters between orality, sound, and movement. Baddoura works as a literary critic and psychologist and now lives in France. Her new poetry collection, Désaltère, was published in May 2022 by L’Arbre à Paroles/iF.

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third collection, O, is forthcoming from Penguin Books in July 2022. She’s the author of Louder than Hearts (Bauhan, 2017), To Live in Autumn (The Backwaters Press, 2014), and the chapbooks 3arabi Song (Rattle, 2016) and There Was and How Much There Was (Smith|Doorstop, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Poetry, among others. She recently moved to California.

Marianne Boruch’s eleven poetry collections include Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon, 2021), which was triggered by her 2019 Fulbright in Australia to observe its astonishing wildlife. “Shards,” which appears in this issue of NER, is among the notes out of which her eighth collection—Cadaver, Speak (Copper Canyon, 2014)—were made. She is the author of three essay collections, most recently The Little Death of Self (Michigan’s “Poets on Poetry” Series, 2017), and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011). Her honors include the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEAs, three Pushcart Prizes, residencies at the Rockefeller Bellagio Center and two national parks (Denali and Isle Royale), and a previous Fulbright at the University of Edinburgh. Her work appears in APR, Poetry, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Maud Casey is the author of five books of fiction, including City of Incurable Women (Bellevue Literary Press, 2022), and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions (Graywolf, 2018). She teaches at the University of Maryland and lives in Washington, DC. 

Victoria Chang’s latest book of poems is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her prior book is OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2022. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Antioch’s MFA Program.

Hilal Chouman is the author of five novels in Arabic: Stories of Sleep (Dar Malamih, 2008), Napolitana (Dar Al Adab, 2010), Limbo Beirut (Dar Al Tanweer, 2012), Once Upon a Time, Tomorrow (Dar Al Saqi, 2016), and Sorrow in My Heart (Khan Aljanub, 2022). His novel Limbo Beirut was translated into English by Anna Ziajka Stanton and was shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and the PEN Translation Prize. Chouman occasionally publishes translations and literary texts in Arab websites. He lives in Toronto, where he works as an AI and machine learning product manager.

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection I Can’t Talk about the Trees without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark has been awarded the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a 2021–2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

Nandini Dhar is the author of the book Historians of Redundant Moments: A Novel in Verse (Agape, 2016). Her poems, short stories, and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Coal Hill Review, Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Memorious, New South, Best New Poets 2016, and elsewhere. She lives in India and teaches literature and gender studies at OP Jindal Global University.

Steven Duong is a poet from San Diego, California. His poems and short fiction can be found in the American Poetry Review, AGNI, Guernica, Catapult, and other publications. He currently lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where he is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Miled Faiza is a Tunisian-American poet and translator. He is the author of Baqāya l-bayt allaḏī daḵalnāhu marratan wāḥida (Dar-Alwah, 2004) and Asabaʕ an-naḥḥāt (Mayara Editions, 2019); and translator of the Booker Prize–shortlisted novel Autumn (al-Kharif, 2017), as well as Winter (al-Shitā’, 2019), both by Ali Smith. He co-translated Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian (Europa Editions, 2021) with Karen McNeil. He teaches Arabic at Brown University.

Fouad Mohammed Fouad is a physician and poet from Aleppo. Following the outbreak of war in Syria, he and his family moved to Lebanon, where he works at the American University of Beirut. He is deeply engaged in research and action on behalf of Syrian refugees. He has published five volumes of poetry in Arabic, most recently Once Upon a Time in Aleppo (Hippocrates Press, 2020), a bilingual collection with translations by the author and Norbert Hirschhorn.

Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry. Her forthcoming book, Nostalgia Has Such a Short Half-Life, will be published in 2023. A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, she has served as the publisher of Noemi Press since 2002.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015), Blazons (Carcanet, 2019), and two collaborative books, Diaspo/Renga, written with Deema K. Shehabi (Holland Park Press, 2014) and A Different Distance, written with Karthika Naïr (Milkweed Editions, 2021). She is also the author of an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan, 2010), as well as eighteen books of translations of French and Francophone writers. Her next book, Calligraphies, will be published by W.W. Norton in early 2023.

Amina Hassan is a German-Lebanese playwright and director from Beirut, Kassel, Arab Saleem, and Bad Karlshafen. She loves to collect scraps of conversation, seashells, and WhatsApp stickers, and continues to be rapt by fairy tales and the Battle of Karbala. She obtains her work from the unknotting of fantasy while distracting from the evidence of this transgression along the way. Currently, she is studying playwriting at the University of the Arts in Berlin. 

Brian Henry’s most recent book is Things Are Completely Simple: Poetry and Translation (Parlor Press, 2022). He has translated books by Tomaž Šalamun, Aleš Debeljak, and Aleš Šteger. In 2024, Milkweed Editions will publish his translation of a comprehensive volume of Šalamun’s selected poems.

Norbert Hirschhorn is a public health physician, proud to follow in the tradition of physician-poets. He was commended by President Bill Clinton as an “American Health Hero.” He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hirschhorn has published six collections of poetry, most recently a bilingual Arabic-English co-translation with Syrian physician-poet Fouad Mohammed Fouad, Once Upon a Time in Aleppo (Hippocrates Press, 2020). His memoir, My Life in Medicine, Poetry and Public Health, was published by Sloan Publishing in spring 2022.

Inaya Jaber (1958–2021) was a Lebanese writer and journalist. She published six books of poetry, and her 2017 short story collection, La ahada yadhi’u fi beirut (Nobody gets lost in Beirut), was her first book of prose. In addition to working as a journalist for over twenty years for As-Safir and Al-Quds Al-Arabi, she was a singer and graduate of the Lebanese National Higher Conservatory of Music.

Justin Jannise is the author of How to Be Better by Being Worse (BOA Editions, 2021), which won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. A recent recipient of the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry and a former editor in chief of Gulf Coast, they recently completed a PhD in creative writing (poetry) at the University of Houston.

Fady Joudah’s most recent poetry collection is Tethered to Stars (Milkweed Editions, 2021).

Roy Kesey divides his time.

Vénus Khoury-Ghata is a Lebanese writer and the author of many books, including Nettles (Graywolf, 2008), A House at the Edge of Tears (Graywolf, 2005), and She Says (Graywolf, 2003), all translated by Marilyn Hacker. Her honors include the Grand Prix de la Société des gens de lettres for Fables pour un people d’argile, the Prix Apollinaire, and the Prix Mallarmé, and she was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 2000. Her work has been translated into several languages. She lives in Paris.

A. E. Kulze is a writer from the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Her fiction has appeared in the Stinging Fly, and the Masters Review Volume V, edited by Amy Hempel, and was selected as the winner of the Tennessee Williams Fiction contest by Claire Vaye Watkins. She lives in the mountains of western Massachusetts where she is at work on a novel.

lisa luxx is an activist, poet, and writer of British and Syrian heritage. Her poems are published in the Telegraph, the London Magazine, and by Hachette and Saqi Books. Her work has been broadcast on Channel 4, BBC Radio 4, and TEDx. In 2021, she toured UK theaters with the show for her sixty-minute poem “Eating the Copper Apple,” produced by a team of all Arab women artists. Her debut book, Fetch Your Mother’s Heart, was published in 2022 by Out-Spoken Press. Her short stories have been published by Comma Press.

Karen McNeil translated Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian (with Miled Faiza), as well as poems and short stories for Banipal and World Literature Today. She was a revising editor of the Oxford Arabic Dictionary (2014) and is currently completing a PhD in Arabic linguistics at Georgetown University, with a focus on the sociolinguistics of Tunisia.

Ben Miller is the author of River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa (Lookout Books, 2013). His writing has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Experimental Writing, Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, AGNI, Yale Review, Southern Review, and other venues. His awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Radcliffe Institute, as well as grants from the South Dakota Arts Council and the Schlesinger Library. His unpublished work, “Meanwhile in the Dronx . . .”, —a novel set in an invented borough of NYC—was a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of the lyric essay collection Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press, 2022), the memoir Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (Ohio State University Press, 2018), and three poetry chapbooks. She is an assistant professor at Bridgewater State University.

Lina Mounzer is a Lebanese writer and translator. She contributes regularly to the New York Times and her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Economist’s 1843 Magazine, and the Baffler, as well as in the anthologies Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women (Telegram Books, 2007) and Tales of Two Planets (Penguin, 2020). Recently, her essay “The Gamble” was chosen for Best American Essays 2022 and will be appearing in the forthcoming anthology.

Suneela Mubayi is a translator, independent scholar, and writer of Indian descent. She completed a PhD in Arabic literature from NYU with a thesis on vagabond poets between classical and modern Arabic poetry and has taught Arabic language and literature in the US and England. She is interested in the intersection between language, the body, and poetry, and gender and sexual liberation. She has translated close to a hundred essays, poems, and fiction pieces between Arabic, English, and Urdu for platforms such as Banipal, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, Jadaliyya, Mada Masr, and elsewhere.

Gillian Osborne writes poetry, essays, hybrid genres, and literary criticism, and is the author of Green Green Green (Nightboat, 2021). She lives in California and holds regular teaching or research appointments for the Harvard Extension School, Bard College, and ASU’s Center for Public Humanities. Her writing has appeared in such publications as the Boston Review, LARB Quarterly Journal, Harper’s, the New Republic, and The New Emily Dickinson Studies.

Yousif M. Qasmiyeh was born and educated in Baddawi refugee camp and is a Palestinian poet and translator whose DPhil research at Oxford University’s English faculty explores containment, the archive, and time in “refugee writing.” His poetry and translations have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Critical Quarterly, GeoHumanities, Cambridge Literary Review, and PN Review. His collection, Writing the Camp (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), was the Poetry Book Society’s recommendation for spring 2021 and was selected as one of the Best Poetry Books of 2021 by the Telegraph, the Irish Times, and Ars Notoria; was highly commended by the 2021 Forward Prizes for Poetry; and was shortlisted for the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.

Rima Rantisi teaches in the Department of English at the American University of Beirut and is the founding editor of Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal. Her essays can be found in Literary Hub, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Past Ten, and Slag Glass City. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

David Ryan is the author of Animals in Motion: Stories (Roundabout Press, 2014). His work appears or is forthcoming in the 2022 O. Henry Prize anthology, the Common, Conjunctions, the Threepenny Review, Fiction, the Kenyon Review, Juked, Hobart, and elsewhere. A recent Artistic Excellence Fellow with the Connecticut Office of the Arts, he teaches in the writing programs of Sarah Lawrence College and New England College.

Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet, writer, and critic. His latest poetry collection is Morning Lit: Portals after Alia (Cinnamon Press, 2022). He is currently at work on a contracted Lebanese verse novel, The Cedar Never Dies, due to be published with Northside Press in 2022. A collection of his short fiction, Y Knots, is due to be published with Liquorice Fish in 2023. He is an associate professor of English literature at the American University in Dubai.

Tomaž Šalamun (1941–2014) published more than fifty books of poetry in Slovenia. Translated into over twenty-five languages, his poetry received numerous awards, including the Jenko Prize, the Prešeren Prize, the European Prize for Poetry, and the Mladost Prize. In the 1990s, he served for several years as the Cultural Attaché for the Slovenian Embassy in New York, and later held visiting professorships at various universities in the US.

Christine Sneed has published short stories in past issues of New England Review, and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and New Stories from the Midwest. She is the author most recently of Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos (7.13 Books, 2022) and The Virginity of Famous Men: Stories (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), and the editor of Love in the Time of Time’s Up: A Short Fiction Anthology (Tortoise Books, 2022). She teaches for Northwestern University and Regis University and lives in Pasadena, California.

Analicia Sotelo is the author of Virgin (Milkweed Editions, 2018), the inaugural winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, selected by Ross Gay, and the chapbook Nonstop Godhead (Poetry Society of America, 2016), selected by Rigoberto González. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, the Nation, and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo fellow and the recipient of the 2016 DISQUIET International Literary Prize. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston.

Kosiso Ugwueze was born in Enugu, Nigeria, but was raised in Southern California. Her short stories have appeared in Joyland, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, and the South Carolina Review, among others. In 2020, she was awarded a Barbara Deming Memorial grant for feminist fiction. Other awards include residencies and fellowships from Kimbilio, Ox-Bow School of Art, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She is a recent graduate of the MFA program in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she was the managing editor of the Hopkins Review as well as a recipient of the Benjamin J. Sankey Prize in Fiction. She lives in Baltimore and is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Corey Van Landingham is the author of Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens (Tupelo Press, 2022) and Antidote (Ohio University Press, 2013). She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.

Rewa Zeinati is a Lebanese-American poet and educator and the recipient of the 2020 Edward Stanley Award for Poetry. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Sukoon (sukoonmag.com), and the author of the poetry chapbook Bullets & Orchids and the nonfiction collection Nietzsche’s Camel Must Die. Her work has been published in various national and international journals and anthologies. With an MFA in creative writing (poetry) from the University of Missouri–St. Louis, she spent the last decade and a half living and working in various cities in the UAE, Lebanon, and USA, and currently considers Metro Detroit her new home. 

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