D. M. Aderibigbe’s debut book, How the End First Showed (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and a Florida Book Award, and was a finalist for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poets. He’s the recipient of a 2022–2023 Artist Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission and other fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the James Merrill House, OMI/Ledig House, Ucross, Jentel, and Boston University. His poems have appeared in the Nation, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He’s an assistant professor in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

David Baker’s latest book of poems, Whale Fall, was published in summer 2022 by W. W. Norton. He lives in Granville, Ohio.

Rick Barot’s most recent book of poems is The Galleons, which was published by Milkweed Editions in 2020 and longlisted for the National Book Award. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

Bradley Bazzle is the author of the story collection Fathers of Cambodian Time-Travel Science (C&R Press, 2020) and the novel Trash Mountain (Red Hen, 2018). His stories have appeared in the Missouri Review, Colorado Review, New Letters, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Athens, Georgia.

Elisabeth Becker is the author of Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste, and Contention in Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2021). She is a Freigeist (“free spirit”) fellow /assistant professor at the Max-Weber-Institute of Sociology at Heidelberg University, where she is leading a project called “Invisible Architects: Jews, Muslims, and the Construction of Europe.” She has published extensively on pluralism, and racial, ethnic, and religious marginalization in Europe and the United States. Her writing has appeared in such outlets as Tablet Magazine, Image Magazine, the Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and A Beautiful Perspective.

Heidi Bell works as a freelance book editor in Aurora, Illinois. Her short fiction has appeared in Vestal Review, the Chicago Reader, and other venues.

Lindsay Bernal is the author of What It Doesn‘t Have to Do With (University of Georgia Press, 2018), winner of the National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, the Georgia Review, Oversound, Poem-a-Day, and other journals. She coordinates the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Maryland and lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and Harpswell, Maine.

TR Brady is a poet and fiber artist. Their work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, and Copper Nickel. TR holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the cofounder/co-editor of Afternoon Visitor, a new journal of poetry and hybrid text.

Jack Gain’s short fiction has been published by the Boston Review, Arts of the Working Class,and American Chordata. His story “Port-Bou” was recently selected as the winner of the Zoetrope: All-Story Fiction Prize by Daniel Mason. He lives in London where he works in a library.

Eugene Gloria is the author of four books of poems. His most recent collection, Sightseer in This Killing City (Penguin, 2019), received the Indiana Authors Award in poetry. His recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Common, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Poetry. He is the John Rabb Emison Professor of Creative and Performing Arts and Professor of English at DePauw University.

Skip Horack is the author of three books: the story collection The Southern Cross (Mariner Books, 2009) and the novels The Eden Hunter (Counterpoint, 2010) and The Other Joseph (Ecco, 2015). Horack is director of the creative writing program at Florida State University and would like to thank the Okapi Conservation Project (www.okapiconservation.org), and its founder John Lukas in particular, for inspiring and informing this essay.

Tabish Khair is an Indian citizen, now based in Aarhus, Denmark, where he teaches literature. He won the All India Poetry Prize and has been shortlisted for the Sahitya Academy Award for both his fiction and nonfiction. His novels have been translated into several languages and shortlisted for major international prizes, such as the Man Asian and the DSC Prize for South Asia. His recent stories have appeared or will be appearing in Harvard Review, the Bangalore Review, and Not Quite Right for Us. His new sci-fi/cli-fi novel, The Body by the Shore, was published by Interlink Books in June 2022.

Caroline Kim is the author of a collection of short stories, The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), which won the Drue Heinz Prize in Literature that year. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Story, Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, Pleiades, Santa Monica Review, Lithub, and elsewhere. Find her at carolinekim.net and @carolinewriting.

Kim Wooncho (梯遴蟾 / 旄磩鶔) (1804–1859) was a courtesan poet of the late Joseon dynasty. While she was raised by a conservative Confucianist family, after her father passed away her uncle became her legal guardian; she later became a courtesan, as did many women without the care of their parents and with great potential in the arts of poetry, singing, and dancing. While she was and is still best known for her sentimental love poems, “In Response to Seolpah’s Poem” is one of the very few Korean poems of the dynasty that seems to acknowledge female friendship.

Sophie Klahr is the author of Two Open Doors in a Field (Backwaters Press, 2023) and Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016), and co-author of There Is Only One Ghost in the World (Fiction Collective 2, 2023) with Corey Zeller. Her work appears in publications such as the New Yorker and American Poetry Review. She teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Iris A. Law is a poet, editor, and educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area. A Kundiman fellow whose poems have appeared in journals such as Hyphen, Menagerie, and Waxwing and are anthologized in They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2022), she is also cofounder and editor of the literary magazine Lantern Review. Her chapbook, Periodicity, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013.

Mary Lee is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and a recent Best New Poets nominee. She currently lives and writes in Phoenix, Arizona.

Lee Okbong (檜螟瑰 / 軝雓塯) was a sixteenth-century Korean poet born to a courtesan mother. Even though she was an illegitimate child, she received her formal name, Okbong (雓塯, meaning “jade summit”), from her father. After her first husband died a year into their marriage, Lee met her second husband, who accepted her on the condition that she no longer write poetry. After her poem “Testimonial” made her a controversial figure, her husband sent her into exile. She disappeared around the time of the Japanese invasions of Korea (1592), and Jibong Yuseol (雖瑰嶸撲 / 罋塯袛飹) records that she was found dead on a Chinese shore, wrapped up in hundreds of sheets of paper with poems written all over them, signed with her name.

Aubrey Levinthal received an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) and a BA from Pennsylvania State University. In 2022, her work was included in A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Her solo exhibitions have appeared at Haverkampf Leistenschneider (Berlin, Germany, 2022), M + B (Los Angeles, 2021), and Monya Rowe Gallery (New York City, 2020). Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Stephen Friedman Gallery (London, UK), Workplace Gallery (London, UK), Fleisher-Ollman (Philadelphia), and Halsey McKay (New York City). She is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. She lives and works in Philadelphia.

Da-Lin explores time, death, and cultural clashes in her fiction with a dash of weird. She grew up in Asia (Taiwan), grew again in North America (Canada and USA), and is now experiencing growing pains once more in her third and probably-not-final continent of Europe (Portugal). She has won the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship and the James Kirkwood Literary Award. Her works in progress include a multigenerational mystery novel spanning 100 years of Taiwanese history, a short story collection, and a nonfiction book about the pursuit of nirvana. For more, visit Da-Lin.com.

Maxim Matusevich is a professor of history at Seton Hall University, where he also directs the Russian and East European Studies Program. He has published extensively as a historian of Africa and the Cold War. He also writes fiction—mostly in English, but occasionally in his native Russian. His short stories and essays have appeared in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, San Antonio Review, the Bare Life Review, BigCityLit, the Wild Word, WordCity Literary Journal, the museum of americana, Rivanna Review, Fatal Flaw, and elsewhere.

Katie Moulton is the author of the memoir Dead Dad Club (Audible, 2022). Her writing appears in Sewanee Review, Oxford American, the Believer, Electric Literature, No Depression, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Art Omi, Djerassi, Tin House, and other organizations. From St. Louis, she lives in Baltimore.

Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆 李 朴) is the author of the poetry collection Present Tense Complex, winner of the Marystina Santiestevan Prize (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021), and a poetry chapbook, Still Life, selected by Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press. Born and raised in South Korea before finding home in the States, she holds a BA in English from NYU and an MFA in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, the Cincinnati Review, and the Los Angeles Review, among others. You can find more about her at suphil-lee-park.com.

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books of poetry and hybrid prose, including Anodyne (Tin House, 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes, 2017). Ekphrastic works include the chapbook Exercises in Painting (Bloof, 2016) and Fearful Beloved (Argos, 2015), partially written during artist Ann Hamilton’s event of a thread installation at Park Avenue Armory. A zuihitsu about the pandemic, “False Dawn,” appears in Harper’s Magazine. Dr. Queen is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech.

Angelique Stevens’s nonfiction has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, Lithub, New England Review, and Best American Essays 2022. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Bennington College where she was a nonfiction fellow, and an MA from SUNY Brockport in literature. She has received scholarships or fellowships from the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the Periplus Collective, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House Winter Workshop, and Bread Loaf.

Cole Swensen is the author of nineteen books of poetry, most recently Art in Time (Nightboat Books, 2021), and a book of faux-logical nano-essays, And And And (Free Poetry Press, 2022). A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, the National Poetry Series, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. Co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and founding editor of La Presse, she also translates literature and art criticism from French and divides her time between France and the US.

Brian Teare is the author of six critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Four Quartets Prize. His most recent book is a reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Nightboat Books, 2022). After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an associate professor at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

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