Alice Sparberg Alexiou is a New York City–based historian and journalist. She is the author of Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (Rutgers University Press, 2006), The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Extraordinary City That Arose with It (St. Martin’s Press, 2013), and Devil’s Mile: The Rich, Gritty History of the Bowery (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). Among the publications where her articles have appeared are the New York Times, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Lilith Magazine, where she is also a contributing editor. In 2014, Alexiou coproduced a documentary based on The Flatiron for the WNET/PBS series Treasures of New York.
Yuri Andrukhovych, one of the most important figures in contemporary Ukrainian literature, has published more than a dozen poetry collections, fiction books, and collections of essays, and his work has been translated into many languages. Among his books that have been translated into English are the novels Recreations (CIUS, 1998), The Moscoviad (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008), Perverzion (Northwestern University Press, 2005), and Twelve Circles (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015), as well as a collection of poems, Songs for a Dead Rooster (Lost Horse, 2018) and a collection of essays, My Final Territory (University of Toronto Press, 2018). He lives and works in Ivano-Frankivsk.
Mildred Kiconco Barya is a North Carolina–based writer, educator, and poet of East African descent. She’s the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently The Animals of My Earth School (Terrapin Books, 2023). Her prose, hybrids, and poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Joyland, Cincinnati Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She’s now working on a collection of creative nonfiction, and her essay “Being Here in This Body” won the 2020 Linda Flowers Literary Award and was published in the North Carolina Literary Review. She serves on the board of African Writers Trust and blogs here: www.mildredbarya.com.
Brian Blanchfield is the author of Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Nightboat, Picador UK, 2017), winner of a 2016 Whiting Award; A Several World (Nightboat, 2014), recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award; and Not Even Then (University of California Press, 2004). His newest work appears in the Yale Review, Chicago Review, Best American Essays 2022, and the Oxford American. He lives in Missoula, where he teaches at the University of Montana.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017) and Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021). He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, he has published his poems in Poetry, the Nation, the Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Granta, and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at the Rumpus and on the editorial board at Alice James Books.
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)—winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize and the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award—and of four chapbooks. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cleveland State University. Her poems appear in the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, the Atlantic, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program.
Lily Greenberg is a poet from Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of In the Shape of a Woman (Broadstone Books, 2022). She holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and lives in Nyack, New York.
John Hennessy is the author of two collections, Coney Island Pilgrims (Ashland Poetry Press, 2013) and Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point Books, 2007). He is the translator, with Ostap Kin, of A New Orthography (LHP, 2020), selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize, and the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature/HUP, 2023).
John James is the author of The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, as well as two chapbooks, most recently Winter, Glossolalia (Black Spring, 2022). His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, PEN Poetry Series, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. He holds an MFA from Columbia and is completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ostap Kin is the editor of New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City (Academic Studies Press, 2019) and Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature/HUP, 2023), which he co-translated with John Hennessy. With Hennessy, he also co-translated Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize. He co-translated, with Vitaly Chernetsky, Yuri Andrukhovych’s Songs for a Dead Rooster (Lost Horse Press, 2018).
Cindy King is the author of a book-length poetry collection, Zoonotic (Tinderbox Editions, 2022), and two poetry chapbooks, Easy Street (dancing girl press, 2021) and Lesser Birds of Paradise (Southeastern Louisiana University Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Sun, Threepenny Review, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Cindy was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up swimming in the shadows of the hyperboloid cooling towers on the shores of Lake Erie. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Utah Tech University and an editorial assistant for Seneca Review.
Samuel Kolawole is an assistant professor of English and African studies at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches fiction writing full-time. He also teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Art’s low-residency MFA program. His fiction has received fellowships, residencies, and scholarships, and his work has appeared in AGNI, Georgia Review, the Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, Image Journal, and elsewhere. His novel will be published by Amistad/HarperCollins.
Adrie Kusserow is a medical anthropologist and writer. She is currently Professor of Cultural Anthropology at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. She has written four books, American Individualisms (Palgrave MacMillan), REFUGE (BOA Editions, Ltd.), Hunting Down the Monk (BOA Editions, Ltd.), and The Trauma Mantras, a memoir in prose poems, forthcoming with Duke University Press in January 2024. She helped cofound Africa Education and Leadership Initiative with the Lost Boys of Sudan who have resettled in Vermont. She lives in Underhill, Vermont, with her mother and husband on the land where she was born and raised.
Esther Lin is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, and of the chapbook The Ghost Wife (Poetry Society of America, 2018). Most recently, she was an artist-resident at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester and Cité internationale, Paris. She was a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her work has been included in Best New Poets 2022 and 2023 Best of the Net Anthology. Currently she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which raises consciousness about the structural barriers facing undocumented poets.
Jessie Ren Marshall’s debut story collection, Women! In! Peril!, will be published by Bloomsbury (April 2024). Her writing has appeared in Electric Lit, Zyzzyva, Joyland, Gulf Coast, the Gettysburg Review, and the New York Times. She has an MFA from New York University, and her work has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Millay Arts, the KHN Center for the Arts, and the Community of Writers. She lives off-grid with her dogs on Hawai‘i Island. Find her at jessierenmarshall.com.
David Moats is the author of a story called “The Incident,” which appeared in New England Review in 2019. He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2001 for his work at the Rutland Herald. He is the author of the book Civil Wars: A Battle for Gay Marriage, published by Harcourt in 2004. He moved to Vermont from San Francisco in 1975, and he lives in Salisbury, Vermont.
Micah Muldowney is the author of the collection Q-Drive and Other Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2022). His short fiction, poetry, and essays have been featured in Descant, West Trade Review, Grey Sparrow, Soundboard, and many others. He currently lives in greater Philadelphia where he is working on a novel.
Ottilie Mulzet has translated over thirteen volumes of Hungarian poetry and prose. Her translation of László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming was awarded the 2019 National Book Award in Translated Literature, and her translation of Szilárd Borbély’s Final Matters: Selected Poems, 2004–2010 was a finalist for the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Her work has received grants from both English PEN Translates and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. Her translation of Szilárd Borbély’s Kafka’s Son is forthcoming from Seagull Books, as is an anthology of modern poetry by Hungarian women (with other translators).
Laura Newbern is the author of Love and the Eye, selected by Claudia Rankine in 2010 for the Kore Press First Book Award, and the recipient of a Writer’s Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her second collection of poems, A Night in the Country, was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the Changes Book Prize and is forthcoming in Spring 2024. She lives and works in Georgia.
Lori Ostlund’s first book, The Bigness of the World, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (UGA Press, 2009; reprinted Scribner 2016), the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Award. Her second book, After the Parade (Scribner 2015), was a Barnes & Noble Discover pick, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and numerous journals. Lori is the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award and lives in San Francisco. “Just Another Family” is part of her just-completed story collection “Are You Happy?”
Joseph Pearson is a writer and cultural historian and author of two books of nonfiction, My Grandfather’s Knife (HarperCollins, The History Press, 2022) and Berlin (Reaktion, 2017). His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in places such as Lettre International, AGNI, Prism International, and New England Review. He is the house essayist of the Schaubühne Theatre. Pearson currently teaches creative and arts writing at a German university, the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin.
Jing Qin is an artist living and working in Denver, Colorado. She is Phipps Artist-in-Residence at the University of Denver where she is the Visiting Professor of Painting. She was born and grew up in Henan province, China. She earned her MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Tennessee. Her work has been exhibited with galleries in Philadelphia, New York, Nashville, and many places in China, and has been featured in publications such as New American Paintings and Friend of the Artist.
Gábor Schein is the author of over nine volumes of poetry and five novels. He has been awarded the Attila József Prize, the Artisjus Prize, and the Prize of the Society of Hungarian Authors, among many other distinctions. His work has been translated into eight European languages. His short novels The Book of Mordechai (translated by Adam Z. Levy) and Lazarus (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) were published in one volume by Seagull Books in 2017. His novel Autobiographies of an Angel, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, was published in 2022 from the Margellos World Republic of Letters of Yale University Press.
Caridad Svich is a playwright and theater-maker. Key works for performance include 12 Ophelias, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls, Red Bike, and The House of the Spirits (based on Isabel Allende’s novel). They have been awarded an Obie for Lifetime Achievement, a Harvard/Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, and the American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize. She has authored and/or edited several books on theater, including Toward a Future Theatre (Methuen Drama, 2022) and Mitchell and Trask’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” (Routledge, 2019). She is Artistic Director of New Play Development at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York City, drama editor at Asymptote literary translation journal, and an editor at Contemporary Theatre Review, UK.
G. C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021); and The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, forthcoming 2024). Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University.
Fang Xin 方莘 was born in 1939 in Chengdu, China, arrived in Taiwan in 1949 with his family, and settled in Taipei. As a teenager he joined an established group of avant-garde poets known as the Blue Star Poetry Society (藍星詩社). His first poetry book, Mo Bai 膜拜 / In Prostration (1963), received great acclaim in Taiwanese literary circles. Fang is currently finishing a collection of poems and translations titled Night falls so impatiently. He lives with his family in Oakland, California.
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