Marianne Boruch has written eleven books of poems, most recently Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2021); four essay collections, including Sing by the Burying Ground (Northwestern University Press, 2024); two memoirs, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press, 2011) and, forthcoming, The Figure Going Imaginary, made of notes taken in Gross Human Anatomy (the medical school’s “cadaver lab”) and a Life Drawing class, an experience that triggered poems in her eighth collection, Cadaver, Speak (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). Among her honors are the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and fellowships/residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, MacDowell, Yaddo, national parks (Denali and Isle Royale), and Fulbright Scholarships (Edinburgh and Canberra). Boruch went rogue and emeritus in 2018 after teaching at Purdue for thirty-three years. “The Empty Child” is her first published story. 

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator. His most recent book is Written after a Massacre in the Year 2018 (Coffee House Press, 2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press), received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. A forthcoming collection, The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (Coffee House Press) will be published in 2024. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (co-im-press, 2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia (co-im-press, 2016) received ALTA’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Cecilia Vicuña, Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún.

Grady Chambers is the author of North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions, 2018), chosen by Henri Cole as the winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the Atlantic, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, the Sun, Image, and elsewhere. Grady is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and lives in Philadelphia. 

Rob Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled bakla poet and playwright from Evanston, Illinois. His work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Sewanee Review, and Gulf Coast, among others, and has received support from MacDowell, Fulbright, Kenyon Review, and Tin House. He is the author of My Love Is Water, a verse drama forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse, and Feeble, winner of the Poetry Online Chapbook Series Fellowship. He received an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from the New Writers Project at UT Austin and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta, poet-in-residence at Tangled Art + Disability, and assistant poetry editor at Foglifter Journal.

Timothy Cummings was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1968 where he grew up in the midst of Spanish Catholic and Native American culture, fertile with religious imagery and iconography in the churches. Cummings is completely self-taught. Several years ago he returned to New Mexico after living in the Bay Area for many years. While most of Cummings’s paintings are dreamlike fantasies filled with myriad detail and discovery, each has a figure or figures. Much of Cummings’s work addresses the issue of youthful turmoil, of that awkward moment between childhood and adulthood, of identity, of gender. The artist often paints figures as a child might conjure them in his/her mind, giving a dreamlike, fantasy quality to a grown-up persona.

Vinay Dharwadker is Professor of English, World Literature, and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His poetry has appeared in the Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, London Magazine, and elsewhere. He translates poetry, drama, and prose variously from Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit, Punjabi, and Urdu. His book-length translations, all published by Penguin, include Kabir: The Weaver’s Songs (poetry, Hindi; 2003); Mohan Rakesh: One Day in the Season of Rain (co-translated with Aparna Dharwadker; postcolonial play, Hindi; 2015); and Kalidasa: The Recognition of Shakuntala (classical play, Sanskrit; 2016). His work first appeared in New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly in the 1980s. 

Courtney DuChene is a poet, journalist, and essayist based in Philadelphia. She is a current MFA candidate in the Helen Zell Writers program at the University of Michigan, and her work has been recognized and supported by the Hopwood Awards, the Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. You can read her poems, essays, and interviews in Philadelphia Stories, Glass Mountain, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Millions, and the White Review, where she was shortlisted for the 2023 Poet’s Prize.

Ophelia Eryn Hostetter is an associate professor at Rutgers University-Camden, specializing in medieval literature and culture (esp. Old English), translation studies, queer theory, and hip-hop poetics. They offer these “re-translations” as radical, queer interventions, unlocking fresh insight into what is often a very stale field. They have published translations in Ancient Exchanges and Trinity Journal of Literary Translation (both 2023). The Exeter Book Riddles is found in an Old English miscellany produced between 950–1000 CE, now housed at Exeter Cathedral Library. Few of these riddles, if any, were produced by the same hand, and the idea of an “author” may not even be particularly relevant to its immediate audiences, making these crafty jewels difficult to contextualize in ways that modern scholarship finds reassuring. Unlike extant Anglo-Latin riddles, these poems do not include solutions, and many of the answers since derived are highly speculative and much-debated.

Rebecca Lehmann is the author of the poetry collections The Sweating Sickness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), Ringer (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) and Between the Crackups (Salt, 2011). Her writing has been featured in the American Poetry Review, Threepenny Review, NPR’s The Slowdown, and other venues. She is the founding editor of the online literary journal Couplet Poetry and lives in Indiana.

Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk (Sarabande Books, 2014). A collection of essays, How to Disappear and Why, which includes “Junk Temples,” will be published in August 2024 by Sarabande Books. 

K. R. Mullins is a writer originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Brevity, and others. She is the fiction editor of Phoebe and serves on the board of Nimrod International Journal. She lives in Washington, DC, where she is an MFA candidate at George Mason University. She is currently at work on a novel.

Marina Pavlova is a native speaker of Russian who holds a Cand. Sc. (PhD) in American Literature from Ivanovo State University. Her awards for translation include the Special Prize for the Best Realization of Intercultural Communication in a Translator’s Work in the 2007 Sensum de Sensu competition (St. Petersburg, Russia). She is currently working on a book-length collection of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems translated into English.

Imad Rahman is the author of a book of connected stories, I Dream of Microwaves (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004). His short fiction has appeared in, among others, One Story, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, New England Review Digital, and the anthology xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths (Penguin Books, 2013). He’s also the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award and a Creative Workforce Fellowship through the Cuyahoga County Community Partnership for Arts & Culture (CPAC). He currently teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program.

Nathan Curtis Roberts was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has received honors from the Granum Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the American Society of Magazine Editors. His stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic, Harvard Review, the Forge, Alaska Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, and many others. He currently lives in Utah.

Sharon Solwitz’s books include Blood and Milk (Sarabande Books, 1997), Bloody Mary (Sarabande Books, 2003), and Once, in Lourdes (Random House, 2017). Her novel “The Place of No Pain” (formerly titled “Abra Cadabra”) received an award from the Center for Fiction.

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author/editor of fourteen books, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (Persea Books, 2021), and a novel, Paradise Close (Persea Books, 2022). Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Prize for Poetry, and the Carol Weinstein Prize. She is a Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Debra Spark’s latest novel, Discipline, was published by Four Way Books in 2024. She has published ten earlier books, including the novels Unknown Caller (LSU Press, 2016) and Good for the Jews (University of Michigan Press, 2009). She teaches at Colby College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. 

Mairead Small Staid is the author of The Traces: An Essay (A Strange Object/Deep Vellum, 2022).

Noah Marcel Sudarsky is a writer and coastal ecologist who focuses on environmental resiliency and the preservation of essential life systems. He has studied marine mammals and big cats and has worked as a dog behaviorist, forester, and videographer. Now based in California, Noah was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in New York City, Switzerland, and Brittany. He is a naturalist, mycologist, and dedicated wilderness explorer. He is also an award-winning journalist and correspondent who has contributed to, among numerous other publications, Explorer’s Web, Earth Island Journal, New York magazine, Tikkun, National Geographic, Libération, and the New York Times.

Vijay Tendulkar (1928–2008) was India’s preeminent playwright between the 1960s and 2000s. His Marathi oeuvre includes thirty full-length and twenty-three one-act plays; English versions of eight of his plays appear in Collected Plays in Translation (Oxford University Press, 2002). His other Marathi writings include novels, short stories, essays on theater, social and political commentary, children’s plays, and literary translations. He founded the theater group Avishkar; wrote and produced for television; and collaborated as a screenwriter for eleven major Hindi films in India’s “middle cinema” movement. His 1972 musical, Ghashiram Kotwal (Police Chief Ghashiram), is the world’s longest-running postcolonial play, with more than 6,000 performances in Marathi and translations in India and abroad.

Tianyi is a poet based in New York, from Hong Kong. His work can be found in the Margins, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is an alumnus of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program.

Pimone Triplett is the author of four book-length collections of poetry, including Supply Chain (University of Iowa Press, 2017). She is also the author of the poetry volumes Rumor (TriQuarterly/Northwestern, 2009), The Price of Light (Four Way Books, 2005), winner of the Levis Poetry Prize, and Ruining the Picture (TriQuarterly/Northwestern, 1998), winner of the Oregon Book Award. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Washington and lives in Seattle.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) is often considered one of the greatest poets in twentieth-century Russian literature. Her legacy includes several collections of lyric poetry and long poems, the most celebrated of which are “Poem of the Mountain” (1926) and “Poem of the End” (1926); verse dramas; translations of Rilke, Goethe, Baudelaire, and other European poets; literary criticism; and autobiographical prose. Broadly described as modernist, her work was not part of any literary movement of the time. Tsvetaeva is known as a technical virtuoso, whose poems combine musicality with highly distinctive elliptical syntax and hectic rhythm.

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