Lauren Acampora is the author of three books of fiction published by Grove Atlantic: The Wonder Garden (2015), The Paper Wasp (2019), and The Hundred Waters (2022), a novel in which Roy Fox of “Dominion” also features as a pivotal character. Lauren’s short fiction and essays have previously appeared in New England Review and NER Digital, as well as the Paris Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and Guernica. She lives in New York.

Emily Bettencourt is a Korean-English translator and serial adopter of passion projects currently living in Portland, Oregon. She attended the LTI Korea Translation Academy from 2017 to 2019 and, in a kismetic overlap of interests, is the translator of Cha Miju’s Philosophizing about BTS (Bimilsincer, 2020) and Kim Namguk’s BTS Insight (2021). She has translated poems by Lee Jenny and Ra Heeduk for Puerto del Sol and Asymptote, and her translation of “Across the Tooniverse” by Im Guk-yeong appeared in Azalea. She can be reached on Instagram and Twitter at @peonydust. 

Hayes Davis is the author of Let Our Eyes Linger (Poetry Mutual Press, 2016). He recently served as the 2023–24 Howard County (Maryland) Poetry and Literature Society Writer in Residence, and won a 2022 Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artists Award. His writing has appeared most recently on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day feature, and has also appeared in Mom Egg Review, Poet Lore, and several anthologies. He was a member of Cave Canem’s first cohort of fellows. An education administrator and English teacher, he lives in Silver Spring with his wife, poet Teri Ellen Cross Davis.

Samantha DeFlitch is the author of Confluence (Broadstone Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, Colorado Review, and Appalachian Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Audubon Artist Residency at Hog Island, and the University of New Hampshire, where she completed her MFA. She lives in New Hampshire, where she is a staff reader for the Maine Review.

Fay Dillof’s poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ploughshares, New Ohio Review, Gettysburg Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Plume, and elsewhere. A recipient of scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Sewanee, Fay has been awarded the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize in Poetry and the Dogwood Literary Prize. She lives with her husband and daughter in Northern California where she works as a psychotherapist.

Ayokunle Falomo is Nigerian, American, and the author of Autobiomythography of (Alice James Books, 2024); AFRICANAMERICAN’T (FlowerSong Press, 2022), finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters’ Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry; two self-published collections; and African, American (New Delta Review, 2019), selected by Sarah Saterstrom as the winner of New Delta Review’s eighth annual chapbook contest. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he obtained his MFA in creative writing, and his work has been anthologized and widely published. 

Fi Jae Lee, based in Seoul, South Korea, holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2005) and a Master of Fine Arts (2007) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 2008, she has specialized in the technique of traditional Korean Buddhist paintings. Employing diverse materials ranging from reinforced plastic to traditional Korean gold pigment, she constructs shrines for the bodies (extinct bodies, bodies of future creatures, bodies shaped by her senses) that exist parasitically within her own body. Her paintings and sculptures have been showcased in numerous exhibitions, including seventeen solo shows across Korea, Japan, and the United States.

Gongmin is a novelist, translator, and activist for animal rights and climate justice. They translate both literature and video games, and recently translated Gye Mihyun’s web poetry collection, The Fall of the Hyuns. Gongmin’s writing focuses on language, anti-speciesism, and nonhuman entities, and they made their literary debut by publishing the short story “Nose” in Consonants and Vowels. They are also one of the founding members of Extinction Rebellion Korea and are currently a member of the Ant and Bee Collective.

Hwang Geum-nyeo was born in 1939 and writes and publishes poetry in Jejueo, an endangered language of her native Jeju Island located southwest of the Korean Peninsula. She is a lifetime resident of Jeju and a living witness to the island’s tumultuous history, including the violent suppression of the April 3 Uprising and Massacre (1948), when an estimated 10 percent of Jeju’s population was killed. Since making her formal literary debut in 2004, Hwang has written over ten books of poetry, children’s poetry, and folk songs in Jejueo and standardized Korean. She is an active member of the Jeju Language Preservation Society.

Gye Mihyun is a poet and animal rights activist. They made their debut by publishing the web poetry collection The Fall of the Hyuns (www.thefallofthehyuns.net). Their experimental poetry performance Stories HONEYBEE Poetry was featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan’s 2021 exhibition, Sustainable Art Museum: Art and Environment, and they served as the editor-in-chief of Korea’s first animal rights quarterly magazine, Wave. They are currently a member of the Ant and Bee Collective. 

Heeum is a Korean poet and a climate justice activist. A recipient of the ARKO (Arts Council Korea) Literary Creation Fund, she gained recognition when she published her debut poetry collection, Facing Skirts Don’t Lift Skirts (Geoneunsaram, 2020). Additionally, Heeum has coauthored a collection of feminist poetry titled We Put on Shoes and Started a Fire (Onegin House, 2019).

Julia Heney received an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Salt Hill, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago, Illinois. 

Anton Hur’s translations have been nominated for the International Booker Prize, National Book Award, Dublin Literary Award, National Book Critics Circle Barrios Prize, and the Firecracker Award. He won the Yumin Prize for his contribution to the arts in Korea. His first novel, Toward Eternity, will be published by HarperVia in July 2024. 

Helen Hwayeon is a literary translator and writer working in Korean, English, and now Jejueo through Hwang Geum-nyo’s body of poetry. Her writing and translations have appeared in Aster(ix) Journal, chogwa, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia and holds a BS from University of Pennsylvania. 

Jack Jung is 2024 NEA Translation Fellow and is currently working on translating Kim Hyesoon’s hybrid collection Thus Spoke n’t. He studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is the cotranslator of Yi-Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020). His poetry and translations have been published in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, BOMB Magazine, the Paris Review, Chicago Review, the Margins, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He teaches at Davidson College. 

Tabish Khair is an Indian writer based in Aarhus, Denmark. His most recent books include Namaste Trump and Other Stories (Interlink, 2023). He has recently completed a book on reading literature as literature—arguing for its crucial role in thinking, and as an antidote to fundamentalism—which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024. 

Kim Bokhui debuted in 2015 after receiving the World of Literature New Writers’ Award (Munhak Segye Shininsang) and Creative Writing 21 New Writers’ Award (Changjak21 Shininsang). 

Lee Seong-bok is the author of Indeterminate Inflorescence (Sublunary Editions, 2023) and is one of the preeminent contemporary poets of Korea. He debuted in 1977 and has published nine books of poetry, including That Summer’s End (Moonji Books, 1990), which is being translated into English, as well as numerous books of prose. 

Trudy Lewis is the author of the novels The Empire Rolls (Moon City Press, 2014) and Private Correspondences (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly, 1994), winner of the Goyen Prize, as well as a story collection, The Bones of Garbo (The Ohio State University Press, 2004), winner of the Sandstone Prize. Her fiction has appeared in the Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, Chattahoochee Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Meridian, Prairie Schooner, Witness, and elsewhere. She is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Missouri. 

Ben Miller is the author of the forthcoming Pandemonium Logs: Sioux Falls, South Dakota 2020–2022 (Raritan Skiff Books, Rutgers University Press, 2024) and River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa (Lookout Books, 2013). His awards include creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, as well as grants from the South Dakota Arts Council and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.

Marla Moffa grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1997 with a degree in theater arts. A theater director, writer, and translator of Italian literature, she has published two children’s books: Il leone con gli occhiali (ETS, 2019) and Non ti senti speciale? (Storie Cucite, 2021). Her first collection of plays, Tre pièces da Borges, is forthcoming in 2024 from Ut Orpheus Edizioni. With Oonagh Stransky, Marla has translated Eugenio Montale’s Butterfly of Dinard (New York Review of Books, 2024). She lives in Italy. 

Iheoma Nwachukwu is the winner of the 2023 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He has won fellowships from the Chinua Achebe Center for Writers, the Michener Center for Writers, and the Mississippi Arts Commission. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Southern Review, Electric Literature, AGNI, Prism International, Crazyhorse, and other venues. His debut collection, Japa & Other Stories, will be published by UGA Press in September 2024.

Emily Pittinos is an assistant professor of English at Providence College. She is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts and support from the Vermont Studio Center, the Alexa Rose Foundation, and Washington University in St. Louis, and her recent work appears, or will soon appear, in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America, and elsewhere. She is the author of Animal, Roadkill, Ashes, Gone: Essays (Bull City Press, 2022) and The Last Unlikable Thing (University of Iowa Press, 2021), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2022 Midwest Book Award. 

Gene Png is an award-winning literary translator and illustrator based in Seoul. 

Cristina Alexandra Pop is an anthropologist and ethnographic fiction writer. While working on her research projects, she became interested in the ways tales come to life through creative writing. Her first creative nonfiction piece was published in Fugue. She is currently working on completing a collection of nine “made-up true stories” that reshuffle reality while remaining ethnographically and historically accurate. Writing in English as a non-native speaker and inspired by the works of Aleksandar Hemon, Chinua Achebe, Yiyun Li, among others, she seeks to give voice to the lived experiences of otherwise silent participants in history.

Ra Heeduk is a Korean poet and literature professor. Born in 1966 in Nonsan, she was raised by missionary parents at different orphanages until age twenty. She attended Yonsei University during the 1980s, where she turned to poetry during the pro-democracy movement to reconcile tension between her parents’ Christian values and her anger at society. She has won the Kim Soo-young Literature Prize (1989), This Year’s Young Artist Award (2001), the Contemporary Literature Prize (2003), and the Midang Literary Award (2014). To date, she has published nine poetry collections, three essay collections, two books of theory, and three compilations.

Laura Schmitt is a multiracial writer with roots in Hawai’i and the Midwest. Her fiction can be found in New England Review, the Pinch, Boulevard, Indiana Review, Florida Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for New England Review’s 2021 Award for Emerging Writers, received a 2019 Hedgebrook residency, and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Laura was born in Southern California and currently lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on a novel and a collection of stories.

Sam Simas is a queer Luso-American writer. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Southern Indiana Review, Hunger Mountain, and other literary magazines. He is the recipient of Copper Nickel’s Editor’s Prize for Prose, placed first in CRAFT Literary’s First Chapters Contest, and has been selected as a 2024 Luso-American Fellow at DISQUIET International. He is a PhD student in fiction at the University of Cincinnati and the contributing fiction editor for the Ocean State Review.

Soje is a poet and the translator of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla (Tilted Axis Press, 2020), Lee Soho’s Catcalling (Open Letter Books, 2021), and Choi Jin-Young’s To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, 2021). They also make chogwa, a zine that features one Korean poem and multiple English translations per issue.

Monica Sok is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Hedgebrook, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, New Republic, and the Washington Post, among others. Sok is a daughter of Khmer Rouge regime genocide survivors and stands in solidarity with Congo, Palestine, and Sudan. She lives in New York City.

Song Seung Eon is the author of three poetry collections about love, education, and work, as well as an essay collection about killing time. In 2016, he won the seventeenth Park In-hwan Literary Award. He is a member of the collective Jangnan, meaning “revolt” and “mischief.”

Justin St. Germain is the author of the memoir Son of a Gun (Random House, 2013) and the book-length essay Bookmarked: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (IG Publishing, 2021). His writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies and has been awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Oregon State and the Rainier Writing Workshop.

Mario Rigoni Stern (1921–2008) was born in Asiago, Italy. An avid mountaineer and reader, at seventeen he enrolled in the alpine corps and during WWII was posted to the Russian front as a sergeant. After refusing to join the Republic of Salò in 1943, he was deported to an internment camp, during which time he started writing Il sergente nella neve (Einaudi, 1953), which earned him the Viareggio Prize. He went on to write short stories, mostly about the people and wildlife of his beloved mountains. “My Paths under Snow” is from the collection Sentieri sotto la neve (Einaudi, 1998).

Oonagh Stransky’s translations from Italian include works by Starnone, Lucarelli, Pontiggia, Dell’Oro, and Saviano. Her translation with Marla Moffa of Eugenio Montale’s collection of short stories, Butterfly of Dinard, was published in May 2024 by New York Review of Books. Her work also appears in a number of journals including the Literary Review, Exchanges, Massachusetts Review, and Southern Humanities Review. Oonagh studied Italian at Middlebury College, UC Berkeley, Università di Firenze, and Columbia University. She now resides in Italy. 

David Joez Villaverde holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. A CantoMundo fellow, he has received honors from the American Academy of Poets, Best New Poets, and Black Warrior Review. His poetry has appeared in Kenyon Review and FENCE, and is forthcoming in AGNI, the Adroit Journal, and Ninth Letter. He lives in New York and can be found at schadenfreudeanslip.com.

Cynthia R. Wallace is the author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2024) and Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering (Columbia University Press, 2016). Her creative and critical writing has been published in Kenyon Review, the Ploughshares journal blog, Commonweal, Arizona Quarterly, Toronto Quarterly Review, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. She is associate professor of English at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan.

Subscribe to Read More