Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Acolyte of the Exquisite. An Iranian-American poet, medium, and scholar, she received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, the Kenyon Review, Annulet, the Hopkins Review, the Missouri Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Hailing from the Northeast, she currently haunts the Midwest.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems, including A Film in Which I Play Everyone (Graywolf, 2023), A Doll for Throwing (Graywolf, 2017), and Elegy (Graywolf, 2007), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher (Graywolf, 2012), and Purgatorio (Graywolf, 2021). Paradiso is forthcoming in 2025. She is also the co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Victoria Chang’s latest book of poems is With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024). She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the director of Poetry@Tech.

Mary Clark came to fiction writing as a poet. The New England Review has published both her poems and short stories. She is the winner of the 2021 Crazyhorse Fiction Prize. Her poetry and fiction also appear in Ploughshares, Fiction, the Iowa Review, swamp pink, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, and other magazines. She pulled scenes of the story “Developed” from a chapter in her current novel manuscript. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Joseph De La Torre is from Las Vegas, Nevada, and Los Angeles, California. He is a PhD candidate in the University of Southern California’s creative writing and literature program.

Matt Donovan is the author, most recently, of The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA, 2022) and Missing Department (Visual Studies Workshop, 2023), a collection of poetry and art made in collaboration with the artist Ligia Bouton. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Donovan serves as director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections and three books of nonfiction, including Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity (University of New Mexico Press, 2023). Her next book of poems, Civilians, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2025. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, New England Review, Southern Review, and Ploughshares. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas.

Rachel Greenley has essays that can be found in the New York Times, Orion Magazine, and River Teeth, among others. Her essay in Orion, “The Atomic Disease,” was selected by Longreads as their #1 essay of the week. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her thesis, a memoir in essays, explores the conflict between the values of her adult life in corporate America with those of her childhood on a hippie commune. She has been supported by Prospect Street Writers House. After years at Starbucks and Amazon, Rachel now writes for a public university’s healthcare system.

Christine Grillo is a Baltimore-based novelist and science writer. Her debut novel, Hestia Strikes a Match (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023), was one of NPR’s “Books We Love 2023.” Her short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, the Southern Review, LIT, and other journals. Her nonfiction covers science, public health, food systems, agriculture, and climate change, and has been published in outlets such as the New York Times, the Atlantic: CityLab, Audubon, NextTribe, and Real Simple.

francine j. harris has authored various collections of poetry, the third of which, entitled Here is the Sweet Hand, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. Her second collection, play dead, was the winner of the Lambda Literary and Audre Lorde Awards. Originally from Detroit, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is professor of English at the University of Houston and serves as consulting faculty editor at Gulf Coast.

Lindsay Hill is a graduate of Bard College. Since 1974, he has published six books of poetry, including Contango (Singing Horse Press, 2006) and The Empty Quarter (Singing Horse Press, 2010). His work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals. His first novel, Sea of Hooks (McPherson & Company, 2013), won the 2014 PEN Center USA Fiction Award, the 2015 IPPY Gold Medal for Literary Fiction, and the 2016 Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award. His second novel, Tidal Lock, from which the work included here is excerpted, will be published by McPherson in fall 2024. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Liana Kapelke-Dale (she/her) is a queer poet, ATA-certified translator (Spanish to English), mixed-media artist, and nonpracticing attorney. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection Seeking the Pink (Kelsay Books, 2021) as well as two poetry chapbooks. Her poetry and translations have appeared in a myriad of journals and are recent or forthcoming in Poet Lore, Contemporary Verse 2, and the Scop, among others. Liana holds a BA in Spanish language and literature from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a JD from the University of Wisconsin Law School. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Lou Mathews’s story “Desperate Times, Desperate Crimes,” published in this issue, will appear in his new novel Hollywoodski, forthcoming from Turner Publishing’s Tiger Van Books imprint in January 2025. This is the third story published in NER from Hollywoodski. Patton Oswald had this to say about the book: “Screenwriters and movie buffs beware—Hollywoodski touches the dark nerve of desperation and surrealism behind the glitter of show business with an icicle. You have been warned.”

Judith Claire Mitchell is the author of the novels The Last Day of the War (Pantheon, 2004) and A Reunion of Ghosts (Harper, 2015), the recipient of the Edna Ferber Prize in Fiction, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her short stories and essays have most recently appeared in the Missouri Review, the Sun, the Sewanee Review, and Another Chicago Magazine, among others. A professor emerita in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she currently lives in Madison where she writes and works as a freelance developmental editor.

Nathaniel G. Nesmith holds an MFA in playwriting and a PhD in theater from Columbia University. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Marymount Manhattan College, City College of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Middlebury College. He has published articles in American Theatre, the Dramatist, the Drama Review, the New York Times, Yale Review, African American Review, Black Scholar, American Music, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and other publications. His interviews with John Guare, Charles Johnson, Steve Carter, Ademola Olugebefola, and Suzanne Jackson have appeared in previous issues of NER.

Ben Ren studied computer engineering and creative writing at the University of Minnesota. The winner of the 2023 Solas Award for Best Travel Writing, his work has previously been published in IMPACT magazine. He was the 2022–2023 creative nonfiction fellow at the Loft Literary Center, and his literary musings can be found on actionischaracter.substack.com. 

Michael Robins is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The Bright Invisible (Saturnalia Books, 2022) and People You May Know (Saturnalia Books, 2020). He lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he teaches in the MFA program at McNeese State University and serves as editor of the McNeese Review.

Viplav Saini has previously published poems, a translation, and an essay in journals such as POETRY, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Massachusetts Review. A native of Delhi, India, he is a clinical professor of economics at NYU. He is a Kundiman fellow and received a Katharine Bakeless award from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Julia Soboleva is a UK mixed-media artist, originally from Latvia, known for her evocative paintings on found photographs. An intuition-led creator, she draws inspiration from meditation, dancing, mythology, and archetypes. Reflecting on her experiences of cultural and family dislocation, Julia explores themes of madness, reality, taboo, and transgenerational trauma in her work. She creates imaginary worlds that act like mirrors, allowing viewers to see what they need most, with no fixed interpretation. Currently, Julia is a full-time independent creator, balancing her professional practice in illustration and publishing with parenthood and the practice of meditation.

Robert Stothart was born in New Jersey and grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A conscientious objector, he served as a VISTA volunteer in West Virginia in the 1960s. He holds an MFA from the University of Washington. After teaching for the Nooksack Tribe in Deming, Washington, he taught and retired from Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming. He and his wife divide their time between Bellingham, Washington, and Owl Creek, Wyoming. He was awarded the 2018 Conger Beasley Jr. Prize in Nonfiction from New Letters, and the 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Nonfiction from the Missouri Review.

Yuki Tanaka was born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan. His poems have appeared in the Nation, the New Republic, the Paris Review, POETRY, and elsewhere. His first full-length collection, Chronicle of Drifting, will be published by Copper Canyon Press. He has also co-translated, with Mary Jo Bang, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi—forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2024. He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University.

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA Editions, 2021) and the essay collection We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress (Graywolf, 2018). He is also the editor of Little Mr. Prose Poem: Selected Poems of Russell Edson (BOA Editions, 2022). His next collection will be published in 2026. He works as Director of Special Projects for the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Jessica Treadway has published four novels and three collections of short stories, one of which, Please Come Back to Me (University of Georgia Press, 2012), received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her most recent collection is Infinite Dimensions (Delphinium Books, 2022). A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Cultural Council, she is a Senior Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College in Boston.

Blanca Varela (1926–2009) was a surrealist poet born in Lima, Peru. She co-created the national poetry movement known as “la Generación del 50” with fellow contemporary Peruvian poets. Varela’s work was championed by Octavio Paz, who wrote the introduction to her first volume of poetry, Ese puerto existe / That Port Exists (Universidad Veracruzana, 1959). Varela has been honored with a myriad of awards, including the 2001 Octavio Paz Prize for poetry, the 2006 Federico Garcia Lorca City of Granada International Poetry Prize, and Spain’s Queen Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry in 2007. Despite this acclaim, she has not been translated extensively into English.

Nirmal Verma (1929–2005) was a Hindi writer, essayist, novelist, translator, and activist. Born in Shimla, India, he was a pioneer of the Nai Kahani (New Story) movement in Hindi literature. Verma published nine essay collections and travelogues, five novels, and eight short-story collections. In his thirties, Verma lived in Prague for ten years, learning Czech and translating Czech classics into Hindi, and also traveled widely in Europe. Verma received the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary prize, as well as the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France.

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