Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016). His next collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2026.

Jane Bernstein has written six books. She is a lapsed screenwriter and an essayist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and journals such as Creative Nonfiction, The Sun, and Crazyhorse. Her essay “Still Running” was chosen for Best American Sports Writing 2018. Gina from Siberia (Animal Media, 2018), a children’s book co-written with her daughter, was translated into Russian and German. Her grants include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Creative Writing and a Fulbright Fellowship. She is a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University and honored to be in the New England Review. Visit www.janebernstein.net to read some of her shorter work.

Seth Bockley is a writer of plays, fiction, and poetry, and a theater artist specializing in literary adaptation. His works for the stage have been produced in New York, Chicago, Toronto, Minneapolis, and Mexico City and include adaptations of fiction by George Saunders, Roberto Bolaño, and Washington Irving, as well as The Epic of Gilgamesh. His fiction and poetry have been published in Boulevard Magazine and No Contact. 

Susan Margaret Brown is a professor, critic, and literary translator. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She co-translated with Edwin Honig two Pessoa books: Poems of Fernando Pessoa (Ecco Press, 1986; City Lights Books, 1998) and The Keeper of Sheep (Sheep Meadow Press, 1985). Her translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Southwest Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and New England Review. Brown’s scholarly work has appeared in Pessoa Plural, among other academic journals. She resides in Rhode Island.

Chico Buarque (Francisco Buarque de Hollanda) is a singer-songwriter and novelist, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1944. He has published four plays, seven novels, and the short story collection Anos de Chumbo (Companhia das Letras, 2021), from which this story is taken. His work has earned him many important literary awards, including the Jabuti Prize, the São Paulo Prize for Literature, the Casa de las Américas Prize and the Camões Prize—the most prestigious literary award in the Portuguese language. The English translation of Budapest (Grove Press, 2005)was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025) and Split (Alice James Books, 2014) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books, 2023). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed (New York), and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival.

Tom DeBeauchamp is a graduate of the Portland State University MFA program in fiction. His work has been published in DIAGRAM, SmokeLong Quarterly, Full-stop, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Michael Dhyne is the author of Afterlife (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review,and West Branch, among others. His work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Community of Writers, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He received his MFA from the University of Virginia and his MSW from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Oakland, California, and works as a grief counselor for Stanford Medicine Children’s Health.

Amy Dougher-Solórzano is a poet originally from Harrison, New Jersey. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark and a BS in chemical biology from Saint Joseph’s University. She has received support from the Fine Arts Work Center’s online writing program, 24PearlStreet. She lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband, Aleck.

Alison Entrekin is an award-winning translator from Portuguese. She has translated many of Brazil’s most iconic and beloved literary works, such as Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart (New Directions, 2012) and Paulo Lins’s City of God (Grove Atlantic, 2007). Her new translation of João Guimarães Rosa’s 1956 classic Vastlands: The Crossing (grande Sertão: Veredas) is due for publication in 2026 by Simon & Schuster USA and Bloomsbury Publishing UK. 

Patricio Ferrari is a poet, polyglot literary translator, editor, and traveler. As an editor and translator, he has published twenty books, including The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik (with Forrest Gander, New Directions, 2018), The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos by Fernando Pessoa (with Margret Jull Costa, New Directions, 2023), and Habla Terreña [Field Talk] by Frank Stanford (with Graciela S. Guglielmone, Pre-Textos, 2023). In 2024, he was featured at Shanghai’s “Poetry Comes to the Museum” with Mudderun, exploring how multilingualism shapes identity, belonging, and place. Ferrari speaks seven languages.

Brian Flinn is a mixed media and digital artist from Derby, Connecticut, whose work explores issues of paradox and fragments of time. He currently serves as a Professor of Art and the Art Education Coordinator at Central Connecticut State University, and is represented through Kehler Liddell Gallery in New Haven. 

Morgan Hargrave works in human rights and international development. He lives in the USA with his wife and son.

Ellen Jones is a writer, editor, and translator from Spanish. Her recent and forthcoming translations include Imagine Breaking Everything by Lina Munar Guevara (Peirene, 2025), This Mouth Is Mine by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (Charco Press, 2024), Cubanthropy by Iván de la Nuez (Seven Stories Press, 2023), and The Remains by Margo Glantz (Charco Press, 2023), shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023 and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize 2024. Her monograph, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is published by Columbia University Press (2022). Her short fiction has appeared in Litro Magazine, Slug, and The London Magazine.

Ann Keniston is a poet, essayist, and critic interested in the relation of the creative to the scholarly. She is the author of several poetry collections, including, most recently, Somatic (Terrapin 2020), as well as several scholarly studies of contemporary American poetry. Recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Western Humanities Review, Interim, Fourth Genre, Five Points, and elsewhere. A professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, she lives in Reno.

John Kinsella’s new selected poems, The Darkest Pastoral, is out with W. W. Norton in March 2025. Later in 2025, a collection of new poems, Aporia, will appear with Turtle Point Press, as will the new anthology he has edited, The Uncollected Animals: Poems for Our Nonhuman Kin.

Peter LaSalle is the author of nine books, including novels, short story collections, and collections of essays on literary travel, most recently The World Is a Book, Indeed: Writing, Reading, and Traveling (LSU Press, 2020) and Sleeping Mask: Fictions (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017). Among the anthologies his work has appeared in are Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Sports’ Best Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards,and Best American Travel Writing. He has taught at universities in the US and France and is currently a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Kate Lebo’s first collection of nonfiction, The Book of Difficult Fruit (FSG, 2021), won the 2022 Washington State Book Award. She is the author of the cookbook Pie School (Sasquatch Books, 2023), the poetry chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books, 2018), and co-editor with Samuel Ligon of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze (Sasquatch Books, 2017). Her essay “The Loudproof Room,” originally published in New England Review, was anthologized in Best American Essays. She lives in Spokane, Washington.

Maja Lukic is a Brooklyn-based poet. She received an MFA in poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, A Public Space, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Bennington Review, Image, Sixth Finch, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, Brooklyn Poets, The Slowdown podcast,and elsewhere. Currently, she serves on the board of Four Way Books and as a poetry reader for The Swannanoa Review.

Astrid López Méndez, originally from Teotihuacan, Mexico, is a writer, editor, and one of the founders of publishing house Ediciones Antílope and magazine La estación. Her book Frontera Interior was published in 2020 by Alacraña ediciones in a co-edition with the UNAM. Her writing has been published in anthologies and periodicals including 266 microdosis de Bolaño (La Conjura Ediciones, Buenos Aires, 2024), “Ernaux y Les années super 8: contra la literatura del yo” (Letras Libres, Mexico and Spain, 2022), and Abcdespac (Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico, 2021), among others. She received a Graduate School of Arts and Science Award from New York University, where she completed her MFA in creative writing in Spanish (2021–2024).

Ana Menéndez has published five books of fiction, most recently The Apartment (Counterpoint, 2023). She was a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt, and her awards include a Pushcart Prize for fiction, an American Society of Newspaper Editors first prize for commentary, and a National Association of Hispanic Journalists first prize for commentary. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Bomb Magazine, The New York Times, New England Review, and Tin House and has been included in numerous anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature.

Tomás Q. Morin is the author of the forthcoming novel Cat Love (Pantheon, 2026) and the poetry collection My Favorite Things (Knopf, 2027). He is a Guggenheim Fellow and teaches at Rice University.

Ugochukwu Damian Okpara is a Nigerian-born writer and poet. He is the author of the poetry collection In Gorgeous Display (Fordham University Press, 2023) and the poetry chapbook I Know the Origin of My Tremor (Sundress Publications, 2021). A 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow and an alumnus of both the Tin House Summer Workshop and Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop, his work has appeared in POETRY, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review,and other publications. Currently he is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Mississippi. His website is www.ugochukwudamian.com.

António Osório (1933–2021), originally from Setúbal, a port town south of Lisbon, was born to a Portuguese father and an Italian mother. He practiced law by profession, serving both as the head of the Portuguese Bar Association and as president of the Portuguese Association for Environmental Law. His early books—A Raiz Afectuosa [The Tender Root] and A Ignorância da Morte [Ignorance of Death]—were both published in the 1970s to great acclaim in Portugal. Later books would earn him the Township of Lisbon Literary Prize (1982), the P. E. N. Club Portuguese Poetry Prize (1991), and the prestigious Portuguese National Authors Prize (2010) for his collected works, A Luz Fraterna [Fraternal Light]. A Felicidade da Luz [Joy of Light], published by Assírio & Alvim in 2016, was his last book. 

Nilou Panahpour is a Los Angeles-based writer and criminal defense lawyer. She went to Brown and Stanford Law School, and completed an MFA in creative writing at NYU. She was also a writer and editor at Rolling Stone magazine.

Kate Petersen’s work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Epoch, The Paris Review Daily, LitHub, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is a former recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford University and a Pushcart Prize, and currently leads communications for the Permafrost Pathways project at Woodwell Climate Research Center. Her story “The Iowa Tooth Fairy,” which appears in this issue, is dedicated to her father.

Hilary Plum is the author of five books, including the poetry collection Excisions (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), the essay collection Hole Studies (Fonograf Editions, 2022), and the Fence Modern Prize in Prose–winning novel Strawberry Fields (Fence Books, 2018). She teaches at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program, and she serves as associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. Her work has appeared in Granta, Astra, The Rupture, Los Angeles Review of Books, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry, most recently, West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah Poet Laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she directs the American West Center. 

Mai Der Vang is the author of Primordial (Graywolf Press, 2025) and Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, along with Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is the recipient of Guggenheim and Lannan Literary fellowships, and her poetry has appeared in Tin House, The American Poetry Review, and POETRY, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

Julie Marie Wade writes and publishes poetry, prose, and hybrid forms. Her most recent and forthcoming collections include The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone for the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla for the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry, and The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach.

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