Helene Achanzar is a poet and editor whose writing has been published in The Georgia Review, Sixth Finch, Oxford American, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2022 New England Review Award for Emerging Writers, and her work has been supported by the Mastheads, the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. She is a senior editor for Poetry Northwest, a regional chair for Kundiman, and the director of programs at the Chicago Poetry Center.

Gustavo Amaral is a Brazilian artist who creates mixed media photographic collages that explore the human form. His works capture simultaneously the body in its external form and the inner emotions and psyche that exist beneath its shell, investigating the concept of habitation. Born in 1983, he graduated in his hometown of Belo Horizonte with a degree in journalism before pursuing his passion for visual and fine art in São Paulo. He now resides in Corumbau, Bahia.

Bethânia Pires Amaro was born in Recife, Pernambuco, in 1988 but moved to the nearby northeastern state of Bahia as a child and grew up in the city of Salvador. She has several degrees in law and currently lives in São Paolo, where she works for the Municipal Department of Education. Her first book, a collection of stories called O ninho (The nest) was published by Editora Record in 2023 and won the 2023 SESC Literature Award and the 2024 São Paulo Association of Art Critics (APCA) Award.

Luciany Aparecida, a prolific author of poetry and prose, was born in Jaguaquara, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia. Her most recent novel, Mata Doce, from which the excerpt “Bull-Butcher” was taken, was a finalist for Brazil’s most prestigious literary award, the Jabuti Prize, and won the São Paulo Literature Award. She now lives in São Paulo and teaches at Pontifical Catholic University. 

Marília Arnaud, from João Pessoa, Brazil, is the critically acclaimed author of four novels and four story collections. Her novel O Pássaro Secreto (The secret bird) was selected from 2,400 works for the 2021 Kindle Prize in Literature in Brazil and published in 2021 by José Olympio Editora. Her short story collection The Book of Affects, translated by Ilze Duarte, was a recipient of the 2024 Sundial Literary Translation Award and published by Sundial House in 2024. Translations of her writing appear in Asymptote Journal, Deep Vellum’s Best Literary Translations 2026, Latin American Literature Today, Michigan Quarterly Review, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. 

Jarid Arraes was born in Juazeiro do Norte, Ceará, in 1991. She’s the author of Body Undone and Whirlwind on a Torrid Day, among others, and the winner of the 2020 Biblioteca Nacional Award. She currently lives in São Paulo, where she runs a women’s writing group.

Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of Archipelago (Tin House, 2025), Scorpionfish (Tin House, 2020), and The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012). Her work has appeared in Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications. In 2015, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Athens, Greece. She has taught at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. 

Juliana Barbassa, born in Uberaba, in Minas Gerais, Brazil, had a long career as a nonfiction author and journalist, mostly with the Associated Press and The New York Times, before turning to literary translation, editing, and teaching. She currently teaches journalism at John Cabot University, in Rome, Italy.

Marianne Boruch’s work includes her eleventh book of poems, Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon, 2021); four essay collections, most recently Sing by the Burying Ground (Northwestern, 2024); and two memoirs, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011) and The Figure Going Imaginary (Copper Canyon, 2025). She’s been a Guggenheim, NEA, and Bellagio Center Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar twice, and an artist-in-residence at two national parks and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest. She recently won the 2026 Jackson Poetry Prize.

Cynthia Cruz earned a BA in English literature at Mills College, an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in art writing at the School of Visual Arts, an MA in German language and literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and a PhD from the European Graduate School, where she wrote her dissertation on Hegel and madness. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her recent collection of poems, Hotel Oblivion (Four Way Books, 2022), was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Kwame Dawes is the author of thirty books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent collections are Mortality (Peepal, 2025) and Sturge Town (Norton, 2024), which was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University and teaches in the Pacific MFA Program. He is a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In April 2024, he was named the Poet Laureate of Jamaica.

Laurence de Looze has published five “place” essays in the New England Review. The others were on Lisbon, Rome, France, and Spain. He has also published fiction and translations in many other journals. An American by birth, he is happy to live in Canada where he has taught for many years. 

Rachel de Queiroz (1910–2003) was a Brazilian writer, translator, journalist, dramaturg, and activist. She was the first woman to be elected a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. At the age of eighty-three, she received the Camões Prize, the most prestigious prize for literature in the Portuguese language.

Ilze Duarte writes short prose and translates works by Brazilian authors. She is a recipient of the 2024 Sundial Literary Translation Award for her translation of Marília Arnaud’s story collection The Book of Affects, published by Sundial House in 2024. Her translations appear in Asymptote Journal, Columbia Journal, Deep Vellum’s Best Literary Translations 2026, La Piccioletta Barca, Latin American Literature Today, MAYDAY Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Words Without Borders, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection, The Heart Beats Faster, is slated for publication by Betty, an imprint of WTAW Press, in 2027. 

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (Southern Indiana University, 2014), Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018), and Alien of Extraordinary Ability (Haymarket, 2027). Her poems appear widely in the United States and abroad. She currently teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.

Matty Layne Glasgow is the author of deciduous qween (Red Hen Press, 2019), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. His poetry and nonfiction have recently appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, Houston Public Media, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Matty holds a PhD in creative writing and English literature from the University of Utah and is an assistant professor of English at the College of Charleston, where he serves as the creative nonfiction editor of swamp pink.

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her poems and essays appear in American Poetry Review, BOMB Magazine, The Georgia Review, and Sinister Wisdom. Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship, and a NEA Fellowship. She is an associate professor of creative writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop.

L. F. Khouri is a Palestinian writer whose work explores war, memory, and the inheritance of silence. His fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translations appear or are forthcoming in journals including The Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, River Teeth, The Massachusetts Review, The Adroit Journal, EPOCH Magazine, The Rumpus, Alaska Quarterly Review, Wigleaf, Brevity, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2026 Georgia Review Prose Prize.

Laurie Lathem writes fiction, essays, and plays. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Cream City Review, The Plentitudes, About Place Journal, and others. Her work has won the 2026 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, third place in the 2025 Plentitudes Journal Prize in Fiction, and was longlisted for the 2026 Disquiet Fiction Contest. She is a 2026 fellow at the Vermont Studio Center and a recent alum of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and The Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop. She is at work on a collection of short stories.

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, The Dial, and The Common. Her translation of Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain (New Vessel Press, 2023) received the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Born and raised in Natal, Brazil, she lives in Iowa and is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Grinnell College. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is out now from Grove Atlantic in North America and forthcoming in several countries—including Brazil and Portugal—in her own translation.

Jennie Malboeuf is the author of jump the gun, part of the American Poets Continuum Series (BOA Editions, 2025), and God had a body (Indiana UP, 2020), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Blue Lights Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, and Harvard Review.

Olaniyi Omiwale was born in Lagos, Nigeria. His short stories and essays have appeared in A Long House, Saraba Magazine, and Tender Photos, among other publications. Olaniyi is the author of On & Of, a Substack whose essays announce themselves by where they stand: on or of. He currently lives in the country’s capital, Abuja.

Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey, born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, is a writer, scholar, and translator of Brazilian literature, with a special interest in works by female authors. Her English-language translations of poetry and narrative have appeared in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, The Ilanot Review, Absinthe: World Literature in Translation, Latin American Literature Today, and other venues. Pinto-Bailey translated and wrote the critical introduction for Maria Firmina dos Reis’s 1859 abolitionist novel, Ursula (Tagus, 2022). She is also a regular reviewer of books in translation for World Literature Today. 

Maria Valéria Rezende is an award-winner, feminist nun, educator, poet, and fiction writer, having published to date more than thirty books. In her youth, she was active in leftist organizations working on behalf of the poor and against Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship. Her fiction focuses most often on the lives and struggles of the poorest in Brazilian society. She has received the Jabuti Prize, Brazil’s most prestigious literary award, several times, as well as the São Paulo Prize for Literature and Cuba’s Casa de las Américas Prize, both for her novel Outros cantos (Other songs) (Alfaguara, 2016). 

Shaan Sachdev is a writer and essayist based in New York City. He writes about political bias, thinking, flânerie, the military-industrial complex, and his two favorite divas: Hannah Arendt and Beyoncé. His previous essay for New England Review, titled “Portrait of the Technocrat as a Stanford Man,” won a Pushcart Prize in 2024. His piece “The Discomposures of Solomon Shah,” which appears in this issue, is excerpted from the first chapter of his novel-in-progress, a series of interlacing portraits that explores antagonism between writers.

Julia Sanches translates literature from Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish into English. 

Camila Santos is currently writing other stories and a novel. She holds an MFA in creative writing and literary translation from Queens College. In 2020, she was named a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow. Originally from Recife, Brazil, she lives in New York City. 

Douglas Silver’s fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, The Sun, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He splits his time between the Hudson Valley and New York City, where he serves as executive director of Gotham Food Pantry. Read more at https://douglassilver.com/.

Brandon Som is a Chicano and Chinese American poet. His poetry collection Tripas (Georgia Review/University of Georgia Press, 2023) was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the author of The Tribute Horse (Nightboat Books, 2014), which won the 2015 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He lives in San Diego, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Kumeyaay Nation, and teaches literature and creative writing at University of California San Diego.

Yerra Sugarman is the author of three volumes of poetry, most recently Aunt Bird (Four Way Books, 2022), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and PEN America’s Joyce Osterweil Award. She holds an MFA in painting from Columbia University and a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. A Canadian American poet, essayist, and teacher living in New York City, she serves as a board member for Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry and as a co-curator for Yetzirah’s reading series. 

Cydni Thompson is a poet from Jamaica, Queens. She is a third-year MFA student at Queens College and is the 2025–26 Poetry Coalition Fellow at The Poetry Society of America. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming from ONLYPOEMS, Poet Lore, poetry.onl, trampset, and elsewhere.

Leath Tonino is a freelance writer and the author of two essay collections, most recently The West Will Swallow You (Trinity University Press, 2019). He lives at nine thousand feet in the Colorado Rockies.

Padma Viswanathan’s books have been published in eight countries and shortlisted for the PEN USA Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and others. Her most recent novel is The Charterhouse of Padma (Godine, 2024). Her translations from Brazilian Portuguese have been nominated for The Republic of Consciousness Prize, the International Booker Prize, and others, and she is co-editor of the forthcoming Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories. She teaches creative writing and translation at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville.

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