Kazim Ali’s recent books include Sukun: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 2023) and Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry and Poetics of Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions, 2024). He is the founder of Nightboat Books and a professor of literary arts and comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Ali Araghi is an Iranian writer and translator. His writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and Asymptote, among other places. His debut novel, The Immortals of Tehran (Melville House, 2020), has been translated into Dutch and Arabic. He teaches creative writing at the Pennsylvania State University.

David Baker is a poet, critic, editor, and educator who lives in Granville, Ohio, and Hudson, New York. He’s the author or editor of many books of poetry and prose about poetry, including a new poetry collection, Transit (W. W. Norton, 2026). With Michael Collier, he coedited Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly (W. W. Norton, 2025).

Charles Baxter is the author of fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction. He lives in Minneapolis.

Caylin Capra-­Thomas is the author of the poetry collection Iguana Iguana (Deep Vellum, 2022). Her poems and essays have appeared widely, including in Virginia Quarterly Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, The Georgia Review, and Longreads. The recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Sewanee Writers’ Conference, she lives in central Missouri and teaches at Stephens College.

Liz DeWolf is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Her fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Common, and elsewhere. She is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Justin Greene is a poet, translator, and anthropologist based in Berkeley, California. His translations from the Portuguese appear in Granta and AGNI.

Becky Hagenston is the author of four short story collections, most recently The Age of Discovery and Other Stories (Mad Creek Books, 2021), winner of The Journal Non/Fiction Prize and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. Her work has been chosen for a Pushcart Prize and twice for an O. Henry Award. She’s a professor of English at Mississippi State University.

James Allen Hall is the author of two books of poetry and a book of lyric essays: Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas, 2008), Romantic Comedy (Four Way Books, 2023), and I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well (Cleveland State Poetry Center, 2017). They are the recipient of two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts as well as awards from Lambda Literary, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. With the poet Aaron Smith, they host Breaking Form: A Poetry and Culture Podcast. Find them online at www.jamesallenhall.com.

Hilda Hilst, one of Brazil’s most celebrated and transgressive literary figures, was born in 1930 in Jaú, in the state of São Paulo. Her works translated into English include the novels The Obscene Madame D (Nightboat, 2012, trans. Nathanaël and Rachel Gontijo Araújo) and Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat, 2014, trans. John Keene), as well as the poetry collection Of Death. Minimal Odes (co•im•press, 2018, trans. Laura Cesarco Eglin). Hilst spent the latter half of her life at the Casa do Sol in Campinas, São Paulo, where she dedicated herself to writing until her death in 2004.

Ramiro Hinojosa is an Army veteran of the Iraq War. He is the recipient of an NEA-­funded fellowship for veterans by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His stories have been published in the Southwest Review, Salamander, Huizache, and War, Literature & the Arts, while his essays have appeared online at Tin House and Guernica. A native Texan, he holds an MFA from Texas State University and a Bachelor of Journalism from UT-­Austin. He now lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his family.

Kelly Hoffer is a poet and book artist. She is the author of two full-­length collections of poetry—UNDERSHORE (Lightscatter Press, 2023) and Fire Series (U Pitt Press, 2026)—as well as a microchap, the photo I don’t write about (Tilted House, 2025). She currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry.

Garrett Hongo, once a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, was born in Hawaiʻi and grew up in Los Angeles. His latest collection is Ocean of Clouds: Poems (Knopf, 2025). Others include Yellow Light (Wesleyan University Press, 1982), The River of Heaven (Knopf, 1988), which received the Lamont Poetry Prize, and Coral Road (Knopf, 2011). In nonfiction, he has published The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo (Pantheon, 2022), The Mirror Diary (University of Michigan Press, 2017), and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi (Knopf, 1995). His work has been recognized with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a frequent contributor of audio articles to Part-­Time Audiophile and lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Oregon.

Cindy King is the author of two poetry collections, Fever Coat (C&R Press, 2026) and Zoonotic (Tinderbox Editions, 2021), and three chapbooks, Five for Nothing (Galileo Press, 2025), Easy Street (dancing girl press, 2018), and Lesser Birds of Paradise (Louisiana Literature, 2021). Her work appears in Threepenny Review, The Sun, North American Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and scholarships from Tin House, Sewanee, The Fine Arts Work Center, and other organizations. She is a professor of creative writing at Utah Tech University and editorial associate at Seneca Review, TriQuarterly, and Trio House Press.

John Kinsella’s recent volumes of poetry include The Darkest Pastoral: Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2025) and Aporia: New Poems (Turtle Point Press, 2025).

Wheeler Light received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia and lives in Denver, Colorado. He is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Penn Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Barely South Review, and South Broadway Press, among other publications. He is the dad of a cat named Betty and twenty-­something plants, and can kickflip on a good day. You can find his work at www.wheelerlight.net.

Aimee Liu is the author of the novels Glorious Boy (Red Hen Press, 2020), Flash House (Grand Central, 2003), Cloud Mountain (Grand Central, 1997), and Face (Grand Central, 1994). Her nonfiction includes Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders (Wellness Central, 2007). These books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Aimee’s work has also been published in The Common, Solstice Literary Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and taught for fifteen years in Goddard College’s MFA in creative writing program.

Lu Dong, born in 1956, is a contemporary Chinese poet. As he fiercely argues against traditional poetic rhetoric, his work may seem both anti-­poetic and meta-­poetic. His masterful play of words, responding to the hiddenness or mystery of being, hovers on the edge of intelligibility and translatability. He has been writing poetry since 1979 yet has published only a handful of poems in literary magazines. His only collection to date, published in Chinese, is “The Flowers of Sleep” (2020).

Weijia Pan is the author of Motherlands (Milkweed Editions, 2024), selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and winner of the 2025 Levis Reading Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, he has published poems in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-­a-­Day, AGNI, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2026 Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Karola Pezarro studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the town where she has her studio today. The mysterious nature of memory, branching thoughts, and a sense of wonder at the fragility of life and the passage of time form the underlying themes of her work. She explores them through embroidery, three-dimensional works, and video. Pezarro has developed her own embroidery technique to create transparent, free-form works that are suspended slightly away from the wall, allowing them to cast soft, shifting shadows, echoing the fleeting and layered nature of dreams, memories, and thought itself.

Gretchen Schrafft is a fiction writer, journalist, and educator based in Providence, Rhode Island. She graduated from Middlebury College, where she was a New England Review intern. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University and a PhD in creative writing and literature from University of Denver, where her research centered on medieval and early American literature. She’s at work on a series of novels about witchcraft and reproductive justice.

Natasha Singh is an essayist whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the “Modern Love” column of The New York Times, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Threepenny Review, Brevity, Hippocampus, South Asia Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of two Canada Council for the Arts grants and the Barry Lopez Nonfiction Prize. She is completing a collection of essays and short stories and a memoir about grief.

Megan Staffel is the author of six books of fiction, three novels, and three collections of short fiction. Her most recent publication is the novel The Causative Factor (Regal House, 2024), winner of the Petrichor Prize. She taught for many years in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and posts a monthly discussion about a novel or story she admires at “Page and Story” on Substack: https://pageandstory.substack.com/. Her stories and essays have been published in many journals and short-­listed in Best American Short Stories and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Lorenza Starace is a writer from Naples, Italy. She holds an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in Romance Studies from Duke University.

Domenico Starnone is widely regarded as one of Italy’s greatest living authors. He is the author of nearly thirty novels and short-­story collections and has received many of Italy’s most prestigious literary awards, including the Strega Prize, the Premio Napoli, and the Campiello Prize. His works in English translation have all been published by Europa Editions. Ties (2017), Trick (2018), and Trust (2019) were translated by Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri. The House on Via Gemito (2023), The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan (2024), and The Old Man by the Sea (2025) were translated by Oonagh Stransky, who has also translated several of Starnone’s early short stories.

Oonagh Stransky is a translator of Italian literature whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, New England Review, and other publications. Her book-­length translations include works by Domenico Starnone, Eugenio Montale, Erminia Dell’Oro, Carlo Lucarelli, Roberto Saviano, and Giuseppe Pontiggia. Her translation of Starnone’s The House on Via Gemito (Europa Editions, 2023) was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Oxford-­Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the ALTA Italian Prose in Translation Award. Oonagh currently lives in Turin, Italy.

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Wilder (Milkweed Editions, 2018), Redmouth (Tinderbox Editions, 2019), and Meltwater (Milkweed Editions, 2023), which was a finalist for the 2024 Minnesota Book Award and the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a 2025 National Book Foundation Science + Literature selection. She was a 2020–2021 McKnight Writing Fellow and the winner of the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize for her poem “Glacier.” Her fourth book, Cosmorama, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2028.

Austin Woerner is the translator of Su Wei’s novel The Invisible Valley (Small Beer Press, 2018) and two volumes of poetry by Ouyang Jianghe, Doubled Shadows (2012) and Phoenix (2015), both from Zephyr Press. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New York Times Magazine. Formerly the English translation editor for the innovative Chinese literary journal Chutzpah!, he also co-­edited the short fiction anthology Chutzpah!: New Voices from China. He holds a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale and an MFA in creative writing from the New School, and has taught at Sun Yat-­sen University in Guangzhou, Duke Kunshan University in Suzhou, and the University of Leeds.

Jane Yeh is the author of three poetry collections: Discipline (2019), The Ninjas (2012), and Marabou (2005), all published by Carcanet Press in the UK. Her next collection, Pretender, is forthcoming from Carcanet in 2027.

Jess Yuan is a poet, educator, and architect. She is the author of Slow Render (Airlie, 2024), winner of the Airlie Prize, and Threshold Amnesia (2020), winner of the Yemassee Chapbook Contest. Jess is a Kundiman fellow and holds an MFA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Her poems appear in Best New Poets, Tupelo Quarterly Review, jubilat, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is the Director of Intermediate Studios at Boston Architectural College.

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