Sharbari Zohra Ahmed is the author of two books: the novel Dust Under Her Feet (Amazon India/Westland Publishing, 2019) and a short story collection, The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai: Stories (Daily Star Books, 2013). She was on the writing team for season one of the ABC TV Series Quantico, and her play Raisins Not Virgins will be produced as part of New York Theater Workshop’s Next Door 2020 season. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Manhattanville College and Artist in Residence in the Film and Television MA Program at Sacred Heart University.

Andrea Appleton writes essays, fiction, and reported pieces from her home in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has appeared in Aeon, High Country News, SB Nation, and Al Jazeera America, among other publications. She has a degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she focused on science and environmental reporting.

Rosaleen Bertolino’s stories have appeared in Vassar Review, Superstition Review, Gravel, Storyscape, West Marin Review, and others. After spending most of her life just north of San Francisco, she now lives in Mexico, where she coordinates and hosts Prose Café, a monthly reading series in San Miguel de Allende. She is currently working on several collections of short stories.

Cassandra J. Bruner earned an MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University. A transfeminine poet and essayist, their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Adroit Journal, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Muzzle, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

Ina Cariño was born in Baguio City in the Philippines. Her poetry and prose appear in Oxford Review of Books, Fugue, Tupelo Quarterly, Nat. Brut, VIDA Review, and December Magazine, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Christina Cook is the author of A Strange Insomnia (Aldrich Press, 2016), Ricochet (Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press, 2016), and Lake Effect (Finishing Line Press), for which she received the 2012 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her poems have been anthologized in Poet Showcase: An Anthology of New Hampshire Poets and Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place. Her poems, translations, essays, and book reviews have appeared in New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, and more. She is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Writing and Rhetoric Program at Penn State University.

Anna Dibble’s paintings have been featured in numerous solo, group, and invitational exhibitions in museums, cultural centers, and galleries. She has been painting, drawing, making sculpture, and writing for over forty-five years, and was a freelance writer, music composer, and co-concept designer for many animated shorts on Sesame Street. Dibble has designed and created sets for opera and theater, taught workshops in Vermont and Maine schools and art organizations, and has worked in animation in Los Angeles, including feature films, television specials, and theatrical shorts for Disney, Marvel, Hanna Barbera, Murakami-Wolf, and Don Bluth.

Emma Duffy-Comparone’s fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, AGNI, the Sun, two Pushcart Prize anthologies, and elsewhere. A recipient of awards from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the MacDowell Colony, the Yaddo Corporation, and the Elizabeth George Foundation, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Merrimack College.

Andrew Feld is the author of Citizen (HarperCollins: National Poetry Series, 2004) and Raptor (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He is an associate professor at the University of Washington.

Castle Freeman Jr. is a longtime contributor of fiction to New England Review, most recently with “Eli Don’t Hunt” (NER 39.2). He lives in southeastern Vermont.

Leslie Harrison’s second book, The Book of Endings (Akron Series in Poetry, 2017), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first book, Displacement (Mariner Books, 2009), won the Bakeless Prize in poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming from West Branch, Kenyon Review, Literary Matters, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Baltimore.

Julian Hawthorne (1846–1934) wrote fiction, poetry, and nonfiction in numerous forms and styles, including literary and detective novels, poems and short stories, biographies, journalism, and essays. He published more than twenty books, including two about his parents—Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1884–5) and Hawthorne and His Circle (1903)—and one about the year he spent in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He wrote for William Randoph Hearst’s syndicate newspapers, and later for newspapers in Boston and Los Angeles. The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne (1938), edited by his second wife, Edith Garrigues Hawthorne, was published posthumously.

Anne Liu Kellor is a multiracial Chinese American writer, editor, and teacher at the Hugo House in Seattle. Her manuscript, Heart Radical, was selected by Cheryl Strayed as first runner-up in Kore Press’s 2018 memoir contest, and her second nonfiction manuscript, Artifacts of Longing, explores themes of inheritance, impermanence, marriage, and the significance of our homes and belongings. Kellor’s essays have appeared in publications such as the Normal School, Fourth Genre, Vela Magazine, and Los Angeles Review. She has received residencies and grants from Hedgebrook, Jack Straw, 4Culture, and Hypatia-in-the-Woods. 

John Kinsella is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry and prose, and his work has won many awards, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry. His new collection, Insomnia, will be published in the US by W. W. Norton in 2019.

Greta Knutson (1899–1983) was a prolific painter and writer whose aesthetics reflect Surrealism and post-Cubist tendencies. Born in Stockholm to a wealthy Swedish family, she moved to France during the 1920s to pursue her art studies. Briefly married to Dadaism founder Tristan Tzara and partnered with French poet René Char, Knutson authored numerous art essays, novellas, and translations of Swedish literature, but published hardly any of her poetry and prose fragments when alive. She committed suicide in Paris in 1983. Lunaires, a volume of her poetry and fiction, appeared posthumously in 1985.

Keith Leonard is the author of the poetry collection Ramshackle Ode (Mariner-Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). His poems are forthcoming in the Believer, Ploughshares, and Shenandoah. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and Indiana University, where he earned an MFA. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Matthew Lippman’s latest collection, Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful, won the 2018 Levis Prize and will be published by Four Way Books in 2020.

Kerrin McCadden is the author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2014), winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize and the Vermont Book Award; and the chapbook Keep This to Yourself (Button Poetry, 2020), winner of the Button Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the Sustainable Arts Foundation Writing Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She lives in South Burlington, Vermont.

Jasminne Mendez is a poet, educator, and award-winning author. Her poetry and essays have been published by or are forthcoming in Acentos Review, Crab Creek Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Rumpus, and others. She is the author of two poetry/prose collections: Island of Dreams (Floricanto Press, 2013), which won an International Latino Book Award, and Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry (Arte Publico Press, 2018).

Scott Nadelson is the author of six books, most recently a novel, Between You and Me (Engine Books, 2015), and a story collection, The Fourth Corner of the World (Engine Books, 2018). He teaches at Willamette University and in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Robert Oldshue is a family physician in Boston. His work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Ars Medica, and previously in New England Review. His first collection, November Storm, won the 2016 Iowa Short Fiction Award from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His story “Thomas” won the 2017 New Letters Fiction Award judged by Cristina García. “Hero Square” is excerpted from an unpublished novel of the same name.

Cecily Parks is the author of Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia, 2008) and O’Nights (Alice James, 2015), and editor of The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2016). Her poems appear in the New Republic, the New Yorker, Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University.

Supritha Rajan is an associate professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her poems have previously been published in such journals as Literary Imagination, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest,  Antioch Review, and elsewhere. 

James Richardson’s previous collections of poems and aphorisms include During (2016); By the Numbers (2010), a National Book Award finalist; Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (2004), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (2001), all published by Copper Canyon Press. For Now will be published in 2020.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) was a French poet whose work prefigured the surrealist movement and modernist literature. He was raised by his strictly devout Christian mother and excelled in his academic work until he ran away to Paris at age fifteen, where he studied various occult and philosophical writings in search of poetic transcendence. All of his known poetry was written before the age of twenty-one, when he abandoned writing and traveled extensively around the world. His best-known works include Les Illuminations (Illuminations, 1886), Le Bâteau ivre (The Drunken Boat, 1871), and Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873). 

Austin Smith is the author of the poetry collections Almanac: Poems (Princeton University Press, 2013) and Flyover Country: Poems (Princeton University Press, 2018). He lives in Schapville, Illinois.

Ralph Sneeden is a recipient of the Friends of Literature Prize from Poetry magazine for his title poem in Evidence of the Journey (Harmon Blunt, 2007). His poems and essays have appeared in the Common, AGNI, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, New Republic, Ploughshares, Surfer’s Journal, and others. He has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the American School in London, and currently teaches in New Hampshire at Phillips Exeter Academy where he is the B. Rodney Marriott Chair in the Humanities.

Melissa Studdard is the author of the poetry collection I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast (Saint Julian Press, 2014). Her writings have appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, Poetry, Harvard Review, New Ohio Review, Psychology Today, Poets & Writers, and more. Her manuscript-in-progress is a poetry collection told mostly from the perspective of Philomela’s severed tongue. To learn more, visit www.melissastuddard.com.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, translator, editor, and zheng harpist who writes and translates in English, French, Chinese, and occasionally Spanish. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Ruined Elegance (Princeton University Press, 2016). Her latest translation is Ye Lijun’s My Mountain Country (World Poetry Books, 2019). She serves as the 2019–20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. She lives in Paris.

D. J. Thielke’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Bat City Review, Fiction, EPOCH, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Ninth Letter, Mid-American Review, and Crazyhorse, among others. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Vanderbilt University, where she was editor-in-chief of the Nashville Review, and her fellowships include the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Fiction at Colgate University. 

Jessie van Eerden is author of two novels, Glorybound (WordFarm, 2012) and My Radio Radio (Vandalia Press, 2016), and the portrait essay collection The Long Weeping (Orison Books, 2017). Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Oxford American, Willow Springs, Blackbird, and other magazines and anthologies. She has been awarded the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, the Milton Fellowship, and a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and teaches creative writing at Hollins University.

Jerald Walker is the author of The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult (Beacon Press, 2016) and Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption (Random House, 2010), winner of the 2011 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction. His work has appeared in magazines such as Creative Nonfiction, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, Mother Jones, Iowa Review, and Oxford American, and he has been widely anthologized, including four times in Best American Essays. The recipient of an NEA fellowship, Walker is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College in Boston.