Megan J. Arlett was born in the UK, grew up in Spain, and now lives in New Mexico. The recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes, she has published her work in Best New Poets 2019, Best New British and Irish Poets, Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, and Third Coast.

Annie Barnett got her start writing fiction at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and is a winner of the James Kirkwood Literary Prize. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband. “What Child Is This?” is her first published story.

Francesca Bell is a poet and translator. Her debut collection, Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. She translated a selection of Max Sessner’s poems, Whoever Drowned Here (Red Hen Press, 2023), from its original German. Her poems and translations appear in New Ohio Review, North American Review, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. She lives with her family in Novato, California.

Jolene Brink is the author of Peregrine (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), winner of the Merriam-Frontier Award. Her writing appears in Orion, Poetry Northwest, Carolina Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. In 2021, she was awarded a grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council for a book project about landscapes and climate migration. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and lives in northern Minnesota.

Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry, the translators of “Mirko and Marion,” are both Canadian and translate fiction from Hungarian. In addition to the fiction of Gábor T. Szántó, they have translated works by Péter Moesko, Zsófia Czakó, and Anita Harag, a group of three talented young authors who are already highly regarded in Hungary. Many of their translated stories and novel excerpts of all four authors have appeared in magazines in North America. 

Andy Chen was born and raised in New Jersey. He is a Kundiman graduate and holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. His poems appear in Ploughshares, december, the Offing, and Denver Quarterly, and his reviews appear in Hong Kong Review of Books, Hyphen, and Colorado Review. He teaches at John Burroughs School in St. Louis.

Rose DeMaris’s poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Narrative, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of Orison Books’ 2022 Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry. Currently, she’s a poetry MFA candidate and teaching fellow at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn. 

Danielle Cadena Deulen is an author, professor, and podcast host. Her latest poetry collection, Desire Museum, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in fall 2023. Her previous books include two poetry collections, Lovely Asunder (University of Arkansas Press, 2011) and Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us (Barrow Street, 2015), and a memoir, The Riots (University of Georgia Press, 2011). She is co-creator and host of Lit from the Basement, a poetry podcast, and teaches for the graduate creative writing program at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Pietro Federico was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1980. He now lives in Rome. He is a writer, copywriter, story editor, and professional translator. His books of poetry include Non nulla (Ibiskos Editore, 2003), winner of the prize “Il Fiore” Pistoia 2003; Mare aperto (Nino Aragno Editore, 2015), winner of the Subiaco Award 2015 and Ceppo Award 2017; and La maggioranza delle stelle–Canto Americano (Edizioni Ensemble, 2020).

Kelle Groom is the author of I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster, 2011), a Barnes & Noble Discover selection, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and a Library Journal Best Memoir; four poetry collections, most recently Spill (Anhinga Press, 2017); and a forthcoming memoir-in-essays, How to Live (Tupelo Press, 2023). An NEA Fellow in Prose and 2020 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction, she has published her work in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, the New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others. She is a nonfiction editor at AGNI.

Herb Harris grew up in Washington, DC, where he attended Georgetown University. He subsequently obtained his medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and did his residency training in psychiatry at Yale. He currently lives in Arlington, Virginia. His essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Hippocampus, Solstice Literary Magazine, the Tahoma Review, and Under the Gum Tree. His essay “A Tourist at Home” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His essay “Portrait of the Artist as a Black Man” was the winner of Solstice’s 2021 Michael Steinberg Award for nonfiction.

Suzanne Jackson, in a career spanning more than five decades, has worked experimentally across genres including drawing, painting, printmaking, bookmaking, poetry, dance, theater, and costume design. Jackson is a recipient of the Jacob Lawrence Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters (2022), an Anonymous Was a Woman grant (2021), NYFA Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award (2020), and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; the Baltimore Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. She is represented by Ortuzar Projects, New York.

Juliet McShannon is an emerging fiction writer who was born in England, raised in South Africa where she practiced law, and now lives in the Colorado Desert in Southern California. She is a recent graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and is an alumna of the DISQUIET International Literary Program. Her writing has appeared in Five Points Literary Journal, the Guardian, the Independent, the Star, and elsewhere.

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, and Ademola Olugebefola have appeared in previous issues of NER.

Greg Pierce’s opera librettos include The Hours (with composer Kevin Puts, based on Michael Cunningham’s novel), Fellow Travelers (with composer Gregory Spears, based on Thomas Mallon’s novel), and The Glitch (with composer Nico Muhly). His plays and musicals include Slowgirl, Her Requiem, Cardinal, The Quarry (with composer Randal Pierce), The Landing, and Kid Victory (with composer John Kander). His work has been produced by the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center Theater, Steppenwolf Theatre, Geffen Playhouse, Vineyard Theatre, Cincinnati Opera, Signature Theatre, and Vermont Stage Company, among others. His stories have appeared in New England Review, Conjunctions, and Avery. He has a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. He lives in New York City.

John Poch’s work has appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, the Nation, and other literary journals. His most recent book of poems is Texases (WordFarm, 2019). His book of essays, God’s Poems: The Beauty of Poetry and the Christian Imagination, was published this year by St. Augustine’s Press.

Mira Rosenthal is the author of Territorial (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), selected by Terrance Hayes for the Pitt Poetry Series, and The Local World (Kent State University Press, 2011), winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and residencies at Hedgebrook and MacDowell, she is an associate professor of creative writing at Cal Poly. She also translates contemporary Polish poetry.

Shaan Sachdev is a cultural critic based in New York City. He writes about ontology, political bias, the military-industrial complex, and his two favorite divas: Hannah Arendt and Beyoncé. He has written for the Point, the New Republic, Slate, Salon, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Max Sessner was born in 1959 in Fürth, Germany. He lives with his wife in Augsburg and has worked as a bookseller, for the department of public health, and for the Augsburg public library. Sessner is the author of eight books of poetry including Das Wasser von Gestern (edition Azur, 2019), Warum Gerade Heute (Literaturverlag Droschl, 2012), and Küchen und Züge (Literaturverlag Droschl, 2005). Among other honors, he was awarded the 2019 Rotahorn Literary Prize.

Gurmeet Singh is a British, working-class writer of color based in Berlin. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Sand, Sinn und Form, 3am Magazine, and elsewhere. The story featured in this edition of New England Review was shortlisted for the 2022 Bridport short story prize. He is currently working on a novel.

Callie Siskel is the author of Two Minds, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2024. Her poems recently appear or are forthcoming in the Atlantic, Kenyon Review, and Iowa Review. She is a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California and a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Ivan Solotaroff, a former senior writer for Esquire, the Village Voice, and Philadelphia Magazine, has published two books: a collection of articles, No Success Like Failure (Sheep Meadow Press, 1994), and The Last Face You’ll Ever See (HarperCollins, 2001), on the American death penalty and executioners.

Cynthia Steele is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her translations include Inés Arredondo’s Underground Rivers and Other Stories (University of Nebraska, 1996), José Emilio Pacheco’s City of Memory and Other Poems (City Lights, 2001), and María Gudín’s Open Sea (Amazon Crossing, 2018). They have also appeared in Chicago Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Southern Review, among others.

Gábor T. Szántó is a well-known Hungarian novelist, essayist, and playwright born in Budapest in 1966. His novels and short story collections have been translated into German, Russian, French, Italian, Chinese, Turkish, Czech, and Bulgarian. The present story is from his volume 1945 and Other Stories (1945 és más történetek, Noran Libro, 2017). Several of these stories have appeared in English in various American magazines. The acclaimed award-winning Hungarian movie, 1945, directed by Ferenc Török, for which the author co-wrote the screenplay, was based on the title story of this volume.

Rebecca van Laer is the author of a novella, How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, 2022). She holds a PhD in English from Brown University, where she studied queer and feminist autobiography. Her work appears in Joyland, Florida Review, Salamander, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her partner and two cats.

Jaime Huenún Villa was born in 1967 in Valdivia, southern Chile. He is an award-winning Mapuche-Huilliche poet. His latest collection of poetry, Crónicas de la Nueva Esperanza / Chronicles of New Hope, is forthcoming in a bilingual edition from Lom Ediciones in Santiago, Chile. He has received numerous awards, including the Pablo Neruda Prize (2003), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), and the Chilean National Council on Arts and Culture’s Best Work of Literature 2013, for Reducciones (Lom, 2013). He has also edited several anthologies of Mapuche and other Latin American Indigenous poetry, including Epu mari ülkatufe tafachantü: 20 poetas mapuche contemporáneos (Lom, 2003). Two of his books are available in English translation: Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008) and Fanon City Meu (Lavender Ink / Diálogos, 2018). Huenún currently lives in Santiago, where he works in the Chilean Ministry of Culture’s Department of Intercultural Studies.

El Williams III’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Orion Magazine, Ploughshares, River Styx, Shenandoah, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in Best American Poetry. He has received fellowships and scholarships from Cave Canem, Community of Writers, the Minnesota Northwoods Writers’ Conference, Tin House, and the Watering Hole. A St. Louis native, he currently resides in Bloomington, where he is a dual MFA/MA candidate in poetry and African American & African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University.

C. Dale Young is the author of a novel and five collections of poetry. He practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. In 2025, Four Way Books will publish his new collection, Building the Perfect Animal: New & Selected Poems.

Subscribe to Read More