J. Camp Brown is a bluegrass mandolinist hailing from Fort Smith, Arkansas. He has received fellowships from the Arkansas Arts Council, from Phillips Exeter Academy, and from the University of Arkansas, where he received an MFA. His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Crab Creek Review, Black Warrior Review, Shenandoah, Spillway, and elsewhere. He teaches English in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Lauren Camp is the author of two collections, This Business of Wisdom (West End Press, 2010) and The Dailiness (Edwin E. Smith Publishing, 2013). Her third book, One Hundred Hungers, won the 2016 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press. Her poems appear in Slice, World Literature Today, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Camp is a Black Earth Institute Fellow and the recipient of a National Federation of Press Women Poetry Book Prize, a Margaret Randall Poetry Prize, and an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award. She hosts Audio Saucepan—a global music program interwoven with contemporary poetry—on Santa Fe Public Radio.

Penelope Cray’s poems and short shorts have appeared in such literary magazines as Harvard Review, Pleiades, Bartleby Snopes, elimae, and American Letters & Commentary, and in the anthology Please Do Not Remove (Wind Ridge Books, 2014). She holds an MFA from the New School and lives with her husband and two children in Shelburne, Vermont, where she operates an editorial business from home.

Laurence de Looze publishes fiction, essays, and books on a variety of topics. A US native, he has lived in Canada for two decades. His fiction has appeared in Antioch Review, Glimmer Train, Ontario Review, and other journals, and his travel essay, “The Piano Is Always There: A Story of Lisbon,” was published in NER 35.4.

Emma Duffy-Comparone’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Pushcart Prize XXXIX, Ploughshares, One Story, American Scholar, Southern Review, Mississippi Review, Cincinnati Review, and the Sun. She has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Elizabeth George Foundation. A recent guest co-editor of The Pushcart Prize XL, she teaches at Tufts University.

David Ebenbach is the author of two books of short stories—Into the Wilderness (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2012) and Between Camelots (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); in addition he has published two books of poetry—most recently We Were the People Who Moved (Tebot Bach, 2015)—and a nonfiction guide to creativity called The Artist’s Torah (Cascade Books, 2012). With a PhD in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Ebenbach teaches literature and creative writing at Georgetown University.

Michael Fallon is a poet and a senior lecturer in English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he has taught creative writing, literature, and composition since 1985. He was an editor of Puerto del Sol (1980–81) and founding editor of the Maryland Poetry Review (1984–91). His poems have appeared in American Scholar, Antietam Review, Sin Fronteras, Oyez Review, and other magazines. He was a winner of the 1988 and 2009 Maryland State Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry, and is the author of three collections, A History of the Color Black (Dolphin-Moon Press, 1991), Since You Have No Body, winner of the 2011 Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, and The Great Before and After (BrickHouse Books, 2011).

Emily Geminder’s stories and essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award as well as fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Previously, she worked as a journalist in New York and Cambodia.

Rav Grewal-Kök’s stories have recently appeared in Missouri Review, the Literary Review, Gulf Coast, Little Star, and elsewhere. He is an associate fiction editor of Fence. He lives in Saint Louis, where he is working on a novel.

 Philip F. Gura is the William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His books include The Life of William Apess, Pequot (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), and American Transcendentalism: A History (Hill & Wang, 2008), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has appeared previously in NER, most recently “Son of the Forest: William Apess and the Fight for Indigenous Rights” (35.4).

Elizabeth Harris has translated fiction by Italian authors Mario Rigoni Stern, Giulio Mozzi, Domenico Starnone, and others for numerous literary journals and anthologies. Her translated books include Mario Rigoni Stern’s novel Giacomo’s Seasons (Autumn Hill Books, 2012) and Giulio Mozzi’s story collection This Is the Garden (Open Letter Books, 2014). For Antonio Tabucchi’s Tristano Dies, she received a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota.

Mateal Lovaas Ishihara holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Iowa State University and a BA in International Studies from Middlebury College. She works as an English teacher and has taught second graders up through college students. When she’s not teaching, she writes fiction, usually for children and young adults. Her research-rich work focuses on environmentalism, social justice, and LGBTQ issues. She is the recipient of Middlebury’s Alison Fraker Prize for feminist writing. She is currently working on several big writing projects, including a historical novel for teens.

Marina Della Putta Johnston is the assistant director of the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where her scholarly work focuses on Medieval and Renaissance texts. Her translations of Pascoli have most recently appeared in Five Points and the Nation.

Edgar Kunz is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His poems appear in AGNI, Narrative, Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Best New Poets 2015, and others. His work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and Vanderbilt University, where he earned his MFA. He lives in Oakland, California.

Kate Lebo is the author of two cookbooks, Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour, and Butter (Sasquatch Books, 2014) and A Commonplace Book of Pie (Chin Music Press, 2013). Her essay “The Loudproof Room,” originally published in New England Review, was anthologized in Best American Essays 2015. Other essays and poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Willow Springs, Hobart, Ninth Letter, and Gastronomica, and she writes the “Cooking the Books” column for the Spokesman-Review. She lives in Spokane, Washington.

Lisa Lewis’s books include The Unbeliever (Brittingham Prize, 1994), Silent Treatment (National Poetry Series, 1998), Vivisect (New Issues Press, 2010), and Burned House with Swimming Pool (American Poetry Journal Prize, Dream Horse Press, 2011). A fifth volume, The Body Double, is forthcoming from Georgetown Review Press. Recent work appears in Carolina Quarterly, Guernica, Sugar House Review, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. She directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as poetry editor for the Cimarron Review.

Tod Marshall’s most recent book of poems is Bugle (Canarium Books, 2014), winner of the 2015 Washington State Book Award. His previous collections are The Tangled Line (Canarium Books, 2009) and Dare Say (University of Georgia Press, 2002). He teaches at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.

Owen McLeod is a potter and an associate professor of philosophy at Lafayette College, and has held visiting positions at Yale and Mt. Holyoke College. He has poems forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, BOAAT, and Willow Springs.

Lisa Mullenneaux is a Manhattan-based poet and journalist. Her first poetry collection, Painters and Poets (Pennington Press, 2012), inspired the ekphrastic blog www.paintersandpoets.com, where collaborative work in the sister arts is explored and celebrated. Her poems have appeared in American Arts Quarterly, Stone Canoe, Summerset Review, Fourth River, and others. When she’s not writing, she teaches at the University of Maryland.

Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912), a founding figure of modern Italian poetry, might be seen as an Italian equivalent to both Robert Frost and Ezra Pound. He’s like Frost in his particular combination of morbidity and lyrical transcendence, and for the fact that every Italian school kid memorizes his terrifically musical poems. And he’s like Pound for having been the first to modernize the Italian language for poetry, revolutionizing classical standards through a new use of dialect and natural speech. He is best known for his books Canti di Castelvecchio (1903–06) and Myricae (1891).

Hai-Dang Phan’s poems have been published in Poetry, the New Yorker, Boston Review, and Lana Turner. A graduate of the University of Florida’s MFA program in creative writing, he teaches at Grinnell College in Iowa.

Sasha Pimentel, born in Manila and raised in the US and Saudi Arabia, is a Filipina poet and author of Insides She Swallowed (West End Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 American Book Award. She was selected by Philip Levine, Mark Strand, and Charles Wright as a finalist for the 2015 Rome Prize in Literature and was a Philip Levine fellow at CSU-Fresno. Her work has been published in such journals as American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, and Callaloo. She is an assistant professor in a bilingual MFA program in Creative Writing on the border of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

Vincent Poturica’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Birkensnake, Columbia Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, New Ohio Review, and other journals. He lives with his wife in Long Beach, California, where he teaches English at Cerritos College and Chadwick School.

Diane Seuss’s most recent collection, Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015), is soon to be followed by Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press, 2018). Her book Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open was the winner of the 2010 Juniper Prize (University of Massachusetts Press). She has published widely in literary magazines including Poetry, Iowa Review, and the New Yorker. Seuss is Writer in Residence at Kalamazoo College.

Brenda Shaughnessy’s forthcoming collection of poems is So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Her other books are Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon, 2012), Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon, 2008), and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1999). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the Nation, the New Yorker, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and is associate professor of English/Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark.

Rebecca Smith has exhibited widely since 1977 and her work can be found in many private and public collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the Microsoft Art Collection, and the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Australia. In 2010 Rebecca Smith: Tape & Steel was on view at the New York Studio School. Smith received an Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012. She recently curated and exhibited in Climate Contemporary at the Lake George Arts Project, and has shown her tape collages and sculpture at the Nina Freudenheim Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Smith lives in New York City and Bolton Landing, New York.

Taije Silverman’s book of poetry, Houses Are Fields, was published by LSU in 2009, and newer poems have appeared in journals such as Massachusetts Review and Harvard Review. She was a 2011 Fulbright Fellow in Italy and teaches poetry and translation at the University of Pennsylvania. Her translations of Pascoli have most recently been published in Five Points, the Nation, and AGNI.

John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) was an English essayist, poet, translator, and biographer, best known for his seven-volume Renaissance in Italy (1875–86). He wrote studies of Shelley, Ben Johnson, Walt Whitman, and others, and translated The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella and Cellini’s two-volume autobiography. He also published three of his own collections of poetry. His A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) and A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891) were two of the first works in English on the subject of homosexuality. His memoirs were first published in 1984.

 Antonio Tabucchi (1943–2012) was regarded as one of the most innovative translators and fiction writers of postwar Europe, honored with numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Médicis étranger and the Premio Campiello, and translated into over forty languages. Tabbuchi was devoted to history, politics, and freedom of the press, speaking out against fascism and Mussolini in the 1990s. He was a founder, in 1993, of the International Parliament of Writers in the aftermath of Salman Rushdie’s publication of The Satanic Verses, an organization that highlights censorship of writers’ freedoms around the world.