Kazim Ali’s most recent books are a hybrid novel, The Secret Room: A String Quartet (Kaya Press, 2017), and a monograph, Anais Nin: An Unprofessional Study (Sundress Publications, 2017). His fifth full-length collection of poetry is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in early 2018.

Ryan Bloom is an English lecturer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has written for the New Yorker, Guernica, PEN America, Creative Nonfiction’s In Fact Books, Salon, Black Clock, Arabesques Review, American Prospect, and other publications. His translation of Albert Camus’s Notebooks, 1951–1959 (Rowman and Littlefield) was nominated for the 2009 French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Prize for Superior English translation of French prose. In 2014 he was awarded the Eli Cantor Fellowship by the Corporation of Yaddo.

Mattina Blue is a painter, photographer, designer, and educator. A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology and Hampshire College, she has had her work exhibited, published, and commissioned for more than twenty-five years. She is the author of three books, published by Sellers Publishing and Chronicle Books, and the creator of a number of large-scale public works. Throughout the year, she teaches creative watercolor painting in workshops around the world. She lives and works in a reconstructed barn on the coast of Maine.

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was born in Algeria, where he wrote, directed, and acted in plays with the Théâtre du Travail and the Théâtre de l’Équipe. Toward the end of World War II, during which he served as editor of Combat, an underground French Resistance newspaper, his plays began to appear on stage in Paris, including original works such as Caligula, The Misunderstanding, State of Siege, and The Just, as well as stage adaptations of William Faulkner’s novel Requiem for a Nun and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. The Silences of Paris, his only radio drama, appears here for the first time in English. Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, and died in a car accident only a few years later.

Caylin Capra-Thomas’s second chapbook, Inside My Electric City (2016), is available through YesYes Books. She is the recipient of the Louisville Literary Arts Association’s 2016 Writer’s Block Prize for Poetry, as well as Yemassee’s 2016 Nonfiction Prize. Other poems have appeared in journals including Crazyhorse, Willow Springs, Salt Hill, the Journal, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a renowned Victorian essayist, historian, and social critic. His early work was influenced significantly by German thought and literature, and in 1824 he published a Life of Schiller, followed by a translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. A decade later, he completed Sartor Resartus (“The Tailor Re-Tailored”), a book that is at once a philosophical satire, a fictionalized spiritual autobiography, a novel, and a work of social and aesthetic criticism. He then wrote his monumental three-volume history of The French Revolution (1837), which made use of notes and materials given to him by John Stuart Mill and would later serve as a principal source for Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. Carlyle’s next major work, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History (1841), was based on a series of lectures focused on heroic figures in disparate cultures, and was followed by a sequence of controversial essays gathered in the volume Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850). Carlyle’s final major work, published between 1858 and 1865, was the six-volume History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great.

Mary Clark has an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa, and has published poems and stories in Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Fiction, and other journals. She recently completed a novel about race, love, addiction, and urban renewal that takes place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Many of the Men” borrows from an early chapter of that manuscript.

Paul Guest is the author of three collections of poetry and a memoir. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. A Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award winner, he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.

Dylan Hicks is a writer, musician, and author of the novels Amateurs (Coffee House Press, 2016) and Boarded Windows (Coffee House Press, 2012). His journalism, essays, and short fiction have appeared in the Village Voice, the New York Times, the Guardian, Slate, Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, Puerto del Sol, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Nina Hale, and their son, Jackson.

Cynthia Huntington’s latest collection is Terra Nova, an Editor’s Selection from the Crab Orchard Poetry Series (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017).

Perri Klass is a pediatrician who is currently professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University. Her novels include The Mercy Rule (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), The Mystery of Breathing (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), and Other Women’s Children (Random House, 1990); her nonfiction includes Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor (Perseus/Basic, 2007) and Every Mother Is a Daughter (with Sheila Solomon Klass, Ballantine, 2006). She writes the weekly column “The Checkup” for the New York Times. Her short stories have won five O. Henry Awards; her most recent collection is Love and Modern Medicine (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). She is a fervent Red Sox fan.

Peter LaSalle is the author of several books, most recently two short story collections, Sleeping Mask (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017) and What I Found Out About Her (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), and a collection of essays on literature and travel, The City at Three p.m.: Writing, Reading, and Traveling (Dzanc Books, 2015). His work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Fantasy, Best American Travel Writing, Sports Best Short Stories, Best of the West, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. He currently divides his time between Austin, Texas, where he is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Texas, and Narragansett in his native Rhode Island.

Dora Malech is the author of Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) and Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in publications that include the New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, and Best American Poetry. She has been the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Writers’ Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center, and a 2017 Amy Clampitt Residency. She lives in Baltimore, where she is an assistant professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Kim McLarin is the author of three novels, including Jump at the Sun (William Morrow, 2006), as well as the memoir Divorce Dog: Men, Motherhood and Midlife (C&R Press, 2014). Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Glamour, the Washington Post, Slate, the Morning News and other newspapers and magazines. A former reporter for the New York Times and the Associated Press, she is now an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.

Jennifer Militello is the author, most recently, of A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (Tupelo Press, 2016) and Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013). Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New Republic, Paris Review, and Ploughshares. She teaches in the MFA program at New England College.

Celeste Mohammed is a lawyer, emerging writer, and mother of a two-year-old. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and lives on the Caribbean island of Trinidad.

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, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and recently completed his Creating Connections Consortium Postdoctoral Fellowship at Middlebury College. He has published articles in American Theatre, the Dramatist, the Drama Review, the New York Times, Yale Review, African American Review, and other publications.

Sarah Pape teaches English and works as the managing editor of Watershed Review at Chico State. Her poetry and prose have recently been published in Passages North, Ecotone, Crab Orchard Review, Bluestem, the Pinch, Smartish Pace, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and others. Her chapbook, Ruination Atlas (dancing girl press), was published this year. She curates community literary programming and is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

Michael Parker is the author of six novels and two collections of stories. A new collection of really short stories, Everything, Then and Since, is forthcoming from Bull City Press in fall 2017. He teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at UNC Greensboro and lives in North Carolina and Texas.

Evelyn Reynolds, raised in Oklahoma, earned her MFA in poetry from Indiana University, where she is completing a PhD in medieval English literature. Her work explores intersections among faith, nature, and suffering. Her work has also appeared in Eborakon and Midwest Review.

Sean Shearer is a Poe–Faulkner Fellow at the University of Virginia’s MFA Program in Poetry. Recent work can be found in Beloit Poetry Journal. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of BOAAT Press.

Martha Silano is the author of What the Truth Tastes Like (Two Sylvias Press, 2015), Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books, 2014), The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (Saturnalia Books, 2011), Blue Positive (Steel Toe Books, 2006), and, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, AGNI, and Best American Poetry, among others. She edits the Seattle-based journal Crab Creek Review and teaches at Bellevue College.

Adrienne Su is the author of four books of poems, most recently Living Quarters (Manic D Press, 2015). Recipient of an NEA fellowship, she teaches at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Recent poems appear in Gargoyle, the New Yorker, and Poetry.

Matthew Thorburn is the author of six collections of poems, including Dear Almost (LSU Press, 2016) and the chapbook A Green River in Spring (Autumn House Press, 2015). He lives in New York City, where he works in corporate communications.

Brian Tierney is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry and a graduate of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, FIELD, Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, the Rumpus, and others. In 2013, Narrative Magazine named him among its “30 Below 30” emerging writers. He currently lives in Oakland, California.

Devon Walker-Figueroa lives in Iowa City, where she serves as the poetry editor of the Iowa Review and as co-founding editor of Horsethief Books. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House Online, Diagram, and Southword. She is completing her MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Anne Pierson Wiese received the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award for her collection, Floating City (Louisiana State University Press, 2007). She has also been the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Discovery/The Nation prize. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Hudson Review, Raritan, Southern Review, Antioch Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. She and her husband, writer Ben Miller, recently moved from New York City to South Dakota, where she is working on prose as well as poetry.

Eric Wilson’s previous NER contribution, the essay “I Sing You for an Apple,”  was selected for the 2017 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. In addition, his work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Epoch, Carolina Quarterly, Witness, Boundary 2, German Quarterly, and O. Henry Prize Stories. After a Fulbright year at the Free University of Berlin, he went on to receive a PhD in German Literature at Stanford. Wilson taught German at UCLA and Pomona College. Subsequently he was a freelance writer and translator, and taught fiction writing at UCLA Extension for thirty years.

Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and migrated to the US when he was nine. He is a 2016–2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Fellowship and the 2016 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. He has published his poems in Granta, Ploughshares, Poetry, Kenyon Review, the New Republic, and elsewhere. His first collection, Unaccompanied, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2017.

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