Kirstin Allio is the author of the novels Garner (Coffee House, 2005) and Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa, 2018), and the short story collection Clothed, Female Figure (Dzanc, 2016). She won the 2019 American Short(er) Fiction Prize, chosen by Danielle Dutton. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Elizabeth Austen is a former Washington State poet laureate, and author of Every Dress a Decision (Blue Begonia Press, 2011) and two chapbooks. For the past decade, she’s led poetry and reflective writing sessions for clinicians in a variety of healthcare settings. “Calling Out the Names” was commissioned by Seattle Children’s Hospital for the annual memorial service for children who have died.

Jan Beatty’s book Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh, 2017) won the 2018 Paterson Poetry Prize. The Switching/Yard (University of Pittsburgh, 2013) was named one of Library Journal ’s “30 New Books That Will Help You Rediscover Poetry.” The Huffington Post called her one of ten “advanced women poets for required reading.” Other books, all from the University of Pittsburgh, include Red Sugar (2008), Boneshaker (2002), and Mad River (1995), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. At Carlow University, she directs the writing program and the Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and is the MFA Distinguished Writer in Residence.

Traci Brimhall is the author of Saudade (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), Our Lady of the Ruins (W. W. Norton, 2012), and Rookery(Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), as well as Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Slate, Poetry, the Believer, the New Republic, and Best American Poetry. A 2013 NEA Fellow, she’s currently an Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.

Dana Jaye Cadman is a writer and artist. Her poetry has recently appeared in North American Review and the Literary Review. She is currently working as libretto illustrator for the upcoming opera Sensorium Ex. She lives just past the edge of New York City, where she teaches writing.

Rohan Chhetri is a Nepali Indian poet based in Houston. He is the author of Slow Startle (The [Great] Indian Poetry Collective, 2017) and a chapbook of poems, Jurassic Desire (Per Diem Press, 2018). His second book of poems, winner of the 2018 Kundiman Poetry Prize, will be published in 2021 by Tupelo Press in the US and HarperCollins in India. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prelude, Wildness, Vinyl, TriQuarterly, Literary Hub, and Poetry Society of America, and have been translated into French for Europe Revue and Terre à ciel. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Inprint, and the Norman Mailer Center.

Kathy Fagan’s fifth book is Sycamore (Milkweed Editions, 2017), a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts and William Carlos Williams poetry awards. Recent work appears in the New York Times, the Nation, Poetry, and Tin House. She has received fellowships from the NEA and Ohio Arts Council. Fagan directs the MFA Program at Ohio State, where she also serves as series co-editor for the OSU Press/Wheeler Poetry Prize.

Joel Fishbane, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, is the author of numerous works including the novel The Thunder of Giants (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in places such as the Saturday Evening Post, Witness, the Writer, and Canada’s History magazine. He is thrilled to be returning to New England Review, where his story “A Clever Science” was published in 2011.

Molly Gallentine’s nonfiction has appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Fourth Genre, the Normal School, and Gulf Coast. She is a Pushcart Prize winner and has been listed as a notable essayist in Best American Essays. Gallentine resides in New Jersey where she’s currently working on her first nonfiction collection.

Bryan Head is a poet from Asheville, North Carolina. He is currently completing an MFA at the University of Maryland. He is the incoming editor of the Sakura Review and co-manages HomeWord Youth Poetry, a youth spoken word and creative writing organization in North Carolina.

Sean Hill is the author of Dangerous Goods (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (University of Georgia Press, 2008). He has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, Oxford American, Poetry, Terrain.org, Tin House, and other journals, and in anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. He directs the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University and lives in Montana.

Gregory Johnson grew up in Appalachia (Sevier County, East Tennessee). He is currently Professor of Philosophy at Pacific Lutheran University. He has a PhD in philosophy and an MFA from Rainier Writing Workshop.

Jakob Maier is the managing editor of Peach Mag. He received his MFA from Syracuse University and was a finalist for the 2018 Metatron Prize and Foundlings Press’s inaugural Wallace Award.

Marilyn Manolakas’s short story “Tornado Season” won a PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers and is anthologized in PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019. Her short fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review and Santa Monica Review. She is a first-year MFA student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she has received the Iowa Arts Fellowship, and was a March 2019 Resident Artist at Brush Creek Center for the Arts. She is at work on a novel about 1970s Los Angeles.

McKenna Marsden studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Oregon and currently resides in Somerville, Massachusetts. This is her first publication.

Ben Miller is the author of River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa (Lookout Books, 2013). His prose has been featured in Best American Essays, One Story, Southern Review, AGNI, Raritan, Yale Review, Kenyon Review,Antioch Review, and elsewhere. Chapter 12 of it all melts down to this: a novel in timelines will appear in Best American Experimental Writing 2020. Miller is the recipient of creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2019), winner of the National Poetry Series. She is also the author of June in Eden (Ohio State University Press, 2017). She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, the “Discovery”/Boston Review prize, and scholarships from the Tin House writing workshop and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Believer, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines. She is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Indiana.

Trey Moody was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. His first book, Thought That Nature (Sarabande Books, 2014), won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in the Believer, Conduit, and Gulf Coast. He teaches at Creighton University and lives with his daughter in Omaha, Nebraska.

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, the Black Scholar, and other publications.

Xan Padrón is a Galician photographer, musician, and composer. His fascination with time and movement, and an ability to go unnoticed by his subjects, brought him to the realization of how much life happens at seemingly insignificant locations. His work has been exhibited in Spain, Canada, Israel, the US, and in a solo exhibition at the United Nations in early 2019. His portraits of artists have been published worldwide in newspapers, magazines, concert programs, posters, and album covers. Padrón lives and works in New York City with his wife, the musician, composer, writer, and educator Cristina Pato.

Kira Procter is a Canadian writer who splits her time between Toronto and Paris. She is currently at work on an MFA in fiction through NYU’s low-residency program, as well as a novel. This is her first published story.

Dean Rader has written, edited, and co-edited eleven books, including Works & Days (Truman State University Press, 2010), which won the T. S. Eliot Prize, Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, edited with Brian Clements and Alexandra Teague (Beacon, 2007), and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. At present, he is at work on poems that respond to the work of Cy Twombly. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and the recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.

Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, while individual poems have won contests and been published by Puritan, Meridian, and Passages North. His work has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and by The Poetry Society of America. He’s gearing up to open a restaurant/bar in Missoula, Montana.

Shang Qin (1930–2010) is the pen name of Luo Xianchang, born in Sichuan, China. After repeatedly being press-ganged by various regimes in revolutionary China, he eventually fled to Taiwan in the late 1940s. He worked as editor of several journals and newspapers, including as chief editor of China Times Weekly. Shang is often noted as one of the first accomplished surrealist poets and writers of prose poetry in the Chinese language. His work has been translated into Swedish, Dutch, French, and English.

Sharon Solwitz’s novel in stories Abra Cadabra won the 2018 Christopher Dohenny Award from the Center for Fiction. Her novel Once, in Lourdes (Spiegel and Grau, 2017) won first prize in adult fiction from the Society of Midland Authors. She is also the author of the novel Bloody Mary (Sarabande, 2003) and the collection of stories Blood and Milk (Sarabande, 1996), which won the Carl Sandburg Prize from Friends of the Chicago Public Library and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in Tikkun, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad’s poetry has appeared in Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s the Margins, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Waxwing, among
others. She is the author of A Form of Beta (typewriter.city, 2017) and the former poetry editor for Noble/Gas Qtrly. She won the 2019lumina La Lengua contest and the 2016 Pinch Literary Prize, and is a Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets nominee. She lives in New York where she practices law.

Alexander Turner is an MFA candidate at the University of Washington’s Creative Writing Program. His writing includes poetry, medieval/contemporary Chinese translation, and linguistics research. Originally from Bountiful, Utah, Turner now lives in Seattle.

A. Vizsolyi is the author of two books, Anthem for the Wounded (Sibling Rivalry, 2018) and The Lamp with Wings: Love Sonnets(HarperPerennial, 2011), winner of the National Poetry Series, selected by Ilya Kaminsky. His verse-play, The Case of Jane, was produced by Performa and broadcast on National Public Radio, and it was adapted into a libretto for Scottish composer Ben Lundt. He is on the faculty in the BFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College.

Owen Wister (1860–1938), born in Philadelphia and educated at Harvard, began writing stories and sketches about the American West in 1891. Throughout the 1890s he published his stories of the West in Harper’s Weekly, and in 1902 he published his bestselling novel, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. His many other publications include the parodic novel The New Swiss Family Robinson (1882), the biography Ulysses S. Grant (1900), the novel of manners Lady Baltimore (1906), and Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, 1880–1919 (1930). His collected writings were published in eleven volumes in 1928, and his journals and letters from 1885 to 1895 were published in Owen Wister Out West (1958), edited by his daughter, Fanny Kemble Wister.

from NER 40.4 (2019)
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