Mir Mahfuz Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and studied at Essex University. He dances, acts, and has worked as a model and a tandoori chef. He has given readings and performances at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, BBC Newsnight Review, Radio 4, and the World Service. He is the winner of the 2013 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. His first poetry collection, Midnight, Dhaka, was published in 2014 by Seren. He is now completing his second full collection. He lives with his wife and son in London.

Rowyda Amin grew up in Canada, Saudi Arabia, and England; she lived in London for eleven years and now resides in the Bronx. She is the author of the chapbooks Desert Sunflowers (flipped eye, 2014) and We Go Wandering at Night and Are Consumed by Fire (Sidekick Books, 2017). Her poems have appeared in anthologies from Bloodaxe Books, Sidekick Books, and Cinnamon Press, as well as in magazines including Poetry Review, Magma, and Wasafiri. She has performed at the Royal Festival Hall, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Ledbury and Brighton festivals.

Indran Amirthanayagam has published seventeen poetry books including The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, 2020), Coconuts on Mars (Paperwall Publishers, 2019), and the Paterson Prize–winner The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose, 1993). He received a 2020 grant from the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the US/Mexico Fund for Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He edits the Beltway Poetry Quarterly and hosts the Poetry at the Port spoken word series in Silver Spring, Maryland. He writes and publishes in French, Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as English.

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator whose newest collection, Arrows, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Milkweed Editions will be publishing Stone-Garland, a selection of lyric poems from the Ancient Greek that includes the poems published here. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim foundations, and he teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.

Caroline Bergvall is an award-winning writer, artist, and performer who works across languages, art forms, and media. She is a strong exponent of interdisciplinary arts practices and writing methods adapted to contemporary audiovisual and contextual concerns and multilingual identities and histories. Bergvall’s projects include performances, installations, books, audio pieces, net-based work, graphic, and printed work. Her current book, Alisoun Sings (Nightboat, 2019), is the final volume of a trilogy exploring medieval and contemporary languages and source materials, which includes includes Drift (Nightboat, 2014), awarded a 2017 Cholmondeley Award. Bergvall is currently a Visiting Professor at Kings College London.

Emma Bolden is the author of three full-length collections of poetry—House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2018), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2016), and Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013)—and four chapbooks. She is the recipient of a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, and her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, Best American Poetry, Best Small Fictions, and such journals as the Mississippi Review, the Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, and Indiana Review. She currently serves as associate editor-in- chief for Tupelo Quarterly.

Alison Brackenbury was born in 1953 in Lincolnshire, in the East Midlands of England. She comes from a long line of servants and skilled farm workers. After winning a scholarship to Oxford to study English, she worked as a technical librarian, a clerk, and a metal finisher in a family business. She is now retired. Her poetry has won an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award and has frequently been broadcast on BBC Radio. Gallop, her selected poems taken from nine previous collections, was published in 2019 by Carcanet.

Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University. Her book Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems was published by Basic Books in 2019; her next book of poems and translations, After Callimachus, was published by Princeton in spring 2020.

James Byrne’s most recent poetry collections are The Caprices (Arc Publications, 2019), Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, 2015), and White Coins (Arc Publications, 2015). He co-translated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012; Northern Illinois University Press, 2013), and he co-edited I Am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English. He is the co-editor of Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Edge Hill University Press/Arc, 2017) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). The work in this issue of New England Review comes from a manuscript in progress titled Places You Leave.

Deric Ch’ng was born in Penang, Malaysia, and lives and works in London. He earned a Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Sustainable Architectural Design at the University of Lincoln, England. After he completed his architecture studies in 2006, he relocated to the capital city, where he exhibits his work regularly. Since his solo exhibition London, the visit in 2010, he has continued to be inspired by and explore his favorite London cityscapes in painting. See more of his work on his website and Instagram.

Hugh Coyle’s poetry and prose has appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, New England Review, Green Mountains Review, and Christopher Street, among others. He has received a Pushcart Prize, a Bakeless fellowship at the Camargo Foundation, and a Vermont Arts Council grant. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he served on the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference admissions board. In recent years, Coyle was invited to discuss his research on the origins of the Nobel Peace Prize at the Peace Palace in The Hague. This January he was awarded a Kathryn Wasserman Davis Peace Fellowship at Middlebury College.

Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. His first book, Solar Prominence (Bedbug Press, 2005), was selected by Vern Rutsala for the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books. A second collection, Vagrants & Accidentals, was published in the Pacific Northwest Poets Series of the University of Washington Press (2017). Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009 to 2016, he now serves as executive editor of Poetry NW Editions.

Sharon Dolin is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Manual for Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). Her translation of Gemma Gorga’s Book of Minutes (Field Translation Series/Oberlin College Press, 2019) received grants from PEN and Institut Ramon Llull. Her prose memoir Hitchcock Blonde has just been published by Terra Nova Press. She is associate editor of Barrow Street Press and directs Writing About Art in Barcelona.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently American Samizdat (Diode Editions, 2019), and a book of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her eighth collection of poems, Simple Machines, won the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award and will be published by the University of Evansville Press in 2020. Her ninth book of poems, Wild Kingdom, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in 2021. Her work has appeared in Poetry, New England Review, and Southern Review. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.

Sasha Dugdale has published four collections of poems with Carcanet, most recently Joy (2017), a PBS Choice. The title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016. She is a Russian translator and is currently working on translations of the Russian poet Maria Stepanova, to be published by Bloodaxe and New Directions in 2020. She is former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and poet-in-residence at St. John’s College, Cambridge (2018–2020).

Ryan Eric Dull lives in Southern California. His work has appeared in the Missouri Review and the Pushcart Prize Anthology and is upcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Zoë Dutka was born in New York and moved to Venezuela in her teens. Her work has appeared in n+1, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Shenandoah. She now lives in Brazil.

Naomi Foyle is a British-Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist. Her poetry publications include The Night Pavilion (Waterloo Press, 2008), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Adamantine (Red Hen/Pighog Press), which she launched in New York City, New Jersey, and western Canada in 2019. The author of five science fiction novels, she is currently adapting her eco-SF quartet The Gaia Chronicles for puppet theater. She edited the bilingual anthology A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry (Smokestack Books, 2017), and for her poetry and essays about Ukraine she was awarded the 2014 Hryhorii Skovoroda prize. She lives in Brighton and teaches at the University of Chichester.

Gemma Gorga has published six collections of poetry in Catalan. Her most recent collection, Mur (Barcelona: Meteora, 2015), won the Premio de la Crítica de poesía Catalana. Her new book of poems, Viatge al centre, is forthcoming in 2020. She is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature at the University of Barcelona.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet, 2019) and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan, 2010). Her sixteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz (Pleiades, 2020) and Emmanuel Moses’s Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award, and the Argana international poetry award from the Beit as-Sh’ir/House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris.

Rachel Hall is the author of Heirlooms (BkMk Press, 2016), selected by Marge Piercy for the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize. Hall’s stories and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, and Natural Bridge. In addition, she has received awards and honors from publications such as Lilith, Glimmer Train, and New Letters, and from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Ragdale, and the Ox-Bow School of the Arts. “Those Girls” is part of a new collection that examines gun violence.

James Hoch’s books are Miscreants (Norton, 2007) and A Parade of Hands (Silverfish Review Press, 2003). Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey is due in 2022 from LSU press. His work has appeared in Poetry, the New Republic, the Washington Post, Slate, the Chronicle of Higher Education, American Poetry Review, New England Review, and many other magazines, and has been selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2019. He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences, St. Albans School for Boys, The Frost Place, and Summer Literary Seminars. Currently he is Professor of Creative Writing at Ramapo College of New Jersey and guest faculty at Sarah Lawrence.

W. H. Hudson (1841–1922), born in Buenos Aires, was a British author, naturalist, and ornithologist, whose books include Green Mansions: A Novel, A Shepherd’s Life, and Afoot in England. His Adventures Among Birds was reissued by the Collins Nature Library in 2012, with an introduction by Robert MacFarlane.

David Keplinger is the author of six collections of poetry, recently The Long Answer (Texas A&M, 2020) and Another City (Milkweed, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 UNT Rilke Prize. Since 2007 he has translated four collections from the German and Danish with authors Jan Wagner and Carsten René Nielsen. He teaches at American University in Washington, DC.

Marshall Klimasewiski is the author of two books, both published by W. W. Norton: The Cottagers (2006), a novel, and Tyrants (2008), short stories. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Tin House, Conjunctions, the Yale Review, and elsewhere, and has been included in The Best of Tin House and Best American Short Stories. He teaches in the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for twenty-one years. She is a 2020 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and author of The Ghost Wife (Poetry Society of America, 2017), winner of the Crab Orchard Review’s 2018 Richard Peterson Prize. A 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow, she currently organizes for the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers they face in the literary community.

Nick Makoha’s debut, Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree Press), was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize and nominated by the Guardian as one of the best books of 2017. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and Complete Works alumnus, he won the 2015 Brunel Prize and 2016 Derricotte & Eady Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. He was the 2019 Writer-in-Residence for The Wordsworth Trust and Wasafiri. His play The Dark, produced by Fuel theatre and directed by JMK Award–winner Roy Alexander, had a UK National tour in 2019. His poems appeared in the New York Times, Poetry Review, Rialto, Poetry London, TriQuarterly Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, and Wasafiri.

Maitreyabandhu won the Keats-Shelley Prize, the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, and the Basil Bunting Award. His first pamphlet, The Bond, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award. His second pamphlet, Vita Brevis, was a Poetry Book Society Choice. He has published three collections with Bloodaxe Books: The Crumb Road (2013), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Yarn (2015); and After Cézanne (2019). Maitreyabandhu lives and works at the London Buddhist Centre, UK, and has been ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order for twenty-nine years. He has written three books on Buddhism published by Windhorse Publications.

Lou Mathews’s story “Tutorial” is from a nearly-finished manuscript, Hollywoodski, stories by and about Dale Davis, a self-described “faded screenwriter.” Another story from Hollywoodski, “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others,” was published in NER 35.2. Mathews’s story “Crab Dinners” from Santa Cruz Noir (Akashic Books) was picked as a “Distinguished Other Story” in this year’s Best American Mystery Stories. His new novel, Shaky Town will be published by Tiger Van Books, a new imprint of Prospect Park Books, in Summer 2021. He has taught in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program since 1989.

Sean O’Brien’s tenth collection of poems, It Says Here, is to be published by Picador in autumn 2020. His work has received awards including the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award. His Collected Poems appeared in 2012. He has translated the Inferno, as well as works by Aristophanes, Fortino Cortes, and Lope de Vega. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Alberto Prunetti was born in Piombino, Italy, in 1973. Asbestos, published by Alegre in 2014 and translated into French, Spanish, and Catalan, is the first in a trilogy of books that focus on the situation of the worker in Italy. The second in the series, 108 Meters (Laterza, 2018), is forthcoming in Greek and Spanish. The third book is due out in July 2020, also from Laterza. Prunetti contributes regularly to La Repubblica, Il Manifesto, and Jacobin, and has translated writers such as Angela Davis, Evaristo Carriego, Roberto Arlt, Osvaldo Bayer, and David Graeber.

Shazea Quraishi is a Pakistani-born poet and translator based in London. Her poems have appeared in UK and US publications including the Guardian, the Financial Times, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and numerous anthologies. Her books include The Art of Scratching (Bloodaxe Books, 2015) and the chapbook The Courtesans Reply (flipped eye, 2012), which she is adapting as a play. She teaches with the Poetry School and Translators in Schools and is an artist in residence with Living Words.

David Roderick is the author of two books of poems, Blue Colonial (Copper Canyon Press, 2006) and The Americans (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). From 2017 to 2019 he wrote a weekly poetry column for the San Francisco Chronicle. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Amy Lowell Scholar, Roderick lives in Berkeley, California, and co-directs Left Margin LIT, a creative writing center and work space serving writers in the Bay Area.

Carol Rumens’s latest collections are The Mixed Urn (2019) and Perhaps Bag (2017), both published by Sheep Meadow Press, USA. Her pamphlet Bezdelki: Small Things, published by the Emma Press and illustrated by Emma Wright, won the Michael Marks Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet of 2018. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she has published short stories, the novel Plato Park (Chatto, 1988), a trio of poetry lectures (Self into Song, Bloodaxe, 2007), and occasional translations of Russian poetry with her late partner, Yuri Drobyshev. She teaches creative writing at Bangor University, Gwynedd, and contributes a popular blog, “Poem of the Week,” to the Guardian Books Online.

Fiona Sampson is published in thirty-seven languages and has received a number of international awards and fellowships. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she has an MBE for Services to Literature. National prizes include the Newdigate Prize, Cholmondeley Prize, Hawthornden Fellowship, and awards from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales, Society of Authors, Poetry Book Society, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She was editor of Poetry Review from 2005 to 2012 and is now Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton. In Search of Mary Shelley (Profile Books, 2018) was internationally critically acclaimed, and her poetry collection Come Down (Corsair, 2020) has received two major European prizes, the Naim Frashëri Laureateship and European Lyric Atlas Prize.

Laura Schmitt is a multiracial writer with family roots in Southern California, Hawaii, and the American Midwest. Her fiction has appeared in Boulevard, Chaffin Journal, and Florida Review. She received a 2019 Hedgebrook residency and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Seni Seneviratne, born and raised in Leeds, is of English and Sri Lankan heritage. Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin (2007), The Heart of It (2012), and Unknown Soldier (2019) were all published by Peepal Tree Press. Her poem “Operation Cast Lead” was shortlisted in the Arvon International Poetry Competition (2010). She is a fellow of The Complete Works program for diversity and quality in British poetry and has collaborated with filmmakers, visual artists, musicians, and digital artists. She is currently one of ten commissioned writers on the Colonial Countryside Project: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted. She lives in Derbyshire and works as a freelance writer.

Avigayl Sharp grew up in Chicago, Illinois. She now lives in Austin, where she is a fiction fellow at the Michener Center for Writers and the fiction editor of Bat City Review.

Joannie Stangeland is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Scene You See (Ravenna Press, 2018). Her poems have also appeared in Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and other journals. Her critical writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop.

Oonagh Stransky is a freelance translator of Italian literature. Her publications include Almost Blue by Carlo Lucarelli (City Lights, 2001), Born Twice by Giuseppe Pontiggia (Alfred Knopf, 2002), Beauty and the Inferno by Roberto Saviano (Verso Books, 2012), and two books by Pope Francis for Random House. She has collaborated with other translators on the work of Pasolini, Masini, Papi, and Vichi and has published short stories and excerpts from the Italian in the Literary Review, Exchanges, the New York Review of Books Daily, Southern Humanities Review, and New Left Review. She attended Middlebury Summer Language Schools in 1986 and returned in 2018 to attend the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference.

George Szirtes’s first book of poems, The Slant Door, was joint-winner of the Faber Prize in 1979. He has published many since then, his collection Reel winning the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2004, and for which he has been twice shortlisted since. His latest book of poems is Mapping the Delta (Bloodaxe, 2016). His memoir of his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen, was published by MacLehose in February 2019 and won the East Anglian Book Prize for Memoir and Biography. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English Association.

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