NER 41.3 (2020)
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Kenneth Calhoun’s stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Paris Review, Subtropics, O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. His novel, Black Moon (Hogarth, 2015), was longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Debut Novel Prize in 2011. A native of Southern California, he currently lives in South Boston.

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of The Low Passions (W. W. Norton, 2019). His work has appeared in Paris Review, BuzzFeed, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other publications. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, he is the winner of the 2017 Poetry International Prize. He holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University and is represented by Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents.

May-lee Chai is the author of ten books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her latest short story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants (Blair, 2018), recipient of a 2019 American Book Award. She teaches in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman (selected by Tayari Jones), a Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and others.

Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT (Copper Canyon, 2020), Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon, 2017), The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013), Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Circle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Her children’s books include Is Mommy? (Simon & Schuster, 2015), illustrated by Marla Frazee, and Love, Love (Sterling, 2020), a middle grade novel. She lives in Los Angeles.

Justin Danzy’s work has appeared in the Offing, On the Seawall, New Ohio Review, Frontier, Guesthouse, and elsewhere. He was the 2019 Gregory Pardlo Fellow at the Frost Place and received an Academy of American Poets Prize from Washington University in St. Louis, where he completed his MFA. He is originally from Southfield, Michigan.

Allison A. deFreese, a poet and literary translator based in the Pacific Northwest, coordinates literary translation workshops for the Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters. Her translations of Karla Marrufo’s poetry and fiction have previously appeared in Apofenie, YourImpossibleVoice, Perceptions, and the Los Angeles Review.

Laurence de Looze is in love with Spain, but also with France, Peru, Japan, Argentina, Portugal, China, and other places. He has published essays on several of them in New England Review and has also published stories in other reviews. He is currently writing a second book on the alphabet. An American by birth, he is happy to live in Canada.

Lynn Domina is the author of two collections of poetry, Framed in Silence (Main Street Rag, 2011) and Corporal Works (Four Way Books, 1995), and the editor of a collection of essays, Poets on the Psalms (Trinity University Press, 2008). Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Nimrod, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, and others. She currently serves as head of the English Department at Northern Michigan University and as creative writing editor of the Other Journal.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Her other titles include Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013), Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001). She and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four collections, the most recent of which is Caprice (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), and, with Julie Marie Wade, she co-authored The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

Elisa Gabbert’s collections of poetry, essays, and criticism include The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays (FSG, 2020), The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018), L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016), The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013), and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2018). Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the New York Review of Books, A Public Space, American Poetry Review, Paris Review Daily, Guernica, and elsewhere.

torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota, and assistant editor of the Shallow Ends. She has received fellowships from Zoeglossia, the Effing Foundation, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Their work is published in Poetry, Ploughshares, and Kenyon Review. Her debut collection, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions (2020).

Meron Hadero is an Ethiopian-American whose short stories have been shortlisted for the Caine Prize and appear in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Zyzzyva, Iowa Review, and Missouri Review, among others. She’s also published in the New York Times Book Review and The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. She has been a fellow at San Jose State University’s Steinbeck Center, Yaddo, Ragdale, and MacDowell, and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, a JD from Yale Law School, and a BA from Princeton.

Ji Yun (1724–1805) was an acclaimed Chinese writer, scholar, and politician who also served as chief editor of the imperial Four Ways of Knowing Library Project—the largest collection of Chinese writing ever assembled. Ji Yun was charged with censoring texts at odds with the Chinese emperor’s staunchly anti-supernatural and socially conservative intellectual sensibilities. In his later years, Ji Yun quietly rebelled against this role by writing the five-volume collection Notes on the Subtle and the Strange, his memoirs about his personal experiences with the supernatural, and dozens of works that parody the conservative social morality of the Qing dynasty.

Rodney Jones is the author of eleven books, including Transparent Gestures (Houghton Mifflin, 1989), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Salvation Blues (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Award. The poem in this issue is from his forthcoming book, Difficult Subjects. He lives in New Orleans and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College.

John Kinsella’s volume of poetry Insomnia will be released in the USA by 
W. W. Norton in November 2020. A recent book of prose is the memoir Displaced: a rural life (Transit Lounge, Melbourne: 2020). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, but most relevantly he is an anarchist vegan pacifist of over thirty-five years.

Sydney Lea, a former Pulitzer finalist, founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review. His twentieth book, and his thirteenth collection of poems, Here, appeared from Four Way Books in late 2019. In spring 2021, Vermont’s Green Writers Press will publish Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life, his collected newspaper columns from his years as Vermont Poet Laureate (2011–15). A mock-epic graphic poem, The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, produced in collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka, is due in autumn 2020.

Karla Marrufo (Mérida, México) holds a Doctorate in Hispanic-American Literature from la Universidad Veracruzana and completed postdoctoral studies at the National Autonomous University of México. Her work has been recognized through several prestigious Latin American literary awards, among them the 2005–2007 National Wilberto Cantón Award in Playwriting, the XVI José Díaz Bolio Poetry Prize, and the 2014 National Dolores Castro Prize in Narration. Her books include Mérida lo invisible, a collection of stories entitled Arquitecturas de lo invisible, and the novel Mayo. A new book, La dulzura de los naufragios [The Sweetness of the Shipwrecked], is forthcoming.

Melanie Mauthner’s translation of Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel Our Lady of the Nile (Archipelago, 2014) was awarded the French Voices Grand Prize 2013. She later received a Hawthornden Fellowship to translate Mukasonga’s short stories, some of which have appeared in the New Yorker, New England Review, the Stinging Fly, and the White Review.

Shara McCallum, originally from Jamaica, is the author of six books published in the US and UK. The poems in this issue are from her forthcoming verse sequence, No Ruined Stone, a speculative account of Scottish poet Robert Burns’s migration to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation. Her previous book, Madwoman (Alice James, 2017), was winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the 2018 Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club. McCallum is a professor of English at Penn State University and on the faculty of the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program.

Scholastique Mukasonga, born in Rwanda in 1956, settled in France in 1992, two years before the genocide of the Tutsi. In the aftermath, Mukasonga learned that twenty-seven of her family members had been massacred. Twelve years later, Gallimard published her autobiographical account Inyenzi ou les Cafards, which marked Mukasonga’s entry into literature. This was followed by La femme aux pieds nus in 2008 and L’Iguifou in 2010, both widely praised. Her first novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, won the Ahmadou Kourouma prize and the Renaudot prize in 2012, as well as the 2013 Océans France Ô prize, and was shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary award.

Linda B. Parshall’s publications include scholarly articles and translations focused on German literature, landscape theory, and art history from the medieval to the modern period. Most recently, she edited and translated Letters of a Dead Man by Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (Dumbarton Oaks, 2016).

Alyssa Pelish lives in New York. A trove of her work can be found at alyssapelish. wordpress.com.

Heidi P (Petersen) is a Danish artist living in the countryside after many years in Copenhagen. She has exhibited extensively in both galleries and museums since 2004. Her work is inspired by the fragile cycles of nature, which she likens to the human life cycle. She is interested in change and transformation and contrasts such as life and death, light and darkness. See more of her work on www.heidp.dk and Instagram.

Kate Petersen’s work has appeared in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Paris Review Daily, Epoch, LitHub, and elsewhere. A former Jones Lecturer at Stanford, she has been the recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Minnesota and lives in Arizona, where she writes about the science of our changing climate for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University.

Christina Pugh is the author of five books of poems including Stardust Media (University of Massachusetts, 2020), which was awarded the Juniper Prize for Poetry. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry and a recent visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, she is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and consulting editor for Poetry.

Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) was a German-Swedish playwright and poet. Her collections of poetry include In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), Flucht und Verwandlung (1959), Fahrt ins Staublose (1961), and Suche nach Lebenden (1971). She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966.

Brandon Som is the author of The Tribute Horse (Nightboat Books, 2014), winner of the 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook Babel’s Moon (Tupelo Press, 2011). He currently lives in San Diego where he teaches in the Literature Department at UCSD.

Jeneva Stone’s first book, Monster, a hybrid collection of poems and essays, was issued by Phoenicia Publishing in 2016. Her writing has been honored by fellowships from the MacDowell and Millay colonies, and has appeared in numerous venues, most recently APR and the Washington Post. She is also the blog manager for Little Lobbyists, a family- led organization that advocates for kids with complex medical needs and disabilities. She and her son Rob are healthcare and disability rights activists in Maryland, where they live.

Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (University of Chicago Press, 2013). His translation (with Linda B. Parshall) of Nelly Sachs’s Flight and Metamorphosis is forthcoming in 2021 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

KirkWilson’s work in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry is widely published in literary journals and anthologies. Trio House Press will publish his poetry collection Songbox as the winner of the 2020 Trio Award. His current publications include a short story in Idaho Review, an Editor’s Award–winning essay in Florida Review, and a poem in Mudfish 21 as a finalist for the Mudfish Poetry Prize. His past publications include a poetry chapbook from Burning Deck Press and a true crime book published in six editions in the US and UK.

Mark Wunderlich is the author of four books of poems, most recently God of Nothingness (Graywolf, 2021). His other books are The Earth Avails (Graywolf, 2014), which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude (Graywolf, 2004), and The Anchorage (University of Massachusetts, 1999), which received the Lambda Literary Award. He directs the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Yi Izzy Yu teaches Cross-Cultural Communication and Multilingual Composition at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and John Yu Branscum teaches Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at the same university. Their collaborative translations have previously appeared in such journals as Cincinnati Review, 3AM Magazine, Samovar, and Wigleaf, and they were finalists in 2020 for the Gabo Award for Translation. In the summers, they work as corporate storytellers for Pan Ji Mi Dao in Qingdao, China, and direct creative writing camps in Beijing.

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