Emily Mitchell began her role as a fiction editor for NER in 2018. She is the author of three works of fiction: The Last Summer of the World, a novel (W. W. Norton, 2007); Viral, stories (W. W. Norton, 2015) and The Church of Divine Electricity, stories (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025). Her short stories have appeared in Harpers’, The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Maryland. Her second novel, Far Ocean, about eighteenth-century century botanist and explorer Jeanne Baret, won the 2025 Big Moose Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2027.