Lauren Acampora is the author of the linked story collection The Wonder Garden (2015) and the novel The Paper Wasp (2019), both published by Grove Atlantic. Her short fiction and essays have previously appeared in the New England Reviewand NER Digital, as well as in publications such as the Paris Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and Antioch Review. She lives in New York.
Joseph Addison (1672–1719) was an English author and poet, whose dramas, poems, and periodical essays launched him into literary fame in eighteenth-century Britain and led to a number of political appointments. Best known for his contributions to the periodicals The Spectator and The Tatler, he was also the author of the well-received play Cato, a Tragedy (1712), which was a success in England, Ireland, and the Americas.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927), born in Tokyo, Japan, was the author of more than 350 works of fiction and nonfiction, including Rashõmon,The Spider’s Thread, Hell Screen, Kappa, and In a Grove. Japan’s premier literary award for emerging writers, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him.
Derrick Austin is the author of Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion, the Nation, and Tin House. A Cave Canem fellow, he was a finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Molly Bashaw’s first book of poetry, The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It, was published by The Word Works in 2014. More recent work has appeared in the New Yorker, Crazyhorse, the Iowa Review, the Paris-American, the Tasmanian Times, and on the Lilith Blog. Molly lives in Würzburg, Germany, where she makes her living as a professional bass-trombonist and educator.
Georgina Beaty is an actor and writer whose work has been published or is forthcoming in Plenitude, Neon Magazine, and Frontenac Press’s anthology, Gush. She has co-written four plays, including Highway 63: The Fort Mac Show, and is the writer/performer of Extremophiles, which continues to tour Canada. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and is currently performing with Belarus Free Theatre in London, England. Her story in this issue is dedicated to Jill Connell.
Ryan C. K. Choi lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he was born and raised. His work has appeared in BOMB, Harper’s, New American Writing, the Yale Review, and elsewhere.
Timothy Donnelly’s third collection, The Problem of the Many, is forthcoming from Wave Books. He is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches in the Writing Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.
Jennifer Grotz’s third and most recent book of poems is Window Left Open (Graywolf, 2016). She teaches at the University of Rochester and directs the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.
Janice N. Harrington is the author of Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (BOA, 2006), The Hands of Strangers (BOA, 2011), and Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin (BOA, 2016). She curates A Space for Image, a blog on poetic imagery, and teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois.
Valerie Hegarty is a Brooklyn-based visual artist and fiction writer. She has been recognized for her achievement in the arts by numerous grants from the Tiffany Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She exhibits her artwork internationally and has been awarded residencies from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Smack Mellon, lmcc, ps122, Yaddo, and MacDowell. She hopes to attend as a writer one day. “Cats vs. Cancer” is her first published short story.
Brian Henry has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Permanent State (Ahsahta, 2019). His translation of Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 and won the Best Translated Book Award and the Best Literary Translation into English Award from aatseel. He also has translated Tomaž Šalamun’sWoods and Chalices (Harcourt, 2008) and Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers (BOA, 2015).
Ioan Marc Jones has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford and a Masters in Critical Theory from the University of London. His work has been published in the Independent, openDemocracy, Wales Arts Review, Essay Review, and others. He currently works as a senior production editor at University of Oxford Press.
Matt Jones has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. His prose has appeared in the Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Atlantic,Post Road, Ruminate, Chicago Tribune, and various other publications. He has received support from the Ohio Arts Council, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Leopold Writing Program, and the Willowtail Springs Nature Preserve and Education Center.
Tommy Lennartsson has exhibited his work extensively in both group and solo shows in his native Sweden. His paintings belong to private collections all around the world, from the USA and Canada to Scandinavia and Japan. His work can be seen online here.
John Mancini’s stories and poems have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, New World Writing, Natural Bridge, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA from San Francisco State University, an MA from the University of Southern Mississippi, and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. He has taught writing courses at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Towson University. He is also a songwriter and musician, and his songs can be heard on television, film, and radio internationally.
Khaled Mattawa currently teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan. His latest book of poems is Tocqueville (New Issues, 2010). A MacArthur Fellow, he is the current editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.
Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Its Day Being Gone, winner of the 2014 National Poetry Series, and Forage, forthcoming in 2019, both from Penguin Books, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books in 2012. A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, which she coedited, is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press. Rose is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and coeditor-in-chief of the Southern Humanities Review.
David Moats was born in Salt Lake City and grew up in California. For many years he worked as an editor at the Rutland Heraldin Vermont, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2001. He is the author of the book Civil Wars: A Battle for Gay Marriage, published by Harcourt in 2004. He is also the author of numerous plays, most recently An Afternoon in France, which was performed in Middlebury, Vermont, in 2012. He lives in Salisbury, Vermont.
V. Penelope Pelizzon’s second poetry collection, Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time, was published in 2014 by Waywiser Press. Her first book, Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000), won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award.
Emily Pittinos is a teaching writer currently living in Boise, Idaho. A creative writing instructor at Interlochen Arts Camp and an editorial assistant for Poetry Northwest, Pittinos received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she served as the 2017–18 Senior Fellow in Poetry. Her recent work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Pinwheel Journal, and elsewhere.
Stanley Plumly is the author of four works of nonfiction and ten books of poetry, including, most recently, Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime (W. W. Norton, 2018) and Against Sunset (W. W. Norton, 2016). Winner of the Truman Capote Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize, among others, Plumly teaches at the University of Maryland and lives in Frederick, Maryland.
Carey Salerno is the executive editor and director of Alice James Books. She is also the author of Shelter (2009) and coeditor of Lit from Inside: Forty Years of Poetry from Alice James Books (2013). She teaches courses in poetry and creative writing for the University of Maine at Farmington and has been invited to teach or lecture on poetry and editing at places like the University of Michigan, Indiana University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Texas State University. You may find her poems—and articles and interviews regarding her other professional work—in print and online at www.careysalerno.com.
Roger Salloch is a novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, photographer, and critic. His work has appeared widely in publications such as the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and others. His novel, Along the Railroad Tracks, was translated into Italian (Una Storia Tedesca) and French (Une Histoire Allemande) and published by Miraggi Edizioni in 2016 and by Nadeau Editions in 2017. His new novel, Vanilla Ice Dream (Miraggi Edizioni) will be published in 2019. His writing has been featured alongside his photography in exhibitions in New York, Eutin, Germany, Paris, Turin, New Delhi, and Vologda, Russia.
Maggie Smith is the author of three prizewinning books: Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005), The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press, 2015), and Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017), the title poem from which was called the “Official Poem of 2016” by Public Radio International. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, the Believer, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, the Washington Post, and on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary.
Aleš Šteger has published seven books of poetry, three novels, and two books of essays in Slovenian. His books in English include The Book of Things (BOA, 2010), Berlin (Counterpath, 2015), Essential Baggage (Equipage, 2016), and the novel Absolution (Istros, 2018)
Arthur Sze’s tenth book of poetry is Sight Lines (Copper Canyon, 2019). He is also the author of Compass Rose (Copper Canyon, 2014), The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon, 2009),Quipu (Copper Canyon, 2005), and The Redshifting Web (Copper Canyon, 1998). He is the recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Brian Teare is the author of five books, most recently Companion Grasses (Omnidawn, 2013), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Ahsahta, 2015). His sixth book, Doomstead Days, will be out from Nightboat Books in 2019. His honors include Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, and fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. An Associate Professor at Temple University, he lives in South Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
Maria Thomas’s work has appeared in the Masters Review Anthology Vol. VI, Wasafiri, Aesthetica, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Oregon and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is working on her first novel. She lives in London, and in 2017 she won the London Short Story Prize.
Noah Warren is the author of The Destroyer in the Glass (Yale, 2016). He is the recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and is pursuing a PhD in English at UC Berkeley.
C. Dale Young is the author of five books, including The Affliction(Four Way Books, 2018), a novel in stories. Four Way Books will publish Prometeo, his next collection of poetry, in 2021. A full-time physician, Young lives in San Francisco.