Aria Aber was raised in Germany, where she was born to Afghan refugees. She is the author of Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), which won a 2020 Whiting Award and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, New Republic, Kenyon Review, Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.
Philipe AbiYouness is a first-generation Lebanese-American poet and educator. His work has been featured in Muzzle Magazine, Fugue, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. He is a Best of the Net nominee and a creative writing MFA candidate at Rutgers University–Newark.
Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell, forthcoming from Graywolf in 2021.
Ellen Bass’s most recent books are Indigo (Copper Canyon, 2020), Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon, 2014), and The Human Line (Copper Canyon, 2007). She coedited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (Doubleday, 1973), and coauthored The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988). Among her honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the California Arts Council, as well as the Lambda Literary Award and three Pushcart Prizes. She teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Yevgeny Bukhin, a Boston-area writer, has more than fifty Russian-language publications of poetry, essays, and fiction in Russian, Ukrainian, German, and US magazines and journals. In addition to his latest book, Poezd pribyvaet v Boston [The Train Arrives in Boston], a collection of short fiction and essays published in 2017 by the Solzhenitsyn Center’s Russkii Put’ publishing house in Moscow, he has published Zapiski bostonskogo taksista [Tales of a Boston Cab Driver] (2012) and Siurrealizm s chelovecheskim litsom [Surrealism with a Human Face] (2013), a collection of poetry and essays, both from Aletheia Press, in St. Petersburg.
Thomas Dai is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Brown University. Aside from his academic work, he is currently working on a collection of linked essays about travel, queerness, and the many ways that geography and identity intersect. Some of his recent writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, CityLab, Literary Hub, and elsewhere.
Marissa Davis is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky, residing in Brooklyn, New York. Her original poems have appeared in the Carolina Quarterly, Rattle, Iowa Review, and Sundog Lit, among other journals. Her translations have been published in Ezra and are forthcoming in Mid-American Review. Davis holds an MFA from New York University. Her first chapbook, My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak (Jai-Alai Books, 2020), was the winner of Cave Canem’s 2019 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Prize.
Christopher DeWeese is the author of three books of poems. He is currently an Associate Professor at Wright State University.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), one of the towering figures of Russian and world literature, was a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Crime and Punishment (1866) was the first of his five major novels, followed by The Idiot (1868), Devils (1872), The Adolescent (1875), and The Brothers Karamazov (1881).
Rob Ehle’s stories have appeared in Epoch, American Short Fiction, Zyzzyva, and similar magazines (including a previous story in New England Review). A former Stegner Fellow and resident at MacDowell, he’s currently writing a novel set in nineteenth-century California.
Nora Seligman Favorov is a Russian-to-English translator specializing in Russian literature and history. Her translation of Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s 1863 novel City Folk and Country Folk (Columbia University Press, 2017) was recognized by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages as “Best Literary Translation into English” for 2018. Her translation of Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator by Oleg Khlevniuk (Yale University Press, 2015) was selected as Pushkin House UK’s “best Russian book in translation” for 2016. She serves as Russian Life magazine’s translation editor. A native of New York City, she currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Jennifer Grotz’s most recent book of poems is Window Left Open (Graywolf, 2016). Everything I Don’t Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski co-translated from the Polish with Piotr Sommer, is forthcoming from World Poetry Books. Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, she teaches at the University of Rochester.
Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen poetry collections, including Blazons (Carcanet, 2019) and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015); a book of essays, Unauthorized Voices (University of Michigan, 2010); a collaborative book, Diaspo/Renga, written with Deema K. Shehabi (Holland Park Press, 2014); and seventeen books of translations by French and Francophone poets, including Claire Malroux and Samira Negrouche. Her collaboration with Karthika Naïr, as featured in this issue, is forthcoming in 2022 from Milkweed Editions, entitled A Different Distance. She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award, and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris.
Rachel Hadas’s most recent books are Love and Dread (poems, Measure Press, 2020) and Piece by Piece (prose, Paul Dry Books, 2021). She is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark, where she has taught for many years.
Susan Heeger has covered gardens, design, food, and people for numerous magazines and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Her essays have appeared in O, Catamaran, Crab Orchard Review, and Los Angeles Magazine, and short stories in december, Stonecrop Maine Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Hong Kong Review.
Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.
Dave Jordano completed a BFA in photography from the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit in 1974. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in museums and galleries, including the Chicago Cultural Center; the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design; the Detroit Institute of Arts; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Recent publications of his work include Articles of Faith: African-American Community Churches of Chicago (2009), Detroit: Unbroken down (2015), and A Detroit Nocturne (2018). His work is held in several permanent collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Cleveland Museum of Art; and the Library of Congress.
Michael R. Katz is the C. V. Starr Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College. He has published translations of over fifteen Russian novels, including works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chernyshevsky. His work has appeared frequently in NER, most recently in 2018 with his translation of a short story by Nikolai Gogol.
Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer, and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her most recent book is the poetry collection America that island off the coast of France (Tupelo, 2019), winner of the Dorset Prize. Her recent essays have appeared in Brevity, Guernica, Sewanee Review, Blackbird, and Entropy.
Dana Levin’s most recent book is Banana Palace (Copper Canyon, 2016). She serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in Saint Louis. Her fifth book, Now Do You Know Where You Are, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in spring 2022.
Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fourth book, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Cate Marvin’s fourth book of poems, Event Horizon, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2022. She teaches English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and in the Stonecoast low-residency MFA Program. She lives in Maine.
Aksinia Mihaylova is a poet, educator, and translator of over thirty-five books of poetry and prose. She is the author of six poetry books in Bulgarian, translated into numerous languages. Ciel à Perdre, her first poetry collection written in French, received France’s Prix Apollinaire in 2014. She released her second French-language collection, Le Baiser du Temps, in 2019; it went on to become the 2020 recipient of the Prix Max-Jacob. Mihaylova is the founder of the independent literary journal Ah, Maria, and currently resides in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Wayne Miller’s fifth poetry collection, We the Jury, was published by Milkweed Editions in spring 2021. His fourth poetry collection, Post- (Milkweed, 2016), won the UNT Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award, and his co-translation of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015) was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, codirects the Unsung Masters Series, and edits Copper Nickel.
Karthika Naïr is the author of several books, including the award-winning Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (Archipelago Books, 2019) and The Honey Hunter (Little Gestalten, 2015), illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet. The performances she has scripted and co-scripted have been staged at venues across the world, such as Sadler’s Wells (London), Esplanade (Singapore), and Lincoln Center (USA). Also a dance enabler, Naïr’s closest and longest association has been with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui as executive producer of several works, including Babel (Words), and as co-founder of Cherkaoui’s Antwerp-based company, Eastman.
Dan O’Brien’s most recent books are the essay collection A Story That Happens (Dalkey Archive Press, US / CB Editions, UK, 2021) and the poetry collection Our Cancers (Acre Books, 2021). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and a PEN Award for Drama. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.
Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route, forthcoming from Alice James Books
in January 2022, as well as two previous collections, Mezzanines (2013) and Contradictions in the Design (2016), both from Alice James Books. He teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Eric Pankey is the author of many collections of poetry. A new book, Not Yet Transfigured, is due out in fall 2021 from Orison Books.
Carl Phillips’s new book, Then the War, and Selected Poems 2007–2020, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2022.
Ismet Prcic was born in Bosnia-Herzegovina and immigrated to the US in 1996. His debut novel, Shards, was published in 2011 by Grove Press, winning numerous awards. He also cowrote the screenplay for the film Imperial Dreams, currently on Netflix. Prcic lives in Salem, Oregon, and writes in a closet next to the water heater.
Kevin Prufer’s newest book, The Art of Fiction, was published by Four Way Books in 2021. His previous book, How He Loved Them (Four Way Books, 2018), received the Julie Suk Award and was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.
Suzanne Rivecca’s story collection, Death Is Not an Option (Norton, 2010), received the Rome Prize in Literature and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Story Prize, and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. A former fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has an essay collection forthcoming from Graywolf and a novel forthcoming from Norton. She lives in California.
Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling, forthcoming from Penguin Poets in 2022. They are a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.
G. C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo, US / Carcanet, UK, 2021). Newer work has appeared in APR, Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Iowa Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, and Conjunctions. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch.
Dana Wilson is a recent graduate of the Fiction MFA program at Brooklyn College. She lives in New York and is currently working on her first novel.