Christopher Bakken is the author of a culinary memoir, Honey, Olives, Octopus, and two books of poetry: Goat Funeral and After Greece. He teaches at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania and directs a summer writing program on the island of Thasos.
Stephen Burt is a professor of English at Harvard. His latest book is Belmont (2013).
Richard Deming is the author of the collection of poems Let’s Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman) and Listening on All Sides: Towards an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford University Press). He teaches at Yale University and was recently the Birkelund Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.
Sandra L. Dyas is a visual artist living in Iowa City. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1998. Sandra teaches art at Cornell College, and her work has been shown and published internationally.
Joseph Fazio was recently awarded an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for his fiction. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Post Road Magazine, Kenyon Review Online, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere. He lives in Boston, where he is at work on a novel and a collection of stories.
James Galvin has published seven books of poetry and two prose works. He teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
C.S. Giscombe teaches English at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent and forthcoming books include Prairie Style, Ohio Railroads, and Border Towns. He is at work on a mixed-genre prose book titled Railroad Sense and a poetry book titled Plantation Songs.
Alan Golding teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Louisville. He is the author of From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry and of numerous essays on modernist and contemporary poetry. With Lynn Keller and Dee Morris, he coedits the Iowa Series on Contemporary North American Poetry and Synapse, a series dedicated to experimental critical approaches to poetics.
Michael DeRell Hill is an associate professor of English and African American studies at the University of Iowa. With his wife, Lena Hill, he cowrote Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Reference Guide (2008). He also contributed to The Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011) and Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance (2011). His book The Ethics of Swagger: Prizewinning African American Novels, 1977–1993 (2013) came out from Ohio State University Press.
Anna Maria Hong is the 2013–14 Visiting Creative Writer at Ursinus College and was the 2010–11 Bunting Fellow in poetry at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her poems have recently appeared in Boston Review, Green Mountains Review, Drunken Boat, Fence, Fairy Tale Review, Unsplendid, Beloit Poetry Journal, Southwest Review, POOL, Best American Poetry 2013, and Poetry. “H & G” is her first published story.
Charles Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary critic, short story writer, philosopher, cartoonist, and professor emeritus at the University of Washington. He is a MacArthur fellow and the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and a National Book Award for his novel Middle Passage.
Jessica Laser's poems have appeared in Boston Review, Lana Turner, jubilat, Petri Press, and elsewhere. A graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she teaches writing in Purchase, NY. For more: jessicalaser.com.
Tom Lutz is the author of Doing Nothing, Crying, and other books. He is the founding editor of Los Angeles Review of Books, teaches at UC Riverside, and is working on a travel book tentatively titled Distant Encounters.
Nathaniel Mackey is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Nod House (New Directions, 2011); his sixth, Blue Fasa, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2015. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University. He edits the literary magazine Hambone.
Dora Malech is the author of two books of poems, Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) and Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser Press, 2009). Her work has appeared in publications that include the New Yorker, Poetry, and Tin House. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an assistant professor of poetry in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Kate Marshall is Thomas J. and Robert T. Rolfs Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she also serves on the faculty of the graduate program in history and philosophy of science. She is the author of Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013) and is currently working on a study of nonhuman narration in literature, culture, and philosophy titled Novels by Aliens. She serves on the editorial board of Post45.
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s essays have appeared in the New York Times, Oxford American, TriQuarterly Online, Fourth Genre, and other journals. Among other honors, she has received a 2014 NEA Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, and had an essay selected as “notable” in Best American Essays 2013. She lives in Boston and teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Grub Street, a nonprofit writing center. More work is online at www.alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com.
Shane McCrae is the author of Mule; Blood; Forgiveness Forgiveness; and three chapbooks. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Seattle Review, Pleiades, LIT, and elsewhere, and he has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the NEA. He teaches at Oberlin College and in the brief-residency MFA program at Spalding University.
Michael Meyer is the author of the nonfiction books The Last Days of Old Beijing and In Manchuria, which will be published by Bloomsbury in February 2015. A recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Meyer teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
Rusty Morrison’s Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta) was published in January 2014. Her book After Urgency won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize, and the true keeps calm biding its story won Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. Whethering won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She is copublisher of Omnidawn.
Lenore Myka’s fiction was selected as one of 100 Distinguished Stories by The Best American Short Stories 2008 and won both the Booth Journal and Cream City Review 2013 fiction contests. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, Massachusetts Review, H.O.W. Journal, and Upstreet, among others.
Jayne Anne Phillips, whose seven highly acclaimed books include Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Shelter, Lark & Termite, and Quiet Dell, is a National Book Award finalist and twice a National Book Critics Circle finalist in fiction. She’s Distinguished Professor of English and director of the MFA program at Rutgers University–Newark.
Mark Jude Poirier is the author of two novels and two collections of stories, as well as many screenplays. He is on the English faculty at Harvard, where he teaches screenwriting.
Lia Purpura’s most recent collection of essays is Rough Likeness. Her awards include a 2012 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, and three Pushcart prizes. On Looking (essays) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic, Orion, Paris Review, Field, and elsewhere; she lives in Baltimore, MD, and is Writer in Residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of five poetry collections. His most recent book, Original Bodies, was selected for the Michael Waters Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Southern Indiana Review Press. Individual poems have appeared in journals that include Kenyon Review, Slate, Southern Review, Georgia Review, AGNI, and Alaska Quarterly Review.
Margaret Reges is from Michigan. Her recent honors include the 2012 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets from the Michigan Quarterly Review and a 2012–2013 second-year fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center.
Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) was an American poet, short story writer, and literary critic. His works include In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays, Genesis, World Is a Wedding, and Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems.
Susan M. Stabile’s work has appeared in the Southwest Review, Biography, American Literary History, and American Literature. An associate professor of English at Texas A&M University, she is completing a collection of essays entitled Salvage.
Soren Stockman was born in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2013, he won first place in Narrative’s 30 Below Contest. New work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, St. Petersburg Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere. He works as International Poetry Editor for Washington Square Review and as the program coordinator for Summer Literary Seminars in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Mark Wisniewski’s third novel, Watch Me Go, was sold recently at auction. His work has appeared in venues such as Best American Short Stories and Poetry.