John Barth’s novels, shorter fiction, and essays include the National Book Award-winning Chimera and his recent novella-triad Where 3 Roads Meet. For many years he taught in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He and his wife live in Bonita Springs, Florida.
Megan Lee Beals works by day as a bookseller and by night on a novel. In the interim, she knits. Her previous short fiction has appeared in Literary Orphans, Luna Station Quarterly, and Dadaoism: An Anthology.
Amy Bernhard is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her essays appear in Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Redivider, The Toast, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among others.
Matthieu Biger is a jack of several trades. Born in the Brittany region of France, he came to Boston to finish college. There, he acquired his brown leatherette Pentax K1000 and met a charming Iowan. Before moving to Iowa in 2010, they traveled to Europe and Morocco, and he photographed many sights and faces along the way. A few of these pictures were exhibited at the 2010 Iowa State Fair. Matthieu is a staff member of the department of computer science at the University of Iowa.
Michael Reid Busk is a recent graduate of USC’s PhD program in literature and creative writing, where he was a Town and Gown Scholar and Feuchtwanger Fellow. His work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fiction International, Florida Review, and other journals. He teaches at Everest University-Online.
Bill Carty was a 2013–14 Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. His chapbook Refugium was published by Alice Blue Books, and his poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Conduit, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, The Volta, Oversound, Sixth Finch, and other journals. He is an associate editor at Poetry Northwest and teaches at the Richard Hugo House.
Justin Hyde lives in Iowa, where he works as a parole officer. His first full-length book, An Elephant Hole, is available from Interior Noise Press.
Jordan Jacks is the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His stories have appeared in the Yale Review and Weekday. He is currently working on a novel.
Jeremy B. Jones is the author of Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland. His essays appear in Oxford American, Brevity, and Defunct, among others, and they have been named Notable in Best American Essays. He received his MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and teaches creative writing at Western Carolina University.
Christopher Kondrich is the author of Contrapuntal and a recipient of the Paris-American’s Reading Series Prize. New poems appear in Boston Review, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, and Kenyon Review. He holds a PhD from the University of Denver; currently he edits Tupelo Quarterly, and teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop.
Emily Sieu Liebowitz is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently lives in New York City and works at the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Lana Turner, LVNG, and various other journals. Her chapbook is forthcoming from The Song Cave.
Terrance Manning, Jr., is a graduate of Purdue’s MFA program in creative writing. Recently he received first place in Boulevard’s Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers, The David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction, and Crab Orchard Review’s John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. His work appears or is forthcoming in Witness, Ninth Letter, Southwest Review, and other magazines.
Michael Martone’s most recent books are Winesburg, Indiana; Memos; and Four for a Quarter.
Elizabeth McConaghy is a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Missouri. Her work has appeared in Western Humanities Review and Southeast Review and is forthcoming in Barrelhouse.
Reginald McKnight is the author of He Sleeps. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Georgia.
Michael Meyer is the author of the nonfiction books The Last Days of Old Beijing and In Manchuria, which were published by Bloomsbury. A recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Meyer teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
Laurie J. Murray is a lecturer of English at Anderson University in Anderson, South Carolina, where she teaches nonfiction writing and English composition and communication. She received her MFA in creative writing from Ashland University in 2013 and is currently working on a memoir about how coastal Maine played an important role in her healing from domestic violence.
Kiki Petrosino is the author of two books of poetry: Hymn for the Black Terrific and Fort Red Border, both from Sarabande Books. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, FENCE, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is founder and coeditor of Transom, an independent online poetry journal. Petrosino is an associate professor at the University of Louisville, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.
Kevin Riel’s poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, New Madrid, RHINO Poetry, and in Split Lip Press’s Utter Foolery: Best Global Literary Humor 2015. He is a PhD student in English at Claremont Graduate University, where he is also editor-in-chief of Foothill: a journal of poetry.
Danniel Schoonebeek’s first book of poems, American Barricade, was published by YesYes Books in 2014. It was named one of the year’s ten standout debuts by Poets & Writers and called “a groundbreaking first book that stands to influence the aesthetic disposition of its author’s generation” by Boston Review. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, Fence, BOMB, jubilat, Guernica, and elsewhere. In 2015, Poor Claudia will release his second book, a travelogue called C’est la guerre.
Diane Seuss’s most recent collection, Four-Legged Girl, was published in October 2015 by Graywolf Press. Her second book, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, won the Juniper Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. A poem that originally appeared in Blackbird received a 2013 Pushcart Prize, and her poem “Free Beer,” originally published in the Missouri Review, appeared in The Best American Poetry 2014. Seuss is Writer-in-Residence at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.
Katherine E. Standefer writes about the body, consent, and medical technology from Tucson, where she is working on a book that traces the global supply chain of her internal cardiac defibrillator. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona, and her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, the Colorado Review, andTerrain.org, among other publications. A certified sexologist, Standefer has taught sexuality education to more than 7,600 people and works in the emerging field of narrative medicine. Follow her at www.KatherineStandefer.com.
Tim Taranto is a writer and illustrator from upstate New York. He has illustrated for McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, FSG Books, and Buzzfeed. In 2015 he was an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He studied painting at Cornell University in Ithaca and holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City.
Wendy S. Walters is the author of the collection of essays Multiply/Divide (Sarabande, 2015) and two collections of poetry, Troy, Michigan (Futurepoem, 2014) and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (Palm Press, 2009). She is an associate professor in the department of literary studies at Eugene Lang College of The New School University.
Lisa Wells is a poet and essayist from Portland, Oregon. She’s the author of Yeah. No. Totally. (essays) and a chapbook, BEAST. Recent work can be found in The Believer, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Third Coast, and others. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a Writer-in-Residence at Yale–NUS in Singapore.
Elizabeth Willis is the author of Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015). Her previous books of poetry include Address (2011), Meteoric Flowers (2006), Turneresque (2003), and The Human Abstract (1995).
David Winner’s first novel, The Cannibal of Guadalajara, won the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. A film based on a story of Winner’s played at Cannes in 2007. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, Kenyon Review (forthcoming), Fiction, Confrontation, Joyland, Bookforum, Dream Catcher, and elsewhere. His new novel, Tyler’s Last, an homage to Patricia Highsmith, was released by Outpost 19 in October 2015.
