Justin Balog is a writer from Beach Park, Illinois. He holds a BS in Biology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program with an MFA in poetry. He has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the University of Michigan. He is an assistant editor at Michigan Quarterly Review, where he cofounded the multimodal imprint Mixtape. His work appears in Ploughshares and Narrative.
Jerri Bell is the managing editor for O-Dark-Thirty, the literary journal of the Veterans Writing Project. She retired from the Navy in 2008; her assignments included antisubmarine warfare in the Azores Islands, sea duty on USS Mount Whitney and HMS Sheffield, and attaché duty at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Russia. Her work has been published in a variety of journals and newspapers, including the Washington Post, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She and former Marine Tracy Crow are the co-authors of It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan.
Amy V. Blakemore writes about the body. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, PANK, Wigleaf, and elsewhere, and was recently anthologized in She Found It at the Movies: Women Writers on Sex, Desire, and Cinema. She holds an MA in American studies from Trinity College and is at work on her first novel (a horror story about girlhood) and an essay collection. She tweets @AmyV_Blakemore.
In a former life, Erik Cederblom was a Marine helicopter pilot. “Where’s Charlie?” is based on actual events from two missions, the details of which have blurred into one story. “Dark Green Comedy,” another story set against the Vietnam war, appears in the online literary magazine Typishly.com.
Tameka Cage Conley, PhD, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship and the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship in fiction. She is assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Oxford College of Emory University. Her work is published in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Callaloo, African American Review, and elsewhere. She is at work on her first novel—an epic family saga that considers the untimely deaths of African American men over six decades beginning in the early 1940s in northern Louisiana.
Colby Cotton is from a small town in western New York. A 2018–20 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, his work appears or is forthcoming in Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, and Best New Poets 2020, among others. He lives in Oakland, California.
Ben DeHaven is from rural Maine and was recently a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia. Past work can be found in Texas Review, Maine Review, and elsewhere.
Steffi Drewes is the author of the poetry collection Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow (Kelsey Street Press, 2016) and four chapbooks. Her work has been featured in Interim, 6x6, and Bennington Review, as well as in events and exhibitions in the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Carol Guess is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose, including Doll Studies: Forensics and Tinderbox Lawn. A frequent collaborator, she writes across genres and illuminates historically marginalized material. In 2014 she was awarded the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement by Columbia University. She is a professor of English at Western Washington University and lives in Seattle.
Camille Guthrie is the author of four books of poetry, including Diamonds (BOA Editions 2021). She is the director of Undergraduate Writing Initiatives at Bennington College.
Ashley Hand is a service academy graduate and spent her career as a military officer deploying around the world. She left the service in 2018 to pursue an MFA at Cornell University. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, West Branch, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives and writes in upstate New York, where she is at work on her first novel.
Rochelle Hurt is the author of three poetry collections, including The J Girls: A Reality Show, winner of the Blue Light Books Prize (Indiana University Press, 2022); In Which I Play the Runaway, winner of the Barrow Street Prize (Barrow Street, 2016); and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). She lives in Orlando and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.
Gilad Jaffe’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, [PANK], Salt Hill, and TriQuarterly, among others. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
James Janko’s novel, The Clubhouse Thief (2018), won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Prize for the Novel and was published by New Issues Poetry & Prose (Western Michigan University). An earlier novel, Buffalo Boy and Geronimo (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone), received the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. A new novel, The Dark Between the Stars, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press.
Brian Kerg is a writer and Marine Corps officer currently stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. His fiction has appeared in several journals, including The Deadly Writer’s Patrol, Line of Advance, The Report, and the anthology Our Best War Stories. His professional writing has appeared in War on the Rocks, Proceedings, the Marine Corps Gazette, CIMSEC, and The Strategy Bridge. Follow or contact him @BrianKerg.
Mark Levine’s most recent books are Travels of Marco and a twenty-fifth anniversary reissue of Debt. Work from his newest collection appears in Lana Turner, Bennington Review, The Harvard Advocate, and elsewhere.
David Lombardi received an MFA from Eastern Washington University and a PhD from the University of Houston. He lives in Houston with his wife and daughters and teaches at The Emery/Weiner School. He is working on a collection of stories, Feather Bowling at the Cadieux Cafe.
Lisa Low was born and raised in Maryland. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Bat City Review, Puerto del Sol, Redivider, The Journal, and elsewhere, and her nonfiction appeared in Gulf Coast as the 2020 nonfiction prize winner. She earned her MFA from Indiana University and is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati and an assistant editor at The Cincinnati Review.
Suphil Lee Park is the author of the poetry collection Present Tense Complex, winner of the 2020 Marystina Santiestevan Prize (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021). She spent more than half her life all over the Korean peninsula before landing in the American Northeast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, the New Republic, and Poetry Daily, among many others. Most recently she received third prize in the Writer’s Digest short short story competition and won the 2021 Indiana Review Fiction Prize. You can find more about her at suphil-lee-park.com.
Maxine Scates’s fourth book of poems, My Wilderness, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in October of 2021. Her poems have been published in such journals as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review and have received, among other awards, the Starrett Prize, the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and two Pushcart Prizes.
Ellis Scott is a new writer and an old man. His work has appeared in Yolk, Into the Void, Blank Spaces, Meat For Tea, Hair Trigger, Dewdrop, and High Shelf. He was nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize. He lives in Canada.
Born and raised in New York City, Andrea Truppin spent the first half of her career in architecture and design journalism, including ten years as editor in chief of Modernism Magazine. Her articles have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, Architectural Record, and Interiors. She currently works for an international aid organization focusing on children’s rights.
A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stella Wong is the author of Spooks, winner of the 2020 Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, and American Zero, selected for the 2018 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize by Danez Smith. Wong’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Colorado Review, Narrative, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, the LA Review of Books, and more.
Molly Wood is a Des Moines–based photographer who uses botanicals as metaphors for the human experience: vanitas compositions that reference the fleeting nature of time, toxic plants that stand in for poisonous relationships, and glorious blooms that reflect moments of exquisite joy. Wood was named one of five Iowa Arts Council Fellows in 2018, and her work can currently be seen in a solo exhibition, The Poison Garden, at the Sioux City Art Center through February 6, 2022.
Greg Wrenn is the author of Centaur, which Terrance Hayes awarded the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His nonfiction and poetry have appeared in the New Republic, Kenyon Review, New England Review, American Scholar, Georgia Review, AGNI, and elsewhere. A former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he is an assistant professor of English at James Madison University.
Amie Zimmerman lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been published in Sixth Finch, West Branch, Guesthouse, the tiny, DIAGRAM, and Seneca Review, among others. She is the author of four chapbooks, including Compliance (Essay Press, 2018) and the forthcoming 31 Days/The Self (Ursus Americanus, 2021) with artist Samantha Wall. An editor at YesYes Books, Amie runs the family portrait reading series.
