John Wall Barger’s fifth book of poems, Resurrection Fail, came out with Spuyten Duyvil Press in fall 2021. He is a contract editor for Frontenac House and teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
Amanda Barrett is writing a book about living in the wake of loss. Every member of her immediate family—husband, father, mother, sister, brother—is dead. Pushing against the tropes of the grief memoir, informed by the neuroscience of bereavement and the Buddhist notion of the bardo, embracing the turbulent, tedious, and hilarious, this work invites readers to take up the quiet challenge that death offers our everyday lives. Amanda co-edited the “Queer Acts” issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory with José Esteban Muñoz. She has an MA and MPhil in Performance Studies from New York University, where she focused on performativity and feminist, queer, and critical race theory, and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Washington, DC. Her pronouns are she/her/hers.
Emily Blair lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, Copper Nickel, The Journal, New Ohio Review, Indiana Review, and the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, among other places. Her two chapbooks are The Nature of Hairwork (Dancing Girl) and Idaville (Booklyn). She has received New York Foundation of Arts Fellowships in both Poetry and Fiction.
Anney Bolgiano lives and writes in Washington, DC, where she teaches at Howard and George Washington Universities. Her essays, poems, collages, and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, DIAGRAM, Nashville Review, Salamander, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, The Rupture, A Velvet Giant, HAD, CTRL + V, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, FLAT- PACK, won the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press 2021 Chapbook Contest and is available from newmichiganpress.com.
Mark Chiusano’s first short story collection, Marine Park, received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, Guernica, Zyzzyva, Five Chapters, Harvard Review, and online at The Atlantic and The Paris Review. He is a columnist for the Long Island–based daily newspaper Newsday.
Nicholas Chng lives in Singapore. He has been named a Commended Foyle Young Poet of the Year and a finalist of the Omnidawn Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared in Ceriph, QLRS, Softblow, Omnidawn, and the exhibition MICROCOSMOS by studio KALEIDO.
Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015).
Katherine Damm was raised in Philadelphia and now lives in New York. She received her MFA from the Programs in Writing at the University ofCalifornia, Irvine, and her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, and Crazyhorse. She is working on a novel.
Kwame Dawes is the author of twenty-two books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His collection Nebraska was published in 2019. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and George W. Holmes University Professor at the University of Nebraska. He teaches in the Pacific MFA Program. He is Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His awards include an Emmy, the Forward Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Nora Magid Award, and the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry.
April Freely’s poetry and essays appeared in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. She received fellowships and awards from Cave Canem, the Ohio Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. At the time of her death in 2021, she was the Executive Director of Fire Island Artist Residency.
Annelyse Gelman is the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone (2014, Write Bloody), the artist’s book POOL (2020, NECK), and the EP About Repulsion (2019, Fonograf Editions). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, BOMB Magazine, the PEN Poetry Series, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Gelman also directs Midst, a digital platform for capturing, saving, and sharing the writing process. Find her at annelysegelman.com.
Mónica Gomery is a poet and rabbi living on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia. Her second book, Might Kindred, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize and was published in November 2022. She is the author of Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018) and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). She has been a nominee for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net and is a graduate of the 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Waxwing, Black Warrior Review, Muzzle Magazine, Adroit Journal, and other publications. Read more at monicagomerywriting.com.
Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poetry, including Foreign Bodies (W.W. Norton, 2020). She is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.
Elizabeth Hall is the author of the book I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist in nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Bitch, Bon Appétit, Electric Literature, L.A. Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her second book, Season of the Rat, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press.
David Hernandez’s fifth collection of poetry is Hello I Must Be Going (Pitt Poetry Series). He lives in Long Beach, CA.
Jeremy Klemin’s essays and translations appear in AGNI, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. He is an editor of Joyland Magazine’s Consulate section, and his work has been supported by grants from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Program and the Disquiet Program. He’s a nonfiction MFA student at Oregon State University.
Hiram Larew’s poems recently appeared in Contemporary American Voices, Poetry South, Amsterdam Quarterly, and Best Poetry Online. His latest collection, Mud Ajar, was published in 2021 by Atmosphere Press. Find him at HiramLarewPoetry.com.
Tom Lutz is the author of Aimlessness, a philosophical investigation, the travel trilogy At Home in the World (The Kindness of Strangers, And The Monkey Learned Nothing, and Drinking Mare’s Milk), the novels Born Slippy and Still Slippy, the cultural histories Doing Nothing and Crying, the literary histories Cosmopolitan Vistas and American Nervousness, and the photographic essay Portraits: Moments of Intimacy on the Road. His work has appeared in American Literary History, American Literature, ASAP, Black Clock, Black Music Research Journal, Chicago Tribune, Chronicle of Higher Education, Connotation Press, Die Zeit, Electric Literature, Exquisite Corpse, LALA, L.A.Times, New Republic, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Santa Monica Review, Salon, ZYZZYVA, and dozens of other literary and academic journals and books. He is the editor of more than twenty books and the founding editor and publisher of Los Angeles Review of Books.
Ruby Hansen Murray is the winner of the Montana Nonfiction Prize and has been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, Ragdale, and Hedgebrook. Her work is forthcoming in Cascadia: A Field Guide (Tupelo Press), Ecotone, and PRISM, and has been nominated for Pushcart prizes and Best of the Net. Find her in River Mouth Review, Under the Sun, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Midwest Review, Colorlines, High Desert Journal, Moss, The Rumpus, and Shapes of Native Nonfiction. She’s a regular columnist for the Osage News. Find her at rubyhansenmurray.com.
Niki Neems received an MFA in poetry from Vermont College. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she owns the stationery shop r.s.v.p. and instigates The Response Handwriting Project: The Convergence of Poetry, Handwriting and Epistolary Correspondence. Her poems have appeared in Jubilat, Conduit, The Literary Review, and elsewhere.
Steven Pfau is a Los Angeles–based essayist and poet. His work has appeared on Poets.org and in Astra Magazine, DIAGRAM, Guernica, The Offing, and Passages North.
Leslie Pietrzyk’s collection of linked stories set in DC, Admit This to No One, was published by Unnamed Press in November 2021. Her first collection of short stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press. Fiction and essays have appeared in, among others, Ploughshares, Story Magazine, Southern Review, and The Sun. Awards include a Pushcart Prize in 2020 and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and Hawthornden International Retreat at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland.
Stephanie Ramlogan is a Trinidadian writer, living in Brooklyn, New York, where she is an MFA student at Brooklyn College. She is the 2020 recipient of the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American writer’s prize. Her work has appeared in gal-dem, Bocas Lit Fest, and elsewhere.
John Searcy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. His work has appeared in the Beloit Fiction Journal, decomP, and First Intensity. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Paul Sladky lives in Edgefield, South Carolina.
Avia Tadmor’s poetry received support from Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation/Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop Series, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where she is a 2022 Reynolds Fellowship recipient. Her poems appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, New England Review, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Avia is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.
Craig Thomas is the Co-Creator/Executive Producer of the comedy series How I Met Your Mother. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and The Boston Globe and can be found craigthomaswriter.com. He lives in New York City.
Teresa Veiga is one of Portugal’s greatest short story writers. She is the author of Gente Melancolicamente Louca, Cidade Infecta, O Senhor d’Alem, and other works. She has won prizes like the PEN Portugal Award for Fiction, the Camilo Castelo Branco Prize (3x), and the Fernando Namora Prize. Veiga was born in Lisbon in 1945 and has also lived in the Alentejo and Algarve regions of Portugal.
H.R. Webster has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, 32Poems, Muzzle, and Ecotone. Her collection, What Follows, is from Black Lawrence Press. Poems etc. at hrwebster.com.
Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, where she studies the way that novels’ formal choices are also ethical ones. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Pangyrus, KPFT Radio Houston, and elsewhere.
Nell Wright is a poet and visual artist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The New Yorker, and The Yale Review. She’s received support from the Vermont Studio Center, the Community of Writers, NYU’s Global Research Institute in Prague, and the Fulbright U.S. Student Program.
Bret Yamanaka is a Japanese American poet, dancer, and teaching artist from Southern California. He has been a Guest Teaching Artist for The Juilliard School, Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, and The Ailey School. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southeast Review and The Margins. Currently, he lives in New York where he is a Margins Fellow with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and a Teaching Fellow at The Juilliard School in their Dance Division.
Melissa Yancy’s story collection, Dog Years, was the winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the California Book Award for First Fiction, received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was longlisted for The Story Prize. She is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship. She works in academic medicine and lives in Los Angeles with her family.
