Alfredo Aguilar is the son of Mexican immigrants. He is the author of the chapbook What Happens on Earth (BOAAT, 2018). His work has appeared or will soon appear in Best New Poets 2017, The Shallow Ends, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in North County San Diego.
Greg Allendorf was born in Cincinnati. He is the author of the chapbook Fair Day in an Ancient Town, selected by Kiki Petrosino for Brain Mill Press’s Mineral Point series. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from such journals as Subtropics, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Journal, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Hawaii Review, and Memorious: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction. He lives in Columbia, Missouri, where he is a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri.
Frances Cannon is a writer and artist with an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and a BFA in poetry and printmaking from the University of Vermont. She is the author and illustrator of the graphic memoir The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank, as well as the book of paintings and poetic translations Tropicalia and the book of poems and prints Uranian Fruit. She has a book of graphic literary criticism forthcoming from MIT Press. You can find more of her work at frankyfrancescannon.com.
Pankaj Challa was trained as an electrical engineer and has made independent films, but on reading Chekhov has turned seriously to the art of writing. He holds an MFA from the University of Miami, where he was a James Michener Fellow. Pankaj is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Stone Court Writer-in-Residence, and is at work on a collection of stories and a novel.
Michael Dumanis teaches literature and creative writing at Bennington College, where he also serves as editor of Bennington Review. He is the author of the poetry collection My Soviet Union and coeditor of the poetry anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Other poems have recently appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day project.
Daisy Hernández is the author of A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir and coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Aster(ix), Brevity, Dogwood, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Juked, and The Rumpus, among others. She is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing Program at Miami University in Ohio, and in researching her essay for this volume of The Iowa Review, she found most useful linguist Dennis Baron’s essay “The Words That Failed: A Chronology of Early Nonbinary Pronouns.”
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Pelvis with Distance, winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry, and Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, forthcoming from Four Way Books in March 2019. Associate editor for Beloit Poetry Journal and faculty for American Jewish University’s Brandeis Collegiate Institute, Jessica lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown. She is currently at work on a paired memoir and poetry collection exploring questions of faith.
Philip Kobylarz is a teacher and writer of fiction, poetry, and essays. His work appears in such publications as The Paris Review and the Best American Poetry series. He is the author of a book of poems concerning life in the south of France and a short story collection titled Now Leaving Nowheresville. His creative nonfiction collection All Roads Lead from Massilia is available from Everytime Press of Adelaide, Australia; A Miscellany of Diverse Things is available from Brooklyn’s Lit Riot Press; and Dos Madres Press has published Kanji Amerikana.
Erika Krouse is the author of the novel Contenders and collection of stories Come Up and See Me Sometime. Her short fiction has been published in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and One Story. She’s a book project mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.
Steve Langan is the author of Freezing, Notes on Exile and Other Poems, Meet Me at the Happy Bar, and What It Looks Like, How It Flies. He teaches at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s MFA in Writing program.
Amy Leach is the author of Things That Are. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, and she has been recognized with a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award.
Originally from Moldova, Ruth Madievsky is the author of the poetry collection Emergency Brake. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Tin House, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. She lives in Boston, where she works as an oncology pharmacist and is completing a short story collection.
Jane McCafferty is author of four books of fiction: Director of the World, a book of stories that won the Drue Heinz prize as judged by John Edgar Wideman; a collection of stories, Thank You for the Music; and two novels, One Heart and First You Try Everything. Her work has been awarded an NEA, two Pushcart prizes, the Great Lakes New Writers Award, an Oprah Book of the Week award, and several special mentions in Best American Short Stories. She is currently finishing a novella in Pittsburgh, where she teaches at Carnegie Mellon. She also writes nonfiction and poems.
Shane McCrae is the author of six books of poetry: The Gilded Auction Block (forthcoming); In the Language of My Captor, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; The Animal Too Big to Kill, winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award; Forgiveness Forgiveness; Blood; and Mule. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
Sara McGuirk holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA in English and film studies from the University of Notre Dame. She was the winner of the 2017 Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in poetry and a finalist for the 2017 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Prize in poetry. Sara is currently finishing her first collection of poetry as well as a feature-length screenplay and television pilot.
Christina Milletti teaches at University of Buffalo, SUNY, where she also curates the Exhibit X Fiction Series. Her fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Harcourt’s Best New American Voices, The Master’s Review, Alaska Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, and Denver Quarterly. She recently finished her first novel Choke Box: a Fem-Noir, and is now working on a new collection Now You See Her.
Grayson Morley is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Bard College. A winner of the 2018 PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, he is at work on a collection of stories and an absurdist novel about deliverymen and GPS efficiency tracking software. His work has appeared in the Brooklyn Review.
Cherise Morris is a writer and witch from rural Virginia. She lives in Detroit, where she’s learning to lean in to freedom, beauty, love, and Spirit.
Amanda Nadelberg is the author of three books, most recently Songs from a Mountain (Coffee House Press, 2016). She lives in Oakland.
Jesse Nathan’s poems appear in Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco and studies poetry at Stanford. With Ilya Kaminsky, he is the editor of In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth.
Emily Nemens’s first novel, The Cactus League, will be published by FSG in 2020. She became editor of The Paris Review in summer 2018, after five years editing The Southern Review.
Marc Rahe is the author of On Hours and The Smaller Half, both from Rescue Press. His poems have appeared in jubilat, MAKE, and elsewhere.
Austen Leah Rosenfeld is a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California. Her poems have appeared in Salmagundi Magazine, AGNI, Zyzzyva, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, Carolina Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and others. She has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.
Neil Schmitz has written extensively on American humor: Of Huck and Alice, his first study; most recently on the concept of “notwithstanding” in Tender Buttons. He lives in Buffalo, New York.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of the novel Mammother (Featherproof Books, 2017) and four books of poems. A new book of poems, The Horse is Forehead, is forthcoming from Black Ocean in 2019. He is an illustrator, teacher, and also a publisher of the independent poetry press Octopus Books. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Devon Walker-Figueroa, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, serves as co-founding editor of Horsethief Books.
Dawn Whitmore is a Washington, DC–based visual artist whose work focuses on mythology, gender, and identity. She is presently a resident in the competitive residency program at the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, Virginia. Her work has been shown in numerous venues including: the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Mesa Museum of Contemporary Art, Hemphill Fine Arts Carroll Square Gallery, and Area 405.
