Dubai-born, Brooklyn-based Rawaan Alkhatib is a writer and visual artist, as well as co-editor of The Catenary Press (with Rob Schlegel and Dan Poppick). She is working on a book-length project about the Empty Quarter, the largest sand desert in the world.
Micah Bateman is the author of a chapbook, Polis, and the recipient of the Poetry Society of America Lyric Poetry Award.
Kate Bernheimer is the author of two story collections, How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales and Horse, Flower, Bird, both published by Coffee House Press, and a novel trilogy. She also edited the World Fantasy Award–winning collection My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and the World Fantasy Award nominee xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths, both published by Penguin Books. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Arizona.
Jared Buckheister is an artist living and working in New York City. He has a BFA in photography from Pratt and an MFA in sculpture from Bard College. He makes everything but paintings, combining autobiographical material with larger social and political narratives that often point toward culminating violence. Buckhiester has had exhibitions at Envoy Enterprises, Feature Inc., Galerie Du Jour in Paris, Thomas Rehbein Galerie in Cologne, and at the Lille Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in France. He has been the recipient of awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Albert K. Murray Foundation, and The Dedalus Foundation. Learn more at jaredbuckhiester.com.
CAConrad received a 2019 Creative Capital Award, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, The Believer Magazine Book Award, and the Gil Ott Book Award. The author of nine books of poetry and essays, While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books) won the 2018 Lambda Book Award. They teach at Columbia University in NYC and the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.
Laura Crossett is a librarian. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa with her family and some cats.
Elizabeth Dodd teaches at Kansas State University. Her most recent book is Horizon’s Lens (University of Nebraska Press).
Jacob Eigen is a poet and fiction writer originally from Brooklyn currently living in Chicago. He holds a BA from Yale and an MFA from Hunter College. His work has previously appeared in The New Republic and The Saint Ann’s Review.
Julie Gray grew up in the piney woods of East Texas. A scholarship recipient of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she went on to earn a BA from the University of Texas and a JD from the University of Houston Law Center. She lives in Houston and is completing a memoir, of which her essay is an excerpt.
Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in Hotel Amerika, the Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, Other Voices, and The New York Times. Holbert grew up in the Grand Coulee near the Columbia River. His family was among the first settlers of the country. His first novel, Lonesome Animals, was a top ten pick in 2012 for The Seattle Times; it was followed by The Hour of Lead in 2014, which won the Washington State Book Award in 2015 and was named by Kirkus as a top 100 pick for 2014. Holbert’s next novel, Whiskey, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in March 2018.
Terrence Holt teaches writing and practices medicine in the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His short fiction has been anthologized widely, in “best-of” collections in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. It was collected in In the Valley of the Kings (W.W. Norton), which was a New York Times editors’ choice. His most recent collection, The New York Times bestseller Internal Medicine (Norton/Liveright), was named by Kirkus as one of the best memoirs and one of the best science and nature books of 2014.
Andes Hruby was at Bennington College when she started as a reporter for Fortune during the Gulf War. After graduating she went on to write copy for Armani, Calvin Klein, Claude Montana, Ungaro, and Valentino. She completed her Columbia University MFA and published mainstream fiction with the Dutton, Penguin & Putnam group. Motherhood introduced her to the world of Scholastic Publishing where she became a ghostwriter. “The Kitty” is the first chapter of her nonfiction memoir, another of which was featured in the Los Angeles Times article “The Robert Mapplethorpe photo you haven’t seen: The one he took of me.”
Kenan Ince is a queer, Turkish-American mathematician, poet, and organizer from Texas living on occupied Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute territory (so-called Salt Lake City). Their work was featured in Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, and the anthology Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America, among others. They are the recipient of scholarships at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop and the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat and winner of the Utah Pride Center Poetry and Prose Contest.
Evan James has written for Oxford American, Travel + Leisure, Catapult, The New York Times, The New York Observer, and many other publications. His essay Lovers’ Theme was selected by Eula Biss as the winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received fellowships from Yaddo and the Carson McCullers Center for his fiction.
Shani Jamila is a visual artist whose work explores identity, genealogy, and the idea of home. Her travels to nearly fifty countries deeply inform her painting, photography, and collage practice. An Aspen Institute Scholar, TED Resident, and Fulbright Fellow, she exhibits and lectures internationally. Her work has been presented at the Manifesta European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Centro Provincial de Artes Plásticas y Diseño, Smack Mellon, Corridor Gallery, and The Cooper Gallery. Her podcast, Lineage, features artist to artist dialogues about making a home in NYC.
R. Kauff is a visual artist working in sculpture, print media, and book arts. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa in 2017 and is currently based in Los Angeles. Learn more at rkauff.xyz.
Tommy Kha received his MFA from Yale University. He has exhibited extensively in the United States, Canada, China, and France. He was a Hyères Grand Prix Finalist, an En Foco Photography Fellowship recipient, a former Light Work resident and Camera Club of New York Workspace Resident. He was the cover of Vice Magazine’s 2017 photography issue. He is based in Brooklyn.
Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet, critic, artist, and performer who has published nineteen books, including Camp Marmalade, Notes on Glaze, My 1980s & Other Essays, Circus, and Humiliation. A new collection of essays, Figure It Out, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in May 2019. He is a professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.
Sherry Kramer’s plays are produced here and abroad and include Three Quarter Inches of Sky, David’s RedHaired Death, and When Something Wonderful Ends. She teaches playwriting at Bennington College and regularly at the Michener Center for Writers of the University of Texas at Austin. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Playwrights Workshop.
Jessica Laser is the author of Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in Berkeley, California. Learn more at jessicalaser.com.
Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong is a British-Mexican-American artist, born in Mexico City. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in numerous museum collections. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. His books include History Images (Steidl), Horizons (Hatje Cantz), and the forthcoming Paris, Novembre (Steidl).
Stacey Levine has written four books of fiction: The Girl with Brown Fur: Tales and Stories, Frances Johnson, Dra—, and My Horse and Other Stories. A recipient of a PEN/West Fiction Award, she has contributed fiction to Tin House, the Fairy Tale Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, and others. She teaches at Seattle Central College and is working on a novel, Where Is Mice?
Eugene Lim is the author of the novels Fog & Car, The Strangers, and Dear Cyborgs. His writings have appeared in Granta, The Believer, Fence, Little Star, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He is the librarian at Hunter College High School, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Queens, NY.
Born in Taipei, Taiwan and raised in Thailand, Eleen Lin holds an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University School of Art, and a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art, UK. Her work has been exhibited in a number of museums in New York, China, and Korea, as well as galleries throughout Austria, Germany, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her works are in the permanent collections of several institutions worldwide.
Originally from the Midwest, Beth Livensperger holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University. She has exhibited at venues in NYC, widely throughout the U.S., and in Seoul, Korea. Her paintings have been exhibited at the Abrons Art Center and Chashama, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, RISD Memorial Hall Gallery, The Painting Center, and William Holman Gallery among many others. Livensperger is currently an assistant professor in the department of performing and creative arts at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.
Derby Maxwell is a writer, comedian, and lawyer. He has a BA in criminal justice, a JD, and an MFA in creative writing. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is currently working on a novel. This is his first publication.
Mark Mayer is the author of the short story collection Aerialists, published by Bloomsbury USA. He is a faculty fellow at Colby College.
Joyelle McSweeney is the author of eight books in various genres, including the verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks and The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, a work of decadent ecopoetics. She co-edits Action Books and teaches at Notre Dame. Her ninth book, Toxicon, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2020.
Philip Metres has written ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon Press), Sand Opera (Alice James Books), Pictures at an Exhibition (University of Arkon Press), and The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan Press), among others. Awarded the Lannan Literary Fellowship, three Arab American Book Awards, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, he is a professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.
Maggie Millner is a poet and teacher from rural upstate New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, jubilat, and other publications. Maggie teaches in the Writing Program at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Beth Morgan is a fiction writer from Sherman, Texas. She lives in Brooklyn where she is self-employed as a dog walker. She is currently attending the Brooklyn College MFA program for fiction and has work forthcoming online in the Kenyon Review. You can follow her on Instagram @gentle_herbal_laxative.
Phomohobes are an artist collective based out of Regina and Winnipeg, Canada comprised of Jason Cawood and Colby Richardson. They work primarily in collage, printmaking, and video.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box (Penguin Press) and What Was It For (Rescue Press). She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from Harvard, and she teaches in the Princeton Writing Program.
Stephanie Elis Schlaifer is a poet and installation artist in St. Louis. She is the author of the poetry collection Cleavemark (BOAAT Press) and The Cloud Lasso, a children’s book from Penny Candy Books. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her poems and art have appeared in Best New Poets, BOMB Magazine, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, Colorado Review, and on PoetryNow. Her work can be viewed at criticalbonnet.com.
Bennett Sims is the author of the novel A Questionable Shape and the collection White Dialogues. He was a recipient of the 2018–2019 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, where he wrote in dialogue with the images of photographer Sze Tsung Leong who is featured in this issue. The story and photo were first exhibited together at the American Academy in a show of Leong’s image/text collaborations titled Storia della storia.
Brain Sneeden is the author of the poetry collection Last City (Carnegie Mellon University Press). His poems and translations have received the Indiana Review 1/2K Prize, the World Literature Today Translation Prize, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, an American Literary Translators Association Travel Fellowship, and a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship. His translation of Phoebe Giannisi’s poetry collection Homerica (World Poetry Books) was selected by Anne Carson as a favorite book of 2017 in The Paris Review. Brian received his MFA from the University of Virginia. He is the program coordinator of Translation Studies at the University of Connecticut.
Colby Somerville has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in New York where he turns bits on and off for dollar sign dollar sign dollar sign.
Jesse Treece makes collages by hand from vintage books and magazines in Seattle.
Analía Villagra’s stories have appeared in Water~Stone Review, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. “After” is one of a linked pair of stories; its companion won the 2018 New Ohio Review contest and appears in the New Ohio Review 24. Villagra posts about books on Instagram and writes almost nothing on Twitter @isleofanalia. She lives in Oakland with her husband, dog, and rapidly growing army of succulents.
Chloe Wilson is the author of two poetry collections, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe, which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, received second prize in the 2018 Bristol Short Story Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Manchester Fiction Prize.
