BERNADETTE ESPOSITO teaches math in Laramie, Wyoming. Her work has appeared in several literary journals, including Best American Essays 2011. She is currently at work on a book on plane crashes.
ERINA HARRIS's poetry has been awarded multiple residencies, awards, and subpoenas. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is undertaking doctoral studies in creative writing and poetics at the University of Calgary. She is currently at work on her first manuscript, The Stag Head Spoke. The poems featured in this issue are excerpts from the serial poem “Beastiary: The Enfantesques.” “The Shadow” is an excerpt from the poem “The Dunce and the Shadow.”
EMILY HUNT's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Conduit, Sea Ranch, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Find her at ehunt.tumblr.com.
RAMON ISAO's fiction has appeared at Hobart (online) and is forthcoming in Ninth Letter. His screenplay credits include Junk, in which he co-stars, and Zombies of Mass Destruction. He has an MFA from Columbia University, where he taught writing courses and served as fiction editor for Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature. He lives in Brooklyn.
EUNSONG KIM's work has appeared in the Seattle Review, Denver Quarterly, and Tinfish Journal.
ADITI MACHADO is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Washington University in Saint Louis, where she stays on as the Third Year Fellow in Poetry. Her poems are forthcoming in The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry by Indians (2012). She is the poetry editor of Asymptote, a journal of translation.
EMILY MARTIN grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Brown University in 2011 and since then has been working and traveling in Southeast Asia.
KYLE MINOR is the author of In the Devil’s Territory, a collection of stories and novellas. Recent work appears in Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, and Best American Mystery Stories 2008.
BONNIE NADZAM's debut novel Lamb (Other Press) won the Center for Fiction’s 2011 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. Her work has appeared in Granta, Harper’s Magazine, EPOCH, and others.
THISBE NISSEN is the author of Out of the Girls’ Room and Into the Night: Stories; The Good People of New York; and Osprey Island. She teaches at Western Michigan University and lives with her husband, Jay Baron Nicorvo, and their son, cats, and chickens on a farm in Battle Creek.
GEOFFREY NUTTER is the author of A Summer Evening, Water’s Leaves & Other Poems, Christopher Sunset, and The Rose of January. Originally from California, he now lives in New York City.
MOLLY PATTERSON’s work has been honored in Best American Short Stories and has appeared or is forthcoming in the Atlantic, Michigan Quarterly Review, Salamander, and Arkansas Review, among others. She is currently at work on a novel.
GILLIAN PARRISH received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches writing. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including Gulf Coast, The Literary Review, and American Letters & Commentary, and recent essays can be found in EarthLines and Ecozone: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment.
ANZHELINA POLONSKAYA was born in Malakhovka, near Moscow, in 1969. A member of the Moscow Union of Writers and the Russian PEN Center, she has published six books of poetry.
D.A. POWELL’s most recent book is Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012). He lives in San Francisco.
JAMES SHEA is the author of Star in the Eye (Fence Books). He teaches at Nebraska Wesleyan University.
KEANE SHUM is a lawyer and an MFA candidate at the City University of Hong Kong. His work has appeared in the South China Morning Post, The Age, Fifty-Fifty: New Hong Kong Writing, and on SLAM Online.
MARCELA SULAK is the author of two collections of poetry, Immigrant (Black Lawrence Press, 2010) and Of All The Things That Don’t Exist I Love You Best. Her translation of K.J. Erben’s A Bouquet of Native Tales is forthcoming from Twisted Spoon Press.
COLE SWENSEN’s most recent books are Gravesend (U. of California, 2012) and Stele (Post-Apollo, 2012). She teaches at Brown University—and misses Iowa!
JOEL TOLEDO holds an MA in poetry from the University of the Philippines, Diliman. A winner of the Bridport Prize for Poetry, he was a recipient of a creative arts grant from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and a 2011 fellowship from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Chiaroscuro (2008), The Long Lost Startle (2009), and Ruins and Reconstructions (2011).
RIMAS UZGIRIS’s poetry and translations have been published in Bridges, 322 Review, Lituanus, Atlanta Review, Massachusetts Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Waiting Room Reader: Stories to Keep You Company, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark University and holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He lives in Brooklyn.
TOMAS VENCLOVA is a scholar, poet, and translator of literature. He was born in Lithuania in 1937 and graduated from Vilnius University. Because of his outspoken membership in the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, which monitored Soviet violations of human rights, he was threatened with sanctions and emigrated in 1977. Since 1980, he has been a member of the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Collections of his poems have been published in English as Dialogue in Winter and The Junction: Selected Poems.
ANNA VODICKA's essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Brevity, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from The University of Idaho and currently writes from Spokane.
ANDREW WACHTEL is the president of the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His most recent books are The Balkans in World History, Russian Literature, and Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe. He has translated poetry and prose from Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Bulgarian, and Slovenian.
DANEEN WARDROP is the author of a book of poetry, The Odds of Being, and the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Bentley Prize for Poetry from Seattle Review. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She has also authored three books of literary criticism, including Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing from University Press of New England.
RYO YAMAGUCHI’s poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming from American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, The Journal, and Drunken Boat, among others. He works and lives in Chicago. Please visit him at plotsandoaths.com.
Considered to be one of the most influential living poets in the Chinese language today, YANG JIAN has won prestigious literary awards over the past two decades. His first book of poetry, Dusk, was rated as one of the best ten national book titles of 2003. A practicing Buddhist and scholar of Chinese traditional culture, he was a factory worker for thirteen years and now makes his living as a writer. He lives in Ma’anshan, Anhui.
YE CHUN’s second collection of poetry, Lantern Puzzle, received Tupelo Press’s 2011 First/Second Book Award. Her translation of Hai Zi’s poetry, Wheat Has Ripened, is also forthcoming from Tupelo. Her other books include Travel Over Water and a novel in Chinese, Peach Tree in the Sea. Together with Gillian Parrish and Paul B. Roth, she has recently completed a collection of translations of Yang Jian’s poems titled Long River.
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