Rachel Abramowitz is the author of The Birthday of the Dead, winner of the 2021 Marystina Santiestevan Prize from Conduit Books, and the chapbooks Flea with Martyrdom, winner of the 2023 Baltic Writing Residency Chapbook Contest (Action, Spectacle), The Puzzle Monster, winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun Prize (Factory Hollow Press), and Gut Lust, winner of the 2019 Burnside Review prize.
Anne P. Beatty is a writer from Greensboro, North Carolina, where she teaches high school English. Her essays have been published in The American Scholar, Shenandoah, Longreads, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Clint Bentley is a writer and filmmaker. His fiction has appeared in The Baltimore Review. His most recent film, Jockey, was released by Sony Pictures Classics.
Catherine Campbell’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Writer’s Digest, The Millions, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. They live in Asheville.
An Iowa City area resident since 1990, Rebecca Clouse finished a PhD in 1995 and taught mostly medieval literature for the English Department at the University of Iowa for about a decade. Then came another decade preoccupied with Lutherans and ministry. After that, she focused more and more on making images. Paintings from her series Mutisse! were shown at the Times Club café at Prairie Lights bookstore and auctioned to raise money for the Iowa City Animal Shelter.
Patrick Donnelly is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Little-Known Operas from Four Way Books. He directs The Frost Place Poetry Seminar, and he translates classical Japanese poetry with his husband, Stephen D. Miller.
CJ Evans is the author of Lives (Sarabande Books), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, chosen by Victoria Chang, A Penance (New Issues Press), and a chapbook, The Category of Outcast.
Rebecca Foust’s book Only (Four Way Books 2022) earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Her poems won the 2023 New Ohio Review Prize and were runner-up for the Missouri Review Prize.
Meredith Ann Fuller’s novel, Quarry, illustrated by Joan Anderson, received a starred review and Best Indie Fiction award of 2017 from Kirkus. She holds an MFA from Queens University. A psychoanalyst, mom, and oma, she lives in flyover country.
Katherine Gibbel’s poems have been published in The Chicago Review, jubilat, Second Factory, and elsewhere. She edits and prints Send Me Press, a letterpress printed postcard series. She lives in Windsor, Vermont.
Kimberly Grey is the author of three books: A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing: Essays (2023), Systems for the Future of Feeling (2020), and The Opposite of Light, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize from Persea Books.
Jeremy Griffin is the author of three short fiction collections. His work has appeared in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Oxford American. He teaches at Simpson College.
Stephanie L. Harper (MFA, Butler University) is a proudly neurodivergent poet living in Indianapolis, IN. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Laurel Review, Crab Creek Review, Salamander Magazine, and elsewhere.
Nathan Hoks’s most recent book of poems is Nests in Air (Black Ocean). He teaches in the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago and in the MFA/BFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Chelsey Johnson is the author of the novel Stray City. Her stories have also appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, and NPR’s Selected Shorts, among others. She lives in the mountain Southwest.
Nicole Klostermann is a writer and theater artist born and raised in Iowa. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at Brown University.
Nathan Kouri is from Des Moines, Iowa. His writing has appeared in Transat’ and X-R-A-Y.
Gaven Lover’s poetry has been published in the Sonora Review. Her writing is often soaked in grief and set on fire with her hope of what is to come.
Julia Meinwald is a writer of fiction and musical theater and a gracious loser at a wide variety of board games. She has fiction published or forthcoming in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, West Trade Review, After Dinner Conversation, and Bayou Magazine, among others. www.juliameinwaldwrites.com
Originally from the DC area, Matthew Moniz holds degrees from Southern Miss, McNeese, and Notre Dame. Matt’s work has been awarded Poetry by the Sea’s Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Crown Contest prize.
Daniel Moysaenko is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, and critic. His work has appeared in Poetry, the Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, and Chicago Review. He lives in Ohio’s Chagrin Valley.
Kathryn Nuernberger’s most recent books are The Witch of Eye: Essays and RUE: Poems. Recent work appears in Agni, Ecotone, Gettysburg, and Poetry. She is an associate professor of creative writing at University of Minnesota.
C. L. O’Dell’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, the New Statesman, and have been featured on Poetry Daily and RTÉ. He is founder and editor of The Paris-American.
Clinton Crockett Peters teaches at the largest college campus in the world, Berry College, in northwest Georgia. His books are Pandora’s Garden (2018) and Mountain Madness (2021), both from University of Georgia Press. Find his work at The Rumpus, Electric Lit, and Southern Review. He is afraid of sloths.
Margaret Schwartz teaches media and culture at Fordham University. She shares creative essays on her Substack, MOGPROFFERY, and is at work on a book about how technology makes the home permeable to global flows.
Lloyd Wallace is an MFA student at George Mason and an editorial coordinator for Poetry Daily. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in FENCE, Poetry Northwest, the Washington Square Review, and elsewhere.
Tim Wood is the author of two books of poems. He is an English professor at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York, and the 2024 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at U.C. Berkeley.
Xiaoyan Zhao Drasnin was born in Nanjing to revolutionaries who were persecuted in China’s political turmoil in the 1960s. As a teenager she read banned books and did manual labor on a rural commune. In 1981, Xiaoyan left China on a scholarship and earned a PhD in communication from Stanford. She was the global polling director at a major research firm in New York, associate producer for the documentary China After Tiananmen (PBS Frontline), and a caption writer for the photo chronicle Beijing Spring (Stewart, Tabori & Chang). She has attended the Stanford Creative Writing Workshops and the Northern California Writers’ Retreat and has been writing poetry and a novel.
Courtney Zoffness is the author of the essay collection Spilt Milk. She won the Sunday Times Short Story Award and received fellowships from The Center for Fiction and MacDowell. She teaches at Drew University.