Kazim Ali’s books include four volumes of poetry, The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities,and Sky Ward;three novels, Quinn’s Passage, The Disappearance of Seth, and Wind Instrument; two collections of essays, Orange Alert and Fasting for Ramadan;and translations of poetry and novels. He is the editor of Jean Valentine: This-World Company. He is on the faculty of Oberlin College and is founding editor of Nightboat Books.
Dinika M. Amaral was raised in Bombay on the lessons of The Godfather. She worked in finance and quit to go to graduate school at New York University, where she got her MA and MFA. Her work has appeared in the Times of India and Golden Handcuffs Review and is forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly and Guernica. Presently, she serves as a writing coach at NYU’s Stern School of Business and substitute-teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. Her secret dream is to be a better mob wife to Michael Corleone than Kay.
John Ashbery’s most recent collection of poems is Quick Question (2012). A two-volume set of his translations from the French (poetry and prose) was published in early 2014.
Catherine Blauvelt is a 2012 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2013, she won the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Contest. Her poems have previously appeared in Likestarlings, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and the Boston Review. She currently works for the Iowa Youth Writing Project at the University of Iowa.
Amy Butcher is an essayist and author of the forthcoming memoir Visiting Hours (Blue Rider Press/Penguin, April 2015), of which this essay is an excerpt. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa and has recent work in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Modern Lovecolumn, Gulf Coast, Guernica, and Brevity, among others. More at amyebutcher.com.
Robert Coover is the recipient of the William Faulkner Foundation Award, for The Origin of the Brunists, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, etc. He has published fourteen novels, and his latest, The Brunist Day of Wrath, is out now from Dzanc Books.
Carol Ann Davis is the author of Psalm and Atlas Hour. She teaches at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
Jennifer Alise Drew is the prose editor for AGNI magazine, and has worked as an editor for numerous other magazines, publishing companies, and authors, including Hunter S. Thompson, who taught her that writing should be fun, though it often isn’t. She holds an MA in creative writing from Boston University, and is currently completing a memoir in essays about her son, cerebral palsy, and other stories, excerpts from which also appear in LUMINA, The Chattahoochee Review, and Hippocampus Magazine.
Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies at UCLA and a well-known visual poet and book artist.
Craig Dworkin is the author of Reading the Illegible (Northwestern, 2003) and No Medium (MIT, 2013) and is the editor of five books: Architectures of Poetry (Rodopi, 2004); Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writing of Vito Acconci (MIT, 2006); The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof, 2008); The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound (with Marjorie Perloff, Chicago, 2009); and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (with Kenneth Goldsmith, Northwestern, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah and serves as Senior Founding Editor to Eclipse (eclipsearchive.org).
Johanna Hunting received her MFA from Columbia University. She lives in New York City and is working on a collection of linked stories.
Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat, as well as three books of short fiction, the most recent of which is We Make Mud. A new collection, The Fish and the Not Fish, is due out in the fall of 2014. He lives in Michigan.
Campbell McGrath is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (Ecco Press, 2012). A Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, he teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
Dave Mondy has been lauded for his work in multiple genres: food writing (Best Food Writing 2014), travel writing (four national Solas Awards), sports writing (seen here), experimental memoir (Iowa Review Awards finalist), radio (A Prairie Home Companion and other public radio programs), and storytelling (national tours and festival awards). He currently writes a feature-length column on sustainably-sourced beer/wine/liquor for Edible and (unrelated to the previous) also teaches university classes in creative writing; he will serve as Randolph College's 2015 Writer-In-Residence. He greatly enjoys speaking of himself in the third person. Dave is currently working on a book about the narratives and characters behind famous sports photos. www.davemondy.com
Andrew R. Mossin is the author of the collection of critical essays, Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and two collections of poetry, The Epochal Body (Singing Horse Press, 2004) and The Veil (Singing Horse Press, 2008). He has recently completed a new book of poetry, The Called, and a memoir, Through the Rivers. He teaches in the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.
Daniel Poppick’s poems have appeared in BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Claudius App, and other journals. He co-edits the Catenary Press with Rob Schlegel.
D.A. Powell’s most recent collections are Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (2012), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, and Repast (2014), both from Graywolf Press. He lives in San Francisco.
Joshua Rivkin’s poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He has received a winter fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a Stegner Fellowship in poetry from Stanford, and a Fulbright fellowship to Italy.
Helen Klein Ross’s poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Salmagundi, and in anthologies, including SHORT, published in 2014 by Persea Books. Her first novel, Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue, was published in March by Simon and Schuster. Her next is due out in 2016. She is editor of a forthcoming poetry anthology, The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, which provides a glimpse into habits and social aspects of nineteenth-century America. She lives in Manhattan and Lakeville, CT.
Montreux Rotholtz is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, the PEN Poetry Series, Fence, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle with her husband and a dog named Toast.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s work has appeared in Redivider, Apalachee Review, and Unfathomable City. He has an MFA from the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans.
Rob Schlegel is the author of The Lesser Fields (Center for Literary Publishing, 2009) and January Machine (Four Way Books, 2014).
Peter Jay Shippy’s fourth book is A Spell of Songs (Saturnalia Books). His work appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012 and 2014. He teaches at Emerson College.
Bennett Sims is the author of the novel A Questionable Shape, which received the 2014 Bard Fiction Prize. His stories have appeared in A Public Space, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Zoetrope, among others.
Garrett Stewart is the author of several books on fiction, film, and fine art, most recently Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art and Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance. He is the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa.
