Jeffrey Allen is an MFA candidate in poetry at George Mason University, where he has received the 2015–16 Heritage Student Writer Fellowship. His poems have been published in Short Vine Literary Journal, ReCap, and New World Writing.
Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian-American writer. She is currently working on a book and teaching writing at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and on NPR. She holds an MFA from Iowa and an MA from Columbia.
Rachel Z. Arndt is a writer from Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Popular Mechanics, The Awl, and elsewhere. She is the assistant editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series and an MFA candidate in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program.
N. Michelle AuBuchon holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn. Her work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in the Brooklyn Rail, BuzzFeed, New Orleans Review, Weekly Rumpus, Caketrain, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Washington Square, Gawker, No News Today, and Swink. She is currently working on a novel-in-stories.
Sandra Beasley is the author of I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. In 2015, W.W. Norton will publish her third collection, Count the Waves. Recent honors for her work include the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, teaching fellowships from Cornell College and Lenoir-Rhyne University, and two DCCAH Artist Fellowships. Her most recent book is Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a memoir and cultural history of food allergy. She lives in Washington DC and is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at the University of Tampa.
Jeanne Birdsall’s New York Times–best-selling novels about the Penderwick family have collected many honors—including the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature—and have been translated into twenty-five languages.
Isaac Blum’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Times, One Teen Story, Sou’wester, and other publications. Find him at facebook.com/blumwriter.
Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and, most recently, a memoir of his seventh-grade year called A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. His work has been translated into seventeen languages, and he has received the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards, the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. In 2007, he was named one of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists. He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He is the author of Capitalism and Extinction (PM Press, forthcoming), The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature (2013) and Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Michigan, 2007), and is coeditor of four essay collections: Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities (Haymarket, forthcoming); Democracy, the State, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge, 2009); Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (Michigan, 2009); and Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Duke, 2007). He has also published over fifty articles in journals such as African Studies Review, Atlantic Studies, Cultural Critique, Interventions, Jouvert, New Formations, Postcolonial Studies, Postmodern Culture, Screen, Small Axe, South Atlantic Quarterly, Social Text, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. He is former editor of Social Text Online and of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom.
George Economou is the author of thirteen books of poetry and translations, the most recent of which are Complete Plus—The Poems of C. P. Cavafy in English (Shearsman Books, 2013); Ananios of Kleitor (Shearsman Books, 2009); and Acts of Love, Ancient Greek Poetry from Aphrodite’s Garden (Modern Library/Random House, 2006). A new book, Unfinished & Uncollected: Finishing Cavafy’s Unfinished Poems, followed by Uncollected Poems & Translations, will be published by Shearsman in the fall of 2015.
Robert Fernandez is the author of Pink Reef and We Are Pharaoh (both Canarium) and co-translator of Azure (Wesleyan), poems by Stéphane Mallarmé. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, A Public Space, Hambone, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a New American Poet award and a former editor for the PEN Poetry Series. He currently serves as the Distinguished Reynolds Chair in Poetry at UNK.
Michele Glazer’s latest book is On Tact, & the Made-Up World (Iowa). She teaches in the MFA program at Portland State University.
Johannes Göransson is the author of six books, including most recently The Sugar Book, from which these poems are taken. He is also a translator, edits Action Books, and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
Janet Kim Ha was born in Chicago and raised in Seoul, South Korea. She has been living in the U.S. for the past ten years, lately setting in Greencastle, Indiana, with her husband and daughter.
Anna Kovatcheva was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and holds an MFA in fiction writing from New York University. Her novelette, The White Swallow, was selected by Aimee Bender as the winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition and will be published later this year. Her stories have previously appeared in the Kenyon Review, online and in print. She lives in Charlottesville, VA, where she works as a graphic designer by day and writes stories of Bulgaria by night.
Rachel Milligan’s poems and translations can be found in BOAAT, Similar:Peaks::, Pathlight Magazine, smoking glue gun, and elsewhere. She was a Pflughaupt Fellow in Creative Writing, as well as a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholar in Chinese. She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she currently lives in Philadelphia.
Molly Minturn’s writing has appeared in The Toast, Boston Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently at work on a book of essays.
Philip Nel is University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University. His most recent books are Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature (2012); Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby Volume One: 1942–1943 (coedited with Eric Reynolds, 2013); and Barnaby Volume Two: 1944–1945 (coedited with Reynolds, 2014).
Alice Notley has been awarded the 2015 Ruth Lilly Prize. Her forthcoming books are Benediction, from Letter Machine, and Certain Magical Acts, from Penguin.
Shaun Tan grew up in Perth, Western Australia. In school he became known as the “good drawer,” which partly compensated for his always being the shortest kid in every class. He graduated from the University of WA in 1995 and currently works as an artist and author in Melbourne. His books include The Rabbits, The Red Tree, Tales from Outer Suburbia, Rules of Summer, and The Arrival. He has also worked as a concept artist for animated films (including Pixar’s WALL-E) and directed the Academy Award–winning short film The Lost Thing with Passion Pictures Australia. In 2011, he received the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. For more information, please visit thebirdking.blogspot.com.au.
Douglas Trevor is the author of the novel Girls I Know, which won the 2013 Balcones Prize, and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. He teaches in the creative writing program and the English department at the University of Michigan.
Inara Verzemnieks is a member of the faculty of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She was also named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. Her first book, a memoir, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
Shawn Wen is a writer, radio producer, and multimedia artist. Her book A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause is forthcoming with Sarabande Books in 2016. Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Seneca Review, the White Review, and the anthology City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis (Faber and Faber, 2015). Her radio work has broadcast on This American Life, Freakonomics Radio, and Marketplace. Her video work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Camden International Film Festival, and the Carpenter Center.
Caroline Randall Williams is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Mississippi. A 2010 Harvard graduate, she is also the coauthor of two books, The Diary of B.B. Bright, Possible Princess (a young adult novel) and Soul Food Love (a cookbook/memoir). Her first collection of poetry, Lucy Negro, Redux (Ampersand Books) was published in spring 2015.
Deborah Willis published her first collection of short fiction, Vanishing and Other Stories, with Harper Perennial in 2010. Her new collection, The Dark and Other Love Stories, is forthcoming from Penguin (Canada) and Norton (U.S.). Her fiction has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly, Lucky Peach, and Zoetrope. She lives in Calgary, Canada.
