Jason Arment served in Operation Iraqi Freedom as a machine gunner in the U.S. Marine Corps. He earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. University of Hell Press will publish his memoir Musalaheen in 2017. He lives in Denver, where he coordinates the Denver Veteran Writing Workshop with Colorado Humanities.
Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and her work has appeared in Tin House, VQR, The New York Times, and various other publications. Along with Eileen Pollack and Jeremiah Chamberlin, she is the coauthor of Creative Composition. She has received fellowships from the Camargo and MacDowell foundations and was a 2015 Fulbright fellow in Athens, Greece. She is working on her second novel.
Graham Barnhart served as a Special Forces medic in Iraq and Afghanistan and is currently pursuing an MFA at Ohio State University. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Beloit Poetry Journal, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Sewanee Review, and others. He was recently named the recipient of the 2015 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal.
Theresa Dowell Blackinton has won the Betty Gabehart Prize for Fiction and the North Carolina State Short Fiction Award. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, where she works as a freelance writer and editor.
D.F. Brown was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks. He served as a combat medic with the First of the Fourteenth Infantry in Vietnam, 1969–1970.
Glenda Carpio is a professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Lauren Haldeman is the author of the poetry collection Calenday (Rescue Press) and the artists’ book The Eccentricity is Zero. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Fence, jubilat, The Rumpus, and Colorado Review. A comic book artist, illustrator, puppeteer, and poet, she works as an instructor and web developer for the University of Iowa. You can find her on twitter @laurenhaldeman or online at laurenhaldeman.com.
Yunte Huang is a Guggenheim fellow and a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of award-winning bestseller Charlie Chan (2010) and the editor of The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature (2016).
Daniel Khalastchi is the author of two books of poetry, Manoleria (Tupelo Press, 2011) and Tradition (McSweeney’s, 2015). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he has published poems in Colorado Review, Fence, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. He is the co-founder and managing editor of Rescue Press, and he lives in Iowa City where he directs the Frank N. Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing.
Sale Trice Lilly IV is a former naval officer and Afghanistan war veteran. He is currently a crisis management consultant.
J. Estanislao Lopez studied philosophy and creative writing at the University of Houston. He currently lives and teaches in Houston, Texas.
Kembrew McLeod is a writer, media maker, and professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa who has written and produced several books and documentaries. The Pop Underground—McLeod’s book about downtown New York City in the 1960s and 1970s—is forthcoming from Abrams.
Daniel Mueller is the author of two collections of short fiction, How Animals Mate (Overlook Press, 1999) and Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey (Outpost 19 Books, 2013).
Iheoma Nwachukwu has won fellowships from the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and the Michener Center for Writers. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Internazionale, Kwani, and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in PRISM International, Forklift Ohio, The Rusty Toque, and other places. His Twitter handle is
@IheomaNwachukwu.
Lisa Jane Persky is a founding staff member of both the New York Rocker and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her work as a journalist, photographer, and artist has appeared in Mojo, Vulture, and The Pitchfork Review, among others. Her fiction has appeared in BOMB and in Eclectica: Best Fiction Volume 1. Lisa is also an actress who has appeared on, off, and off-off Broadway. Thirty years of her film and television work is listed on IMDB. In her spare time, she collects chickens found in literature at chickensinliterature.com and is writing a memoir of growing up bohemian in the years between the Beat and the Blank Generations.
John Durham Peters is a professor of English and film and media studies at Yale.
Hai-Dang Phan is the author of Small Wars, a chapbook of poems (Conclusive Editions, 2016). A graduate of the University of Florida’s MFA program in creative writing, he lives in Des Moines and teaches at Grinnell College.
Shelley Puhak is a poet and essayist from Baltimore. Her essays have recently appeared in Black Warrior Review, Creative Nonfiction, Columbia, and Salon. She is the author of two books of poems, the more recent of which, Guinevere in Baltimore, was selected by Charles Simic for the Anthony Hecht Prize.
Molly Quinn’s fiction has appeared in River City and Blithe House Quarterly. She is currently working on a collection of stories set in a psychiatric hospital, which draws on her experience as a registered nurse. She lives in Minneapolis.
Margaret Reges is the recipient of a 2015 “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize, as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA; the MacDowell Colony; and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in California.
D.J. Savarese studies anthropology and creative writing at Oberlin College, where he is a recipient of the William Battrick Poetry Fellowship and an ASAN Scholar Fellow. His work has appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly, Stone Canoe, wordgatherings.com,and Voices for Diversity and Social Justice: A Literary Education Anthology, and is forthcoming in Seneca Review, Prospect, and Deej, an ITVS-funded documentary airing on America ReFramed in 2017.
Elizabeth Scanlon is the editor of the American Poetry Review. Her book Lonesome Gnosis is forthcoming in 2017 from Horsethief Books.
Karen Skolfield’s book Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press) won the 2014 PEN/New England Award in poetry. Her new poems appear in Boulevard, The Carolina Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Slice, and elsewhere. She is an Army veteran who teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, winner of the 2012 The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and a former Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellow at Stanford University, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2014, Best New Poets 2012, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is currently the 2015–16 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.
Stephen Voyce is associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, where he also holds appointments in the Digital Studio for the Public Arts & Humanities and the Center for the Book. He is the author of Poetic Community: Avant-Garde Activism and Cold War Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2013), the editor of a book of variations: love – zygal – art facts (Coach House Books, 2013), and the director of the Fluxus Digital Collection. He is currently working on a book about twenty-first century culture, surveillance, and warfare.
Noah Warren is the author of The Destroyer in the Glass, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. He was born in Nova Scotia and now lives in San Francisco, where he is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.