Translating from Turkish, Aron Aji is the recipient of the 2004 National Translation Award and NEA fellowships (2006, 2016). He directs the MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa.
Maria Anderson is from Montana. Her work has recently appeared in the Missouri Review and the Atlas Review. She was a finalist for the 2016 Dzanc Disquiet International Fiction Award and for the 2015 Missouri Review Editors’ Prize. She’s an editor at Essay Press.
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet best known for Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil).
Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Cave Canem Fellow. His poems can be found in issues of Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal, Pleiades, and Rattle, among others.
Dan Chelotti is a teacher at Elms College, where he directs programs at The Blue House. He is the author of x (McSweeney’s) and two chapbooks. One of his favorite poems is Nazim Hikmet’s “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved.”
Sarah Coates graduated from Cranbrook Academy of Art with an MFA in metalsmithing but never really touched metal. She makes art. She also writes. It’s often very shiny and about that uncomfortable schism between adulthood and childhood. That itchy rubbing of ages.
CynthiaCruz is the author of four collections of poetry: Ruin, The GlimmeringRoom, and Wunderkammer. Her fourth collection, How the End Begins, will be published in March of 2016. Her essays, interviews, and art writing have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, and Hyperallergic. Cruzhas received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in writing and an MFA in Art Criticism & Writing from the School of Visual Arts.
Craig Curtis has published widely over the last several decades. His work has appeared in the New England Review, The Literary Review, Cream City Review, Chicago Review, Carolina Quarterly, among others. He has stories forthcoming in the North Dakota Review and North Atlantic Review. He lives in Idaho.
Mary-Alice Daniel was born in Northern Nigeria and raised in London and Nashville. After attending Yale University, she received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan as a Rackham Merit Fellow. Her poems have received three Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Black Warrior Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Callaloo, and several anthologies, including Best New Poets 2017. Her adopted home is Los Angeles, where she is completing her debut full-length poetry manuscript and earning a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing as an Annenberg Fellow at the University of Southern California.
Isabelle Davis is a Chicago-based writer and student. Her chapbook I’m Sorry Because This Is Not About Sex (Zoo Cake Press) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Isabelle’s work can be found or is forthcoming in Quaint Magazine, alice blue review, Heavy Feather Review, and others.
Annie DeWitt is the author of White Nights in Split Town City (Tyrant Books, 2016). Her writing has appeared in Granta, Tin House, The Believer, Guernica, Esquire, BOMB, Electric Literature, Bookforum, NOON, The LA Review of Books, The American Reader, art+culture, and The Faster Times, among others, and has recently been anthologized and translated. Annie holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia School of the Arts where she now teaches.Her debut story collection Closest Without Going Over was shortlisted for the Mary McCarthy prize. Annie pens an occasional nonfiction column about art, literature, film and criticism for The Believer, called “Various Paradigms.” She is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship.
Dobby Gibson is the author of three books of poems, most recently It Becomes You (Graywolf Press, 2013). He lives in St. Paul, MN.
Amy Widmoyer Hanson holds a degree in piano performance from the University of Iowa and has taught both privately and in the public schools. She writes from the Minneapolis home she shares with her husband and three children. “The Soles of Her Feet” was her first journal submission.
Robin Hemley is the author of eleven books of nonfiction and fiction and has received many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes in fiction and nonfiction, and the Independent Press Book Award. He is currently Director of Writing at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and Distinguished Visiting Writer at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
Sarah Heston has published chapters of her memoir manuscript, Daughter of Endtimes, in Entropy, American Literary Review, and Hotel Amerika, and an article on the convergence of critical theory and memoir in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She won the Eda Kriseova fellowship in nonfiction from the Prague Summer Program and the Elizabeth Barnes dissertation fellowship from the University of Missouri. She has an MFA in poetry from UC Irvine and a PhD in creative nonfiction from the University of Missouri.
Evan James’s work has appeared in Oxford American, Catapult, The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Sun, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received fellowships from Yaddo and the Carson McCullers Center for his fiction.
Barry Lopez is the author of sixteen works of fiction and nonfiction, including Arctic Dreams, Resistance, and Crow and Weasel. He is the recipient of numerous literary and cultural awards and honors.
Gretchen Marquette’s work has appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, The Paris Review, Poetry, and other places. Her first book, May Day, was released from Graywolf Press in 2016.
Birgül Oğuz (Turkey), a fiction and nonfiction writer, was among the winners of the 2014 European Union Prize for Literature for her latest novel-in-stories Hah, now being translated into thirteen languages. She works and lives in Istanbul.
Barry Phipps is an Iowa City, Iowa–based multimedia artist. He studied photography, video, and painting at the Kansas City Art Institute, from where he graduated with a BFA in 1990. He has spent the last twenty-six years as a working artist in the disciplines of photography, art, and music.
Brett Puryear grew up in east Tennessee and earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Montana. He lives in Missoula and is completing a collection of stories and a novella.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press) and the chapbook But What Will We Do (Seattle Review), and is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker online. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Raphel is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard University.
Nancy Reddy is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series. In fall 2015, she was awarded a grant by the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her poems have recently appeared in Horsethief, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Stockton University in southern New Jersey.
Justin Phillip Reed is a South Carolina native and the author of A History of Flamboyance (YesYes Books, 2016). His first full-length book of poetry, Indecency, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2018. His work appears—or soon will—in Best American Essays, Callaloo, Columbia Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Offing, PEN American, Public Pool, and elsewhere. He received his MFA at Washington University in St. Louis and is the Online Editor for Tusculum Review.
Anjali Sachdeva’s stories and essays have been published in The Literary Review, Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
sam sax is a 2015 NEA Fellow and finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He’s a poetry fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, where he serves as the editor-in-chief of Bat City Review. He’s the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion and author of the chapbooks A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters (Button Poetry, 2014), sad boy / detective (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), and All the Rage (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016).
Sandra Simonds is the author of six books of poetry, including Orlando (Wave Books, 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure (University of Akron, 2017), and Steal it Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015). Her poems have been included in Best American Poetry in 2015 and 2014.
