Contributors

Farah Ali is from Karachi, Pakistan. Her work appears in Copper Nickel, Arkansas International, the Kenyon Review, and Ecotone. She received a special mention in the 2018 Pushcart Prize XLII for a story that appears in J Journal, and was the winner of the 2016 Colorado Review Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. She also won the fall 2018 Copper Nickel Editors Prize in prose.

Kaveh Bassiri is an Iranian-American writer and translator. He has received the Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Award and a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. His poems appear in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, Nimrod International Journal, the Mississippi Review, and Best New Poets. His chapbook 99 Names of Exile, the winner of the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, will be published in 2019.

Alice Blank is an artist and writer.

Debra Bruce’s most recent book is Survivors’ Picnic, and her poems appear widely in journals including the Cincinnati Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Mezzo Cammin, Poetry, and Women's Studies Quarterly. She is professor emeritus at Northeastern Illinois University and lives in Chicago.

Michael Brooks Cryer teaches writing at Arizona State University. His poems and reviews appear in Quarterly West, Ecotone, DIAGRAM, Hayden's Ferry Review, the Cortland Review, and other journals. He is also an occasional freelance music critic for Phoenix New Times. Four Chambers Press released his chapbook, Channels, Frequencies & Sequences, in the summer of 2017. Cryer’s poetry collection, Selected Proverbs, won the 2016 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award.

Vanessa Cuti’s fiction appears in the Kenyon Review, the Indiana Review, the Cimarron Review, the Cincinnati Review, the Rumpus, Hobart, and others. She received her MFA from Stony Brook University and lives in the suburbs of New York with her family.

Jim Daniels’s recent poetry books include Rowing Inland (Wayne State University Press, 2017), Street Calligraphy (Steel Toe Books, 2017), and The Middle Ages (Red Mountain Press, 2018). His book of short fiction, The Perp Walk, was published by Michigan State University Press in 2019. He coedited RESPECT: The Poetry of the Music of Detroit, an anthology of poetry and lyrics forthcoming from MSU Press in Fall 2019. He is the Thomas S. Baker University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

Jennifer duBois is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Her debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was the winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. DuBois’s third novel, The Spectators, was published in spring 2019.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections and three books of nonfiction, including most recently Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity (University of New Mexico Press, 2023). Her next book of poems, Civilians, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2025. Her writing appears in Poetry, New England Review, the Southern Review, and Ploughshares. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas.

Kenneth A. Fleming’s short fiction has been a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Family Matters contest and Pleiades’s 2018 G. B. Crump Prize in Experimental Fiction. He holds an MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University and his work appears in the Delmarva Review. He is a senior editor at F(r)iction and is currently finishing a collection of short fiction. He lives in Maryland. You can find him on Twitter @kflemingwriter.

Niels Frank, born 1963, published his first book in 1985, a collection of poems called Øjeblikket (The Moment). Since then he has published five books of poems, the latest being Små guder (Small Gods) in 2008. He has also published two books of essays, the latest being Alt andet er løgn (Everything Else is a Lie) from 2007. In 1998 he invented his own genre called metaphorisms in Livet i troperne (Life in the Tropics) which he expanded with new texts as well as photographs in the four-hundred-page book Første person, anden person (First Person, Second Person), published in 2004. He has also written a book of art stories about fifteen well-known artists such as Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Andy Warhol, Albrecht Dürer, and Frida Kahlo. In 2010 he published Spørgespil (Who’s Asking), a prose collection of answers to various questions posed by the writer himself, inspired by Marcel Proust’s famous questionnaire. His first novel, Nellies bog (Nellie’s Book), was published in 2013, written apparently by the protagonist himself despite his great difficulties in writing correctly. It received an award from the Danish Critics Prize as book of the year. In 2015 he published Tristhedens historie (The History of Sadness) a collection of ten portraits of various characters who share the experience of lost hopes and unfulfilled dreams. Vulkaner på månen (Volcanoes on the Moon), a collection of stories about various cities around the world, came out in 2018. Frank is represented in New European Poets, an American anthology published in 2008. In 2011, his poetry collection Én vej from 2005 was translated into English and published in Canada under the title Picture World. He has translated poetry into Danish, notably that of John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Francis Ponge, and Paul Celan. From 1996 to 2002 he was head of the Writers’ School in Copenhagen. In 2009 he received a lifetime award from the Danish state.

Joy Harjo’s eight books of poetry include Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction and the American Book Award. She is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the United States Artist Fellowship. In 2014 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She has five award-winning CDs of music including the award-winning album Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. Forthcoming in the fall of 2019 is a book of poetry from Norton, An American Sunrise. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

A poet and essayist, Elizabeth Hazen’s work appears in The Best American Poetry 2013, Southwest Review, the Threepenny Review, the Normal School, and other journals. She teaches seventh and eighth grade English at Calvert School in Baltimore. Alan Squire Publishing released her first book, Chaos Theories, in 2016. Her second book is forthcoming in 2020.

Lesley Jenike’s poems and essays appear in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, the Southern Review, the Bennington Review, the Rumpus, Rattle, Verse, and many other journals. Her most recent books are poetry collections Holy Island (Gold Wake, 2014), and Punctum (Kent State University Press, 2017). She teaches creative writing and literature at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio where she lives with her husband and children.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen novels, six story collections, and, so far, one comic book. Stephen’s been a National Endowment for the Arts recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Independent Publisher Award for Multicultural Fiction, a Bram Stoker Award, and four This is Horror Awards. He’s been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. He’s also made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2020). His work appears in Salon, the Paris Review Daily, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. The Map of Salt and Stars was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature and a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards finalist in Historical Fiction.

Pia Juul is a Danish author of ten books of poems, three books of short stories, and two novels. The novel The Murder of Halland from 2009 can be read here. Her first book of poems was published in 1985. This untitled poem is from her latest poetry collection, Forbi, (Past), which was published by Asger Schnacks Forlag in 2018.

Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of Book of Asters (Mayapple Press, 2014), No Eden (Mayapple Press, 2011), and Says the Forest to the Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2018). She received two Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and her poems appear in the Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, and the Kenyon Review. She is a poetry editor for the Baltimore Review.

Miriam Libicki’s comics appear in the Nib, GEIST Magazine, the Journal of Jewish Identities, and Rutgers University Press. Her memoir jobnik! has been used in more than twenty university courses. Her book of drawn essays received the 2017 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature. Libicki received a BFA in visual art from Emily Carr University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. She was the 2017 Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence.

Willie Lin lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. She is the author of the chapbooks Instructions for Folding (Northwestern University Press, 2014) and Lesser Birds of Paradise (MIEL, 2016).

Louise Mønster was born in 1972, earned her PhD, and is now associate professor at the Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University. She has, among other titles, published Ny nordisk. Lyrik i det 21. århundrede (New Nordic: Poetry in the 21st Century) in 2016, Mødesteder. Om Tomas Tranströmers og Henrik Nordbrandts poesi (Meeting Places: On the Poetry of Tomas Tranströmer and Henrik Nordbrandt) in 2013, and Nedbrydningens opbyggelighed. Litterære historier i det 20. århundredes nordiske modernistiske lyrik (The Constructiveness of Destruction: Literary Histories in 20th Century Nordic Modernist Poetry) in 2009, as well as a large number of anthologies and articles about Danish and Nordic literature. Louise Mønster is an editor of the literary journal Passage (Arcade) and of Nordisk poesi. Tidsskrift for lyrikkforskning (Scandinavian Poetry: Journal of Poetry Research).

Amit Majmudar is a widely published poet, translator, novelist, and essayist. His forthcoming poetry collection is Kill List (Knopf, 2020), and his most recent book in the United States is Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary (Knopf, 2018). Recent and forthcoming novels published by Penguin Random House India include Sitayana and Soar. Ohio's former first Poet Laureate, his poetry and prose have appeared in multiple The Best American Poetry anthologies, The Best American Essays 2018, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017, as well as The Norton Introduction to Literature among other textbooks. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Irène P. Mathieu is a pediatrician, writer, and public health researcher at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book is Grand Marronage (Switchback Books, 2019), which was selected as Editor’s Choice for the Gatewood Prize and runner-up for the Cave Canem/Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. She is also the author of orogeny (Trembling Pillow Press, 2017), which won the Bob Kaufman Book Prize, and the galaxy of origins (dancing girl press, 2014). Irène is a recipient of Fulbright, Callaloo, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowships, and is on the editorial staff of Muzzle Magazine and the Journal of General Internal Medicine’s humanities section.

Kate McQuade is the author of the story collection Tell Me Who We Were, forthcoming from William Morrow in July, 2019. Her work appears in Black Warrior Review, Harvard Review, the Lily/Washington Post, and Verse Daily, and her recent honors include scholarships and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. A native Minnesotan, she lives and teaches at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

Susanna Nied, an American writer and translator, is in love with the Danish language. Her work appears in journals such as Poetry, APR, Tin House, Harper's, and Two Lines. She has been honored with the Landon Award of the Academy of American Poets, the American-Scandinavian Foundation/PEN Translation Prize, and the Nims Memorial Prize of Poetry Magazine. Her most recent translation is The Condition of Secrecy: Selected Essays by Inger Christensen (New Directions, 2018).

Rainie Oet is a nonbinary writer and game designer. They are the author of three books: Porcupine in Freefall (winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition, 2019), Inside Ball Lightning (SEMO Press, 2020), and Glorious Veils of Diane (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2021). They have an MFA in poetry from Syracuse University, where they were awarded the Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction. Read more at rainieoet.com.

Michelle Otero is the Poet Laureate of Albuquerque. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Mexico Magazine, Brevity, and The Best of Brevity. She is the author of Malinche’s Daughter, an essay collection based on her work with women survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault as a Fulbright Fellow in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers is the author of two poetry collections: Chord Box (University of Arkansas Press, 2013) and The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons (Acre Books, 2020). Her poems appear in the Boston Review, the Missouri Review, FIELD, Crazyhorse, Memorious, and elsewhere. Her essays appear in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017, The Best American Travel Writing 2017, the Missouri Review, and other journals. A former Kenyon Review Fellow, she lives in Washington, D.C.

Christopher Sand-Iversen holds a BA in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art and an MA in visual culture from the University of Copenhagen. He is the director of SixtyEight Art Institute, an independent organization in Copenhagen which supports artistic and curatorial research in the field of contemporary art, as well as a founder editor of its publishing house, RSS Press. He has previously worked at several museums in Denmark, in addition to translating literature, exhibition catalogues, and academic papers into English from Danish, Swedish, and German for numerous clients. His work appears in the White Review, Asymptote, and Poetry Wales among other publications

Tim Seibles, recently the Poet Laureate of Virginia, is the author of six collections of poetry, including Hurdy-Gurdy, Buffalo Head Solos, and Fast Animal—which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award and winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. His latest, One Turn Around the Sun, was released in 2017. Tim lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he is a professor of English and creative writing at Old Dominion University.

Chaitali Sen is a writer based in Austin, Texas. Her debut novel, The Pathless Sky, was published by Europa Editions in 2015. Her stories, reviews, and essays appear in Ecotone, the New England Review, Electric Literature, Brooklyn Magazine, Catapult, the Chicago Quarterly Review, the Colorado Review, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Ohio Review, and other publications. She is a graduate of the Hunter College MFA program in fiction and founder of the interview series, Borderless: Conversations in Art, Action, and Justice.

Martin Glaz Serup was born in Copenhagen in 1978, where he currently lives with his family. He has published five chapbooks, eleven children’s books, a book-length theoretical essay on poetry and relational aesthetics, and seven volumes of poetry. His poetry has been translated and published in Germany, Sweden, Finland, the United States, Mexico, and is forthcoming in Greece. His latest book, Reading Places (2018), is creative nonfiction dealing with place, memory, and reading—an odd autobiography as a reader. The book has just been accepted for publication in the United Kingdom and Finland. In 2015 he was awarded a PhD from the University of Copenhagen for his dissertation, Cultural Memory and Conceptual Witness Literature. Serup has been editor of several Danish and Nordic literary magazines and is blogging at the really old-school blog: Kornkammer. Currently Serup teaches poetics and creative writing at the University of Copenhagen and at the Writer’s School for Children’s Literature at Aarhus University.

Maggie Shapiro Haskett serves as the Director of Jewish Life at Washington and Lee University. In her role, she is responsible for directing Washington and Lee University Hillel and developing programming that enhances the Jewish student experience. Maggie is a member of the Office of Inclusion and Engagement and a part of the university’s campus ministry team.

D. M. Spratley is a Black, queer, Southern writer. She received her MFA from Hollins University. Her poems appear in Rattle and Drunken Boat, and she has received awards from Princeton University and Rattle. These poems belong to a completed chapbook manuscript, entitled Bloodroot. Find her on Twitter @dmsprat.

Nanna Storr-Hansen, born 1991, is a Danish poet. Her debut Spektakel (Spectacle) was published in 2017, one year after her graduation from the Royal Danish Academy of Creative Writing. In 2018, her second book Mimosa followed. Mimosa was short-listed for the Danish Literary Award (Danish Critics Prize for Literature), the 2018 Montana Prize for Fiction. Her poems appear in several contemporary Danish literary magazines, and explore themes of the female body, nature, and ecofeminism.

Robert Sullivan lives in Auckland, New Zealand with Rachel Fenton and their newborn baby son, Turi. Sullivan’s Māori tribal affiliations are to Ngāpuhi in the far north, and Kāi Tahu in the far south. His PhD from the University of Auckland examines the work of five other indigenous Pacific poets. His seven collections of poetry include Captain Cook in the Underworld, Shout Ha! to the Sky, and the bestselling Star Waka. He coedited three major anthologies of Pacific and Māori poetry. Sullivan founded the creative writing program at the Manukau Institute of Technology, and is Deputy Chief Executive (Māori) there.

Roy White is a blind person who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with a lovely human and an affable lab mix. His work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, BOAAT Journal, the Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. He is a poetry reader for the Adroit Journal. He can be found on Twitter at @surrealroy.

Patrick Whitfill’s poems and reviews appear or are forthcoming in the Threepenny Review, the Kenyon Review, Cherry Tree, West Branch, and other journals. Currently, he teaches at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Jane Wong’s poems can be found in The Best American Poetry 2015, the American Poetry Review, AGNI, Poetry, and others. Her essays appear in McSweeney’s, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, the Georgia Review, and This is the Place: Women Writing About Home. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and others. She is the author of Overpour from Action Books, and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, which is forthcoming from Alice James. She is an assistant professor at Western Washington University.