E. KRISTIN ANDERSON is a poet and glitter enthusiast living mostly at a Starbucks somewhere in Austin, Texas. She is the author of nine chapbooks, including Behind, All You’ve Got; 17 seventeen XVII; We’re Doing Witchcraft; Fire in the Sky; and Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night. Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Porkbelly Press.
JOANA ARAÚJO is a Portuguese-English bilingual content reviewer at a Fortune 100 company in Cupertino, California. Her co-translations of poetry from Portuguese have been published in Catamaran Literary Reader and World Literature Today. She received her bachelor’s from Catholic University of Lisbon. In Portugal, she worked as a journalist and a television production assistant. In 2002, she moved to San Francisco where she earned her MA at San Francisco State University.
DANIEL ARIAS-GÓMEZ was born and raised in Guadalajara. He holds an MFA in creative writing from California State University, Fresno. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Rattle, and others. He was the winner of Hunger Mountain’s 2019 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, judged by Natalie Diaz.
EMMA BOLDEN is the author of House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (Gen-Pop Books). She is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, and her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, and such journals as Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, and The Greensboro Review. She serves as associate editor-in-chief for Tupelo Quarterly.
AMANDA CHEMECHE is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and folksinger. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming from The Forward, Popula, and Litro. She was born in New York City and grew up in the Chelsea Hotel. She has an MA in American studies and an MA in East Asian studies from Yale University. She is currently attending Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, where she is completing an MPhil in creative writing. She lives between Ireland, Scotland and New York City. She can be found on Twitter: @AChemeche.
GLENDA CONWAY taught courses in rhetoric and composition and coordinated the writing center at the University of Montevallo for twenty years. Now retired, she lives in her home state of Kentucky, teaches yoga, and volunteers in a nonprofit spay/neuter clinic. She has published previously in academic journals, newspapers, magazines, and college literary magazines. She would like to thank the students in her course, The Memoir, for their responses to an earlier version of “The Statesman.”
SHELDON COSTA’s writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, and The Adroit Journal, among others. He is a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Project, the 2018 Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award, and the Cream City Review’s 2019 Summer Prize in Fiction, judged by Ramona Ausubel. He is currently finishing his MFA at The Ohio State University.
MIA COUTO (1955– ) is a poet, fiction writer, and journalist from Mozambique. His honors include the Neustadt Prize. Initially trained in biology and medicine, Couto changed careers to pursue journalism. A supporter of Mozambican independence, he became the director of the Mozambique Information Agency after that nation broke away from Portugal. In recent years, he has returned to his roots as a scientist and works as a biologist for Limpopo Transfrontier Park.
ALANA FOLSOM earned her MFA in poetry from Oregon State University, where she co-founded and was the editor-in-chief of its literary magazine, 45th Parallel. Her poetry has been published in The Believer, The Journal, The Missouri Review, and others.
CHARLES GABEL is a writer and educator living in Cincinnati, Ohio. More of his writing can be found in Yalobusha Review, The Journal Petra, New Delta Review, and Dreginald. Charles co-edits Coast|noCoast, an annual print journal and press of poetry, prose, and art, and he works in the writing center and teaches composition at an open-access college.
MIGUEL GOMES (b. 1964, Venezuela) is the award-winning author of eight collections of short fiction and one novel, Retrato de un Caballero (2015). His scholarly work has earned him such distinctions as the Orden Alejo Zuloaga, the Orden José Félix Ribas, and the José Martí Essay Award.
GLEN HIRSHBERG is the Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of five novels and four story collections. He is a five-time World Fantasy Award finalist. At Campbell Hall in Studio City, California, he founded and currently directs the creative writing program and the StorytellingCrew project, which trains high school students to teach creative writing to 3rd–5th graders at area schools without the resources to offer it. He lives with his family in the Los Angeles area.
JOSEPH GUNHO JANG has received fellowship and support from the University of Pittsburgh and the Heinz Endowments. He is currently an intern for the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and a poetry editor for Hot Metal Bridge. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Blood Orange Review, The Margins, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Recently, his manuscript was a finalist for the 2020 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, judged by Li-Young Lee.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA’s books of poetry include Taboo, Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Warhorses, and The Chameleon Couch. His most recent collection is The Emperor of Water Clocks. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally and include Saturnalia, Testimony, and Gilgamesh. He teaches at New York University.
Photo Credits: Nancy Crampton
LANCE LARSEN is the author of five poetry collections, most recently What the Body Knows (Tampa 2018). He’s received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Ragdale, Sewanee, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at BYU, where he serves as department chair and fools around with aphorisms: “Gesundheit!—as close as I’ve come to Nietzsche and Heidegger in months.” In 2017 he completed a five-year appointment as Utah’s poet laureate.
Photo Credit: Jacqui Larsen
CHARLES LEBEL (b. 1987, Connecticut) is a translator and researcher at the University of Connecticut whose work has appeared in publications including World Literature Today, alter/nativas, and Borderlines. He is a founding editor of The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal and serves as Assistant Managing Editor for World Poetry Books.
LORRAINE M. LÓPEZ has authored seven books of fiction. Her first book, Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories, won the inaugural Miguel Marmól Prize; her second book, Call Me Henri, was awarded the Paterson Prize. Lopez’s Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories was a Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize and winner of the Texas League of Writers Award. Her latest book, Postcards from the Gerund State: Stories, was released in 2019 by BkMk Press.
DAVID H. LYNN has been the editor of the Kenyon Review, an international journal of literature, culture, and the arts, since 1994. As an author, he received a 2016 O. Henry Prize for “Divergence.” His latest collection, Children of God: New & Selected Stories, was published in 2019 by Braddock Avenue Books. Of them, T. C. Boyle says, “Exquisitely wrought stories that dwell deeply in place and character—this is a revelatory collection.”
MICHAEL MCGRIFF is the author of several books, most recently the poetry collection Early Hour (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) and the short story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (A Strange Object, 2014). His work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry London, and Bookforum as well as on PBS NewsHour and NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. He teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho.
Photo credits: Marcus Jackson
SANDRA MCPHERSON’s Quicksilver, Cougars, and Quartz is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry Press. Her books have been published by Ecco Press, Wesleyan University Press, and University of Illinois Press. She founded Swan Scythe Press in 2000. She is retired from twenty-three years of teaching at the University of California at Davis, four years on the faculty of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and many other years teaching here and there. New poems are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Plume, Kenyon Review, and AGNI.
MICHELLE MEIER is the author of Famous Geranium (Nauset Press, 2015). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Conduit, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, Radar Poetry, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Hudson, New York.
CATHY MELLETT’s short stories, flash, and memoir have appeared in The Yale Review, Arts & Letters, The Rumpus, The Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, Confrontation, Pif Magazine, Hobart, and more. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Yaddo, Ragdale, and Villa Montalvo and has recently completed a memoir.
KATIE NAUGHTON is a poet living in Buffalo, New York, where she is a student in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. She has an MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University. Her poetry has been published in jubilat, Opon, Flag + Void, grama, and on the poets.org University & College Poetry Prizes page. She is currently at work on a chapbook-length manuscript hour song and a book-length manuscript debt rituals.
BRIDGET O’BERNSTEIN grew up in Brooklyn and received her MFA in poetry from Syracuse University. In 2019, she won the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and she was a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and the American Literary Review Poetry Award. Her poems and essays have been published or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Birdfeast, and The Bennington Review, among others.
CAROLYN OLIVER’s poetry has appeared in Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Booth, Glass, Sixth Finch, Southern Indiana Review, Sugar House Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. A graduate of The Ohio State University and Boston University, she is the winner of the Frank O’Hara Prize from The Worcester Review and the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. Links to her writing are at carolynoliver.net.
WILLIAM OLSEN has published six collections of poetry, most recently TechnoRage (Northwestern). He and Sharon Bryan co-edited Planet on the Table: Writers on the Reading Life (Sarabande), a collection of essays on the urgencies and mysteries of reading as a writer. He lives in Kalamazoo.
KEVIN O’ROURKE lives in Seattle, where he works in publishing. His first book, the essay collection As If Seen at an Angle, was published by Tinderbox Editions. Other work (poetry, lyric essays) has appeared or is forthcoming from Word For/Word, Tammy, and Seneca Review, to name a few. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, he is also an active literary and arts critic, with writing in Ploughshares, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Kenyon Review. Read more at kforourke.com.
KATE PARTRIDGE is the author of the poetry collection Ends of the Earth (University of Alaska Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in FIELD, Witness, Blackbird, Pleiades, The Yale Review, and other journals. She received her MFA from George Mason University, and she is currently a doctoral fellow in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California. She co-edits Switchback Books.
SYDNEY RENDE is from Baltimore, Maryland, and is pursuing her MFA in fiction at Syracuse University.
ZACK ROGOW was a co-winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award for Earthlight by André Breton and winner of a Bay Area Book Reviewers Award (BABRA) for his translation of George Sand’s novel Horace. His poetry collections include Irreverent Litanies and The Number Before Infinity. zackrogow.com
VIPLAV SAINI is a native of Delhi and has been previously published in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and The Massachusetts Review. A Kundiman fellow, he teaches economics at New York University.
G.C. WALDREP’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the long poem Testament (BOA Editions, 2015). Newer work has appeared in APR, Poetry, The Paris Review, New England Review, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, Conjunctions, etc. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch.
LESLEY WHEELER’s new books are The State She’s In, her fifth poetry collection, and Unbecoming, her first novel. Her essay collection, Poetry’s Possible Worlds, is forthcoming in 2021. Her poems and essays appear in The Common, Crab Orchard Review, Ecotone, The Massachusetts Review, and other journals, and she is poetry editor of Shenandoah. Lesley lives in Virginia and blogs at lesleymwheeler.org.
LANDA WO’s poetry has appeared in a variety of publications including Bellingham Review, Columbia Journal, Nashville Review, Poetry New Zealand, Raleigh Review, Salt Hill Journal, Spillway, Tule Review, The Cape Rock, and several anthologies. With roots in Angola and Cabinda, Landa Wo is an Afro-French poet member of Société des Poètes Français. His work deals with prominent issues of social justice and cultural strife. He can be found on Twitter: @wo_landa.
