Steven Alvarez is the author of The Pocho Codex (2011) and The Xicano Genome (2012), both published by Editorial Paroxismo. His work has appeared in Drunken Boat, Fence, and Huizache. He is Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. Follow him on Twitter @chastitellez and Instagram @stevenpaulalvarez.
Aaron Apps is the author of Intersex (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2015) and Dear Herculine, winner of the 2014 Sawtooth Poetry Prize from Ahsahta Press. He is currently a doctoral student in English Literature at Brown University. His writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Pleiades, LIT, Washington Square Review, Puerto del Sol, Columbia Poetry Review, and Blackbird.
Kristin George Bagdanov is an MFA candidate in poetry at Colorado State University where she is a Lilly Graduate Fellow. Her poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from The Cincinnati Review, The Los Angeles Review, 32 Poems, The Laurel Review, and Juked. She is the poetry editor of Ruminate Magazine. www.kristingeorgebagdanov.com.
Ryan Black has published previously in AGNI, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He was a Norma Millay Ellis Foundation Fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts. He teaches in the English Department at Queens College/CUNY.
Marina Blitshteyn is a Soviet-born poet and writer currently based in Brooklyn. She is the author of four chapbooks, including Nothing Personal (Bone Bouquet Books) and the forthcoming $kill$ (dancing girl press) and Kaddish (Argos Books). She works as an adjunct instructor of composition and literature.
Kimberly A. Collins received her MFA from Spalding University and has an MA in English from Howard University. As an English Lecturer at Morgan State University, she incorporates poetry as a tool to lift up layers of meaning. She is also a Callaloo Fellow. Her first book of poetry, Slightly Off Center, is complemented by her other writings which appear in Black Magnolia Literary Magazine, Black Poets of the Deep South, In The Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers, The Nubian Gallery, NOBO Journal of African American Dialogue, Theorizing Black Feminism, Fingernails Across the Blackboard, and Essence Magazine.
Eran Eads grew up on a religious commune and was inspired to start writing when a local librarian slipped him the works of Sylvia Plath and other poets underneath conventional book covers. He is currently attending the University of Alaska Fairbanks where he studies English with poets Derick Burleson and Sean Hill. He is the Student Editor of Ice Box Magazine and the Social Media Editor for Coldfront Magazine. His poems have appeared in The Allegheny Review, SOFTBLOW, Peaches Literary Magazine, and Deep Water Literary Journal. He can be tweeted, followed, liked, or found @eraneads.
Leora Fridman is the author of Precious Coast (H_ngm_n B_ _ks), Obvious Metals (Projective Industries), On the architecture and Essential Nature (The New Megaphone), and Eduardo Milán: Poems (Toad Press). With Kelin Loe, she edits Spoke Too Soon: A Journal of the Longer. With new media artist Liat Berdugo, energy specialist Joshua Finn, and scientist Shawn Manchester, she forms the collective The Bureau.
Hugo García Manríquez is the author of chapbooks Two Poems and Painting is Finite, and two books in Spanish, No oscuro todavía and Los materiales. Recent work has appeared in Dreamboat, Dusie, Spiral Orb, Tierra Adentro, the collective chapbook Field Work, and in the collection of essays Escribir Poesía en México. In 2014 his translation of Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld by Clayton Eshleman appeared in Mecha de Enebros. He has translated essays and poems by Charles Bernstein, George Oppen, Myung Mi Kim, and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, published in Mexico in 2009. Hugo lives in Oakland, California, where he is a graduate student in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at UC Berkeley.
Melissa Ginsburg is author of the poetry collection Dear Weather Ghost and the noir novel Sunset City (forthcoming from Ecco Books in March 2016). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, Denver Quarterly, Winter Anthology, Kenyon Review, Blackbird, and other magazines. She teaches at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
James Goodwin is a British experimental poet and academic, and a recipient of the 2012 Stephen Lawrence Poetry Prize and his alma mater’s Communication & Creative Arts Prize for Achievement (2012). He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Greenwich, and will undertake his MPhil/PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, in October 2015, with research on the dialectical phenomenology of subject in the poetic works of Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, David Marriott and Will Alexander. His work has been previously featured in Industrial Lunch Magazine, ALiteration and Episodic magazine.
David Alejandro Hernandez studies English and Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was awarded the 2014-2015 Joan Lee Yang Memorial Poetry Prize. His work has previously appeared in Anobium, the Cal Literature & Arts Magazine, Matchbox Literary Magazine, and Boston University’s Coup d’Etat. A series of his poems, featured as a song cycle titled The Way They Understood Themselves, premiered at Northwestern University in April and May 2015.
Andrea Jurjević is a native of Croatia. Her poems have appeared in The Journal, Harpur Palate, Raleigh Review, Best New Poets, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere; her translations of Croatian poetry can be found in Lunch Ticket, RHINO, and The Adirondack Review. She is the winner of the 2013 Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize, the 2014 Der-Hovanessian Translation Award and the 2015 RHINO Translation Prize.
Sarah-Jean Krahn may be a Crotchety Robber, but she is also the Managing Editor of the feminist creative writing journal S/tick and holds an MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory from McMaster University. Her award-winning experimental writing has appeared in various journals and anthologies as well as the academic journal Feminist Studies. More from Sarah-Jean can be found at sarahjeancreates.com.
Brandon Krieg is the author of Invasives (New Rivers Press) and a chapbook, Source to Mouth (New Michigan Press). He lives in Kalamazoo, MI.
George Life is a poet and translator currently living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Sections from his ongoing serial poem “Precarity” have appeared or are forthcoming in N/A, Blackbox Manifold, The Offending Adam, New American Writing, and The Invisible Bear. Selections from a projected translation of the late poems of Du Fu have appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. In the fall he will be entering the Poetics Program at Buffalo as a PhD student. He blogs at periplumvia.blogspot.com.
Aura Maru (pen name of Aurelia Cojocaru) was born in Moldova and did her undergraduate studies in Romania, Germany and the US. Her poetry, articles and book reviews have been published in reviews and anthologies in Moldova and Romania, and her poetry in Romanian has been translated into German, Swedish and Flemish. A collection of poetry is upcoming from Cartier Publishing in Moldova. Currently a PhD student in the Comparative Literature department at UC Berkeley, she is focusing on her projects in the English language.
Emily Goodman Means is currently completing an MFA at Brown University and is the recipient of the 2015/2016 Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University. She is a co-editor of A Perimeter and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Lana Turner Journal, The New Delta Review and The Black Warrior Review.
Philip Metres is the author and translator of a number of books and chapbooks, including the forthcoming Sand Opera (2015), Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (2014), A Concordance of Leaves (2013), abu ghraib arias (2011), and To See the Earth (2008). His work has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Watson Fellowship, five Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. In 2014, he received a Creative Workforce Fellowship, thanks to the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, residents of Cuyahoga County, and Cuyahoga Arts & Culture. He is professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland. www.philipmetres.com.
Anis Mojgani hails from New Orleans but lives in Austin. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in the pages of such journals as Rattle, Forklift, Ohio, and Thrush, amongst others. He has three books of poetry, published by Write Bloody, with a fourth collection, The Pocketknife Bible, forthcoming this fall. He believes his bicycle is magic.
Rusty Morrison is the author of five books, including Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta), After Urgency (Tupelo’s Dorset Prize), and the true keeps calm biding its story (Ahsahta) which won The Sawtooth Prize, Academy of American Poet’s Laughlin Award, Northern California Book Award, and the DiCastagnola Award. Recent poems have appeared or will appear in A Public Space, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, PEN Poetry Series, Talisman, The Volta, and VOLT. She is currently Omnidawn’s co-publisher, www.omnidawn.com. Her website: www.rustymorrison.com.
Jessica Murray is a poet and educator living in Denton, TX. Recent poems of hers are featured in or forthcoming from Barrow Street, Guide to Kulchur, Memorious, Painted Bride Quarterly, Shenandoah, and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. Her website, www.if-you-want-to.com, features linked interviews with contemporary women poets.
Kristy Peloquin holds an MFA in creative writing from Texas State University. She is an adjunct assistant professor of English at Austin Community College in Austin, TX. In addition to teaching, she also leads therapeutic creative writing workshops for persons suffering through grief and loss. Reoccurring themes in her work tend to revolve around memory, the body, and the natural world. Her work has been previously published in Palimpsest: The Yale Literary and Arts Magazine, Sphere Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, and Midway Journal, among others.
Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is the co-founder of Ala Press, co-star of the poetry album Undercurrent (2011), and author of three collections of poetry: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (2008) from unincorporated territory [saina] (2010), and from unincorporated territory [guma’] (2014). He is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa.
Jennifer Pilch is currently the founding editor/curator for La Vague Journal. Her full-length collection, Deus Ex Machina, won the Kelsey Street’s Firsts! BookContest (forthcoming 2015). She has also authored four chapbooks and her poems have appeared in such literary journals as American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Fence, New American Writing, and The Iowa Review.
Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Counterpart (Ahsahta) and Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing). Her mixed genre book, On Ghosts (Solid Objects), was a 2013 finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Hannah Rodabaugh received her MA from Miami University and her MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School. Her work was included in Flim Forum Press’ anthology: A Sing Economy. Recently, her work has been published in Defenestration, Used Furniture Review, Palimpsest, Similar:Peaks::, Horse Less Press Review, Smoking Glue Gun, and Nerve Lantern. Her chapbook, With Words: Verse in Concordance, is forthcoming from dancing girl press.
Ryan Sharp holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University and is currently studying poetry and poetics at the University of Texas in Austin. His poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals including Callaloo, DIALOGIST, Silk Road, Rio Grande Review, and PANK. He lives in Austin, TX, where he serves as the editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and as the Writers’ Studio Coordinator at Huston-Tillotson University.
Monica Sok is a Khmer poet from Lancaster, PA. She is completing her MFA in poetry from New York University, where she is working on a manuscript about the Cambodian genocide and issues of intergenerational trauma. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Narrative, Crab Orchard Review, AAWW Margins, and elsewhere. Sok has received fellowships from Kundiman and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She lives in Brooklyn.
Claire Marie Stancek is a PhD candidate in the English Department at UC Berkeley, where she teaches classes on nineteenth century literature and creative writing. Her most recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Oversound, RealPoetik, Animal, Typo, and elsewhere.
Heidi Lynn Staples’ debut collection Guess Can Gallop was selected by Brenda Hillman as a winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Staples is the author of three other collections, including Noise Event (Ahsahta 2013), and her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She co-edits Poets for Living Waters, an international poetry response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change, forthcoming from BlazeVOX. Currently, she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she lives with her husband, daughter, dog, cat, and smartphone.
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Tahir Hamut was born in 1969 in a small town near Kashgar, in the southwest of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. He published his first poem in 1986, and has since been recognized as one of the foremost modernist poets writing in Uyghur. Since the late ‘90s he has worked as a film director, and has founded his own production company, Izgil, which specializes in documentaries, advertisements, and music videos. He lives in Ürümchi, Xinjiang’s capital, with his wife and two daughters.
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Joshua L. Freeman is a graduate student at Harvard University, where he studies the literature and history of Central Asia. His poetry translations have appeared in Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Words Without Borders, and Tengritagh.
Olja Savičević Ivančević is a Croatian author whose work has been translated into German, Czech, Italian, Spanish, French, Macedonian, Polish, Ukranian, Lithuanian, and Zulu, among other languages. Her collections of poetry include: It Will Be Tremendous When I Grow Up (1988); Eternal Kids (1993); Female Manuscripts (1999); Puzzlerojc (2005); House Rules (2007), winner of the prestigious Croatian award Kiklop; and Mamasafari (2012). Her collection of short stories, To Make A Dog Laugh (2006), and her novel, Adios, Cowboy (2010), won several Croatian literary awards. Adios, Cowboy is forthcoming in English by McSweeney’s in 2015.
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Andrea Jurjević is a native of Croatia. Her poems have appeared in The Journal, Harpur Palate, Raleigh Review, Best New Poets, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere; her translations of Croatian poetry can be found in Lunch Ticket, RHINO, and The Adirondack Review. She is the winner of the 2013 Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize, the 2014 Der-Hovanessian Translation Award and the 2015 RHINO Translation Prize.
Although born a commoner, Sunthorn Phu (1786-1856)—pronounced “pooh”—spent much of his life in and out of royal service: first as a page in one of Bangkok’s palaces, then as a favorite court poet, an instructor to young members of the royal family, and finally a court scribe. Although his magnum opus is the epic-length fantasy Phra Aphaimanee (“Lord Aphaimanee”), Phu was also a prolific composer of nirat, or semi-autobiographical travel poems, as well as of didactic, dramatic, and lyric works. Thailand honors him today as Sunthorn Phu—Phu the Eloquent—and celebrates his birthday every June 26th with recitals and performances of his poems.
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Noh Anothai (pen name of Anothai Kaewkaen) was a researcher with the Thailand-United States Education Foundation (Fulbright Thailand) between 2011–12. In that time, he translated programs and hosted cultural events for Thailand’s Ministry of Culture and College of Dramatic Arts. He has also written poems for the My First Book Project, which benefits underprivileged Thai students. The winner of Lunch Ticket’s inaugural Gabo Prize for Translation and Multi-lingual Texts in 2014, Anothai has recently appeared in The Raintown Review, Structo (UK), RHINO, and Pilgrimage. imallthaidup.wordpress.com
Maha Hasan al-Qasrawi is a Palestinian writer and poet and a professor of Arabic Literature and Language living in Jordan. Her fiction, poetry and academic work are widely published in the Arab world. Her novel Scream was published in 2004, and her poetry collection Sparrow of the Soul was published in 2014.
Hala Shrouf was born in Libya and lives in Ramallah, Palestine. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature and has worked as a teacher for the deaf for the Palestinian Red Crescent and as an English teacher for the Ministry of Education. She is currently an editor for the Palestinian Museum. Her poems are widely published in the Arab world and have been translated into English, French, Spanish and Swedish. Her prize-winning first collection was published in 2004, and her second collection was recently published in Jordan.
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Noor Nader Al Abed is a Palestinian living in Jordan. He teaches English to 11th and 12th grade boys at a secondary school in Jordan. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature from Zarqa Private University and is currently working toward his master’s degree in English Literature at Arab Open University.
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Francesca Bell is an American poet whose work appears in many journals, including North American Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and Zone 3. Her work has been nominated eight times for the Pushcart Prize, and she won the 2014 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle.
Ao Wang is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. He received his BA from Peking University, MA from Washington University in St. Louis, and PhD from Yale University. His main academic interest is classical Chinese poetry. He has also published five books of his own poetry, and has been the recipient of prizes such as the Anne Kao Poetry Prize and most recently the New Poet Prize from People’s Literature. He has translated the work of poets such as Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and W.H. Auden into Chinese.
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Eleanor Goodman is a writer and a translator from Chinese. She is a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University, and spent a year at Peking University on a Fulbright Fellowship. She has been an artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome and was awarded a Henry Luce Translation Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Her book of translations, Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni (Zephyr Press, 2014) was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant.
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Glenn Stowell is the head translator and editor of a volume of contemporary Chinese poetry, You Jump to Another Dream (Vagabond Press, 2012). His fiction has most recently appeared in the Green Mountains Review. His poetry has appeared in the Tulane Review. He works at an investment bank in New York City in a group charged with monitoring and mitigating the firm’s systemic risk.