Author Bios
Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War (YesYes Books 2020), which won the Pamet River Prize. Her poems have recently appeared in Pleiades, 32 Poems, Passages North, Blackbird, and The Southern Review, among others. In 2017 she won The Pinch’s Literary Award in Poetry, and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. She has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Currently, she is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal.
Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His translations include Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories (Pushkin Press, 2014 and 2016) and Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales (CUP, 2018). He is a co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015) and the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016).
Julia Nemirovskaya (b. 1962) is a Russian poet who immigrated to the United States in 1991. She teaches Russian literature and culture at the University of Oregon and has published two collections of poems, My Little Book (1998) and My Second Little Book (2014), as well as the novel Lis (2017).
Liam October O’Brien grew up on a small island. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in New South, The Iowa Review, the Lambda Literary Spotlight, Electric Literature, A&U Magazine, the Denver Quarterly. He completed his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow. He is one of the founding editors of Vetch: A Magazine of Trans Poetry & Poetics.
Ricardo Hernandez is the son of Mexican immigrants. A recipient of fellowships from Lambda Literary, Poets House, and the Vermont Studio Center, his poems have appeared in Muzzle Magazine, Witness, Hyperallerg
Taylor Johnson lives in New Orleans. Their first book, Inheritance, will be published November 2020 with Alice James Books.
Mitchell Jacobs lives in Vientiane and teaches English at the National University of Laos. His work appears in journals such as Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, and Poetry Northwest. A poem is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2019.
Kirun Kapur is the winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry and the Antivenom Poetry Award for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015). Her second collection, Women in the Waiting Room, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press (2020). Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares and many other journals. She serves as poetry editor at The Drum Literary Magazine and currently teaches at Amherst College.
Reginald Gibbons’ eleventh book of poems will be published in early 2021 by Four Way Books. His most recent book of prose is a collection of very short fiction, An Orchard in the Street (BOA Editions). Two of his etchings–Visual poems-appear in the January 2020 issue of POETRY magazine. He teaches creative writing at Northwestern University, where he is the director of the Litowitz Creative Writing Graduate Program.
Kim Chinquee grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, served in the medical field in the Air Force, and is often referred to as the “queen” of flash fiction. She’s published hundreds of pieces of fiction and nonfiction in journals and magazines including The Nation, Ploughshares, NOON, Storyquarterly, Denver Quarterly, Fiction, Story, Notre Dame Review, Conjunctions, and others. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a Henfield Prize. She is Senior Editor of New World Writing, Chief Editor of ELJ (Elm Leaves Journal), co-director of Buffalo State’s Writing Major, serves as the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Northeast Regional Chair–Elect, serves on its Board of Directors, and is also a Mentor for the association’s Writer to Writer Mentorship Program. Her seventh collection of fiction (Snowmaker) will be published with Ravenna Press in the fall of 2020, and her novel–in-flashes Battle Dress will be published in Spring 2021 with Widow + Orphan House Press.
VI KHI NAO is the author of four poetry collections & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She is the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.
Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the 2020 Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award, as well as the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. He lives in Columbus, Ohio and tweets @TheFerocity.
Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the 2020 Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award, as well as the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. He lives in Columbus, Ohio and tweets @TheFerocity.
Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, IL native and author of Thief in the Interior, winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He received a 2017 Whiting Award and 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Phillip is the co-editor in chief of the online journal Vinyl and currently teaches at Bennington College.
Susan Laier writes both fiction and poetry. Her work has previously been featured in Tammy, Catapult, and NOON. She also paints and is a master leather artisan. She lives in Waterford, NY.
Maxim Matusevich is a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, a city to which he still feels a powerful and enduring connection. He emigrated from the former Soviet Union to the United States in 1991. He is presently a Professor of Global History at Seton Hall University, where he also directs an interdisciplinary program in Russian and East European Studies. A professional historian by training and vocation, he started to write and publish fiction in English about three years ago. His two short stories and a novella appeared in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, and the Bare Life Review. In his writing, Maxim is drawn to characters who are whimsical and unconventional. As befits a historian, the questions of the malleability of memory and urban nostalgia loom large in his artistic imagination.
Rachel Zucker is the author of ten books, including, most recently, SoundMachine (Wave Books, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Zucker is an adjunct professor at New York University and the founder and host of the podcast Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People). Zucker is currently working on an immersive audio project (also called SoundMachine) and a book of lectures called The Poetics of Wrongness. For more information visit www.rachelzucker.net
Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of the poetry collection Cityscapes (2019) and the award-winning monograph Writers & Rebels (2016). She has translated many books from Persian and Georgian, including High Tide of the eyes (2019), After Tomorrow the days Disappear (2016) and Prose of the Mountains (2015).