Contributors’ Notes

Hannah Aizenman is originally from Birmingham, Alabama. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University, and she lives and writes in Brooklyn.

Aron Aji directs the MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa and translates from Turkish. He was awarded a NEA Literary Fellowship, the National Translation Award, and was finalist for PEN Translation Prize for his translations of Bilge Karasu’s books.

Matilda Bathurst is a writer based in Los Angeles.

Renée Branum’s stories and essays have appeared in several publications, including The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, Guernica, The Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Lithub. Her story “As the Sparks Fly Upward” was recently included in Best American Nonrequired Reading’s 2019 anthology. She currently lives in Cincinnati, where she is pursuing a PHD in fiction writing and working on her first novel.

Hannah Erickson is a writer and independent consultant for nongovernmental organizations. She is based in East Africa but is frequently on the move in pursuit of things to think and write about.

Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China, and writes both in English and Chinese. A Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has a debut collection of poems forthcoming in 2021 by Copper Canyon Press.

Anisa George is a writer, director, mother, and certified forest therapy guide. She lives on a block in South Philly that is infinitely under construction. “The Tenth” is her first published work of nonfiction.

Fríða Ísberg is an Icelandic author based in Reykjavík.

Sherry Johnson is the author of two books of poetry. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, journals and anthologies, most recently in The Malahat Review and forthcoming in Train and CV2. Her articles on film have appeared in Senses of Cinema, MUBI’S Notebook, the print edition of the Swedish academic journal Film International, and others.

Jack Jung is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He now teaches undergraduate creative writing at the University of Iowa. He was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States. He received his BA in English from Harvard and MA in Korean language and literature from Seoul National University. He currently spends his time between Iowa City and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Douglas Kearney has published six books, including the award-winning poetry collection Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016); libretto, Someone Took They Tongues (Subito, 2016); and criticism, Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015). A Whiting Writer’s and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others, Kearney teaches at the University of Minnesota–twin Cities.

Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) was a Russian absurdist writer, playwright, and performance artist whose work, full of dark humor and wit, had little hope of making it past Soviet government censors during his lifetime. He was known to dress up as Sherlock Holmes and stage performance art in the streets of Leningrad and was a founding member of the Union for Real Art, which survived only briefly against the oppression of Satlin’s purges. He was arrested on multiple occasions for spreading anti-soviet ideas and was eventually sentenced to life in an insane asylum, where he died of starvation during the Siege of Leningrad.

Aleksandra Khmelnik was born in the former Soviet Union and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Jinny Koh is the author of The Gods Will Hear Us Eventually (Ethos Books, 2018). Her stories and essays have appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Pembroke Magazine, Kyoto Journal, Columbia Journal, and Litro, among others. She graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a Master of Professional Writing from the University of Southern California, where she was the fiction editor for The Southern California Review.

Matthew C. Kramer is a writer, performer, cartoonist, and artist living in Providence, Rhode Island. He has an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, where he taught comics and digital writing. His work has been published in Tin House, the New Yorker Online, and Electric Lit, among others. He can be found and followed @canttakemeanywhere on Instagram.

Larissa Kyzer is a writer and translator. She was a 2012 Fulbright grantee to Iceland, where she lived for five years and earned an MA in Translation Studies. Her recent translations include Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s awardwinning novel A Fist or a Heart.

Pete Monacell is an English Professor at Columbia College in Missouri and is at work on a poetry manuscript entitled Life Bird.

Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the story collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone. His work has appeared in publications such as Conjunctions, ZYZZYVA, Willow Springs, Black Warrior Review, and Pleiades. He is the managing editor of Psychopomp Magazine and an assistant professor at St. Olaf College. He is currently working on a novel and another story collection.

Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation—separately and in various combinations. Her books include Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (forthcoming, Wave Books), Pink Waves (forthcoming, Omnidawn), and The Ants (Les Figues Press). She is co-editor, with Eric Selland, of an anthology of twentieth-century Japanese poetry (forthcoming, New Directions). She teaches at Brown University. Her website is sawakonakayasu.net.

Bridget O’bernstein received her MFA in poetry from Syracuse University. She won the 2019 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and the Iowa Review Award in poetry in 2019. Her poems and essays can be found in the American Literary Review, Bennington Review, and Forklift, Ohio, among others.

Nilay Özer is a Turkish poet who lives in Istanbul and teaches literary studies at Beykoz University. She is author of two poetry volumes. Her work has been featured at international festivals and translated into English, German, Iranian, Kurdish, and Zaza.

Daniel Paul received an MFA from Southern Illinois University and a PHD from the University of Cincinnati. His stories, poems, essays, and humor writing have appeared in Passages North, Puerto Del Sol, Hobart, Mcsweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. Find his work at danpiercepaul.wordpress.com.

Melissa Range is the author of the poetry collections Scriptorium (2016) and Horse and Rider (2010) and the recipient of awards and fellowships from

the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, and others. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ecotone, The Nation, and Ploughshares. Originally from East Tennessee, she currently teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

Annie Sand is a native of southeast Ohio and earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa in 2017. Her essays have appeared in venues such as The Normal School, H.O.W., and Nowhere, and she is currently writing a memoir that explores the legacy of trauma across three generations of her family.

Eleanor Stanford is the author of three collections of poetry, The Imaginal Marriage (forthcoming), Bartram’s Garden, and The Book of Sleep, all from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and others. She was a 2014–16 Fulbright fellow to Brazil, where she researched and wrote about traditional midwifery. A 2019 NEA fellow in poetry, she lives in the Philadelphia area.

Katherine Vondy is a writer and director whose credits span film, theater, and literature. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous publications, including the Beloit Fiction Journal, Briar Cliff Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Quiddity, and Hobart. She was awarded the 2015 Davey Foundation Theatre Grant and is the recipient of writing residencies from Palazzo Stabile, the HBMG Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Starry Night, and Wildacres. Visit katherinevondy.com for more information about all her creative adventures.

Gregg Williard is a writer, visual artist, and teacher. He teaches ESL to refugees in Madison, Wisconsin.