Contributors’ Notes Traveler’s Tales

Samuel Amadon is the author of three books: Like a Sea ( Iowa), The Hartford Book (Cleveland), and Listener ( Solid Objects, forthcoming 2018). He teaches in the MFA program at the University of South Carolina, where he edits the journal Oversound with Liz Countryman.

Michael Bazzett’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. You Must Remember This, his debut collection, received the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions. He has two poetry collections forthcoming: The Interrogation (Milkweed) and Our Lands Are Not So Different (Horsethief), as well as a verse translation of the Popul Vuh, the Mayan creation epic, from Milkweed. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.

Malachi Black is the author of Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’S New American Poets Series. He teaches at the University of San Diego and lives in California.

Jenny Boully’s Betwixt-and-between: Essays on the Writing Life is forthcoming from Coffee House Press. Her other books include The Body: An Essay, The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Essays, and not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) was an Anglo-irish novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. She worked for the Ministry of Information in London during World War II and served as an air-raid warden. Her many books include the novels The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938) and the short-story collection The Demon Lover (1945).

“The Designee” is one of twelve new stories in T.C. Boyle’s forthcoming collection, The Relive Box and Other Stories, his first collection since 2013’s T.C. Boyle Stories II, the second volume of his collected stories. If he is very, very lucky, he hopes that one day there will be a third volume of collected stories. Of course, he does understand that there are mysterious forces at work in the universe that are utterly indifferent to the proposition.

Ben Bush is a 2017–18 Fulbright Fellow and managing editor of Mcsweeney’s podcast The Organist. His nonfiction has appeared in Bookforum, The Believer, Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets & Writers, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His fiction has appeared in The Literary Review, Yeti, and elsewhere.

Frances Cannon is a writer and artist of hybrid mediums. She has an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and a BFA in poetry and printmaking from the University of Vermont. She has a book of poems and illustrations, Tropicalia, through Vagabond Press, a book of poems and prints, Uranian Fruit, through Honeybee Press, and a graphic memoir, The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and BigLittle Frank with Gold Wake Press.

Anders Carlson-wee is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow and the author of Dynamite, winner of the 2015 Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, The Sun, AGNI, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Best New Poets, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Narrative Magazine, which also featured him on its “30 Below 30” list of young writers to watch. He lives in Minneapolis, where he serves as a Mcknight Foundation Creative Writing Fellow.

Thom Donovan is the author of The Hole (Displaced Press, 2012), Withdrawn: A Discourse (Shifter, 2016), and Withdrawn (Compline, 2017). He coedits and publishes ON Contemporary Practice. He is the editor of Occupy Poetics (Essay Press, 2015), To Look at the Sea Is to Become What One Is: An Etel Adnan Reader (with Brandon Shimoda; Nightboat Books, 2014), and Supple Science: A Robert Kocik Primer (with Michael Cross; ON Contemporary Practice, 2013). He is a visiting assistant professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts.

Jennifer Alise Drew is the nonfiction editor for AGNI magazine and has worked as an editor for numerous other magazines and publishers, including Open City, Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin, and Grove Atlantic. Her essays have appeared here, as well as in Slice, The Chattahoochee Review, Hippocampus Magazine, and Lumina.

Sean Higgins lives with his wife in an old brick farmhouse in Ypsilanti, Michigan. His work has been published in Barrelhouse, Midwestern Gothic, Bluestem, and a few other journals.

Anna Jackson lives in Island Bay, Wellington, New Zealand, and lectures in English at Victoria University of Wellington. She has published six books of poetry with Auckland University Press, most recently I, Clodia (2014).

Steven Kleinman is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Maryland. His poems and reviews have appeared in Orion Magazine, The Collagist, Devil’s Lake, Horsethief, Construction, and Hidden City Quarterly. He lives in Philadelphia, where he works as the assistant editor at Saturnalia Press, is a founding member of the Philadelphia Poetry Collaboration, and teaches poetry and writing at far too many colleges and universities.

M.W. Larson is an author, editor, and translator based out of Tokyo. He earned his MFA from The Ohio State University, and his work has appeared in the Colorado Review, Ninth Letter, Witness, and elsewhere.

Margot Livesey is the author of eight novels, most recently Mercury, and The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Rachel Lyon’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared most recently in Mcsweeney’s, Joyland, Bustle, The Toast, and The Saint Ann’s Review. A native of Brooklyn, she teaches for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and cohosts the reading series Ditmas Lit. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Scribner. Visit her at www.rachellyon.work.

Christopher Merrill’s latest book is Self-portrait with Dogwood. He directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Wayne Miller’s fourth poetry collection, Post- (Milkweed, 2016), won the Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award. He has cotranslated two books by Moikom Zeqo—most recently Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015), which was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation—and he has coedited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the TwentyFirst Century (Milkweed, 2016). He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and edits Copper Nickel.

Rusty Morrison’s most recent book is Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta). She is copublisher of Omnidawn (omnidawn.com). Her other books include After Urgency (Tupelo), which won the Dorset Prize, and the true keeps calm biding its story (Ahsahta), which won the Sawtooth Prize, Academy

of American Poets James Laughlin Award, Northern California Book Award, and Poetry Society of America Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. Her website is rustymorrison.com.

Todd James Pierce is the author of the novel The Australia Stories and the story collection Newsworld, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. He co-directs the creative writing program at Cal Poly University.

Max Ritvo was the author of the poetry collection Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions, 2016) and the chapbook AEONS, for which he was awarded a 2014 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry has also appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, and on Poets.org. His prose and interviews have appeared in Huffington Post, Divedapper, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lived in Manhattan until his death in August 2016.

Alexander O. Smith is a writer and translator for the Japanese video game industry, a publisher, and a translator of more than twenty novels from Japanese to English. He is currently based in the hills of Kamakura, from where he occasionally ventures out to take photographs.

Analicia Sotelo holds an MFA from the University of Houston. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker; Forklift, Ohio; the Antioch Review; Meridian; The Collagist; and elsewhere.

Mike Soto is a first generation Mexican-american, raised in East Dallas and in a small town in Michoacán. His current manuscript uses themes from the drug war taking place along a fictional U.s./mexico border town. The manuscript can be described as a Narco Acid Western told in about forty-five poems. It is written in lineage with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film El Topo.

Tim Taranto is a writer, poet, and visual artist from New York State. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Ars Botanica is his first book.

Sophie Unterman is a writer and teacher based in New Orleans. Her essays have appeared in The Forward and Guernica. She holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Ardashir Vakil was born in Bombay and educated at Cambridge, and he now teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths in London. His first novel,

Beach Boy (Penguin, 1997), was translated into eight languages and won a Betty Trask Award. His second novel, One Day (Penguin, 2003), was shortlisted for the Encore Award. He contributes to BBC broadcasts, and his short stories are often anthologized and have recently appeared in Raritan: A Quarterly Review.

Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, winner of the 2012 Ohio State University Press/the Journal Award in Poetry. She received a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2014, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker, among many other places. She’s currently a doctoral student in English literature and creative writing at the University of Cincinnati and a book review editor for Kenyon Review.

Marcus Wicker is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, the Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and the Fine Arts Work Center. His first collection Maybe the Saddest Thing, a National Poetry Series winner, was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His second book, Silencer, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in September. Wicker teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis. He is poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review.