Contributors’ Notes

Benjamin Aleshire is based in New Orleans and travels the world as a poet-for-hire, writing poems for strangers on a manual typewriter. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Barrow Street, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. Benjamin works as assistant poetry editor to the Green Mountains Review. Visit him at poetforhire.org or in the flesh on the corner of Royal and Orleans.

Christopher Bakken is the author of three books of poetry—most recently Eternity & Oranges (2016)—and the culinary memoir Honey, Olives, Octopus. He is the director of the Writing Workshop in Greece: Thessaloniki and Thasos.

Molly Bashaw’s book, The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It, was printed in 2014.

Micah Bateman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PHD student at the University of Texas at Austin, where he serves as assistant director of the New Writers Project and contributing editor of Bat City Review. His chapbook of poetry, Polis, is out from The Catenary Press.

Nikki-lee Birdsey was born in Aukland, New Zealand. She has a BA from NYU and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared most recently in Fence, LIT, The Volta, Hazlitt, and others. She is currently a PHD candidate at the International Institute for Modern Letters at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

Cassandra Cleghorn’s Four Weathercocks was published in 2016 by Marick Press. Her poems and reviews have appeared in journals including Paris Review, Yale Review, New Orleans Review, Poetry International, Boston Review, and Tin House. She lives in Vermont, teaches at Williams College, and serves as poetry editor of Tupelo Press.

Jed Phillip Cohen is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an instructor in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University. He is currently at work on a novel. “Salad Days” is his first publication.

Patrick Connelly is an alum of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He currently lives in Los Angeles and is working on a novel and a number of screenplay projects.

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual, and author of Maps, a collection of poems.

Tess Gunty is a Lillian Vernon fellow at New York University’s creative writing MFA program. She is also a fall 2017 Graduate Research Institute fellow in Paris. Her writing awards include the American Voice Award for a short story, the Ernest Sandeen Award for an outstanding poetry collection, and a Sigma Tau Delta scholarship for personal memoir. She lives in Brooklyn.

Robin Hemley is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction and has won many awards for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. He directs the writing program at YALE-NUS College in Singapore and is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Bob Hicok’s current book is Sex & Love & (Copper Canyon, 2016). His previous one— Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon, 2013)—was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Justin Hyde lives in Des Moines, Iowa, where he works as a parole officer.

Jillian Jackson is a graduate of the MFA program at Boston University. She lives in Brighton, Massachusetts, and teaches writing at Emmanuel College. She is currently at work on a novel.

Rachel Kadish is the author of the novels The Weight of Ink, From a Sealed Room, and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, as well as the novella I Was Here. Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Ploughshares, and Tin House. She lives outside Boston.

Josh Kalscheur is the author of Tidal, winner of the 2013 Levis Prize from Four Way Books. Recent work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Cincinnati Review, and Pleiades, among others. He was the Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at Uw–madison for the 2015–16 academic year and most recently served as a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at SUNY Fredonia.

Wayne Koestenbaum has published nineteen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction, including Camp Marmalade, Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). He is a Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and French at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

Stephen Markley is the author of the memoirs Publish This Book and Tales of Iceland. His forthcoming novel, Ohio, will debut in summer 2018.

Tameka J. Norris received her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art (2012). Her group exhibitions include Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Walker Art Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2014–15). Her feature-length film/installation Meka Jean: How She Got Good premiered at Prospect 3 in New Orleans (2014) and was shown at Emerson Dorsch Gallery in Miami (2015) and David Shelton Gallery (Houston, 2015). Solo exhibitions include Lombard Freid Gallery (New York), Ronchini Gallery (London), and 1708 Gallery (Richmond, VA).

Poet and essayist Mary Quade is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of the poetry collections Guide to Native Beasts (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and Local Extinctions (Gold Wake). Her work has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship and three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. She is an associate professor of English at Hiram College, where she teaches creative writing, and lives in Madison, Ohio.

Margaret Ross is the author of A Timeshare (Omnidawn, 2015). She is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford.

Montreux Rotholtz is the author of Unmark (Burnside Review Press, 2017), which was selected by Mary Szybist as the winner of the Burnside Review Press Book Award. Her poems appear in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Prelude, jubilat, Lana Turner, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.

Susan Stewart’s most recent book of poems is Cinder: New and Selected Poems from Graywolf Press.

John Tripoulas has served as the general surgeon on the Greek island of Ikaria since 2009. He was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and graduated from Oberlin College with a BA in English Literature and from Athens University Medical School. His maternal grandfather was the Greek poet and Olympic athlete Demetrios Golemis, whose poems he has translated.

Joyce Tsai is curator at the University of Iowa Museum of Art and clinical associate professor of art education at the University of Iowa. She has published widely on art, technology, philosophy, and politics. Her most recent book, Painting after Photography (University of California Press, 2018), is winner of the Phillips Collection Book Prize.

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta, 2012), co-edited with Joshua Corey, and a chapbook, Susquehanna (Omnidawn, 2013). BOA Editions will release a long poem, Testament, in 2015. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as Editor-at-large for The Kenyon Review.

Jeffrey J. Williams’s most recent book is How to Be an Intellectual: Criticism, Culture, and the University (Fordham University Press, 2014). He has conducted more than sixty full-length interviews, published in Minnesota Review, Symploke, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. He serves as one of the editors of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism and is professor of English and literary cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University.