Chibuihe Obi Achimba is a poet and essayist from Nigeria, and a visiting poet at the Harvard University Department of English. His works have been featured in Guernica magazine, Adirondak Review, Expound, Heart Journal, Expound, Brittle Paper, and various anthologies, and have also been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poet. He was awarded the inaugural Brittle Paper Award, and was a finalist for 2018 Gerald Kraak Award.
Philip G. Alcabes is Professor of Public Health at Hunter College, CUNY and author of Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics. His research and commentary on AIDS and related public health problems has appeared in numerous medical and public health journals. He has published essays and reviews in The American Scholar, The Chronicle Review, Consequence, and other publications. He is working on a book on the intersection of consciousness, healing, and psychiatric diagnosis.
Victoria Amelina was a Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and human rights activist based in Kyiv. She won the Joseph Conrad Literature Prize for her prose works, including the novels Dom's Dream Kingdom and Fall Syndrome, and was a finalist of the European Union Prize for Literature. She was a founder of the New York Literature Festival, which takes place in a small town called New York in the Donetsk region. Due to the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, instead of the festival, the team launched the "Fight Them with Poetry" initiative to help supply the Ukrainian Army units defending the region. Victoria's prose, poems, and essays have been translated into many languages, including English, Polish, Italian, German, Croatian, Dutch, Czech, and Hungarian. Since 2022 Amelina had been collaborating with the Ukrainian teams to document Russian war crimes and advocate for accountability for the international crimes committed by the Russian Federation and its troops on the territory of Ukraine and other countries. In her mission to document those Russian war crimes she was tragically killed in a senseless airstrike while at a restaurant in Kramatorsk, Ukraine.
Caught up in the civil rights movement in Boston at age 13, Michael Ansara spent decades as an activist and organizer. He was a regional organizer for Students for A Democratic Society, Chair of the ‘69 Harvard Strike Committee, spent ten years organizing against the war in Vietnam, helped found the Old Mole, was researcher for Ramparts Magazine, became a community organizer, was an op-ed writer for the Boston Globe, was director of Mass Fair Share, worked on voter registration efforts and numerous political campaigns and owned and operated several companies. In the last 15 years he has been a co-founder of Mass Poetry, a writer of poems and essays, a board member of Indivisible Massachusetts and an organizer of Together for 2020. His essays and poems have appeared in Solstice, Ibbetson Street, Salamander, MidAmerica Poetry Review, Muddy River Poetry Review and Vox.
Paul Auster is the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. He has been awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature, the Prix Médicis Étranger, the Independent Spirit Award, and the Premio Napoli. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Peter Balakian, is the author of many books including recent Ozone Journal (Pulitzer Prize '16); The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response; and Black Dog of Fate, a memoir (both New York Times Notable Books). He is the Rebar Professor of Humanities at Colgate University. He has written extensively on mass violence, cover-up and denial.
Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, is the author of seven novels, five books of nonfiction, and a play. Her forthcoming books, the novel The Good Deed, and the nonfiction Map of Hope and Sorrow, are both about refugees in Greece, the work from which this article is taken. Benedict's coverage of sexual assault in the U.S. military inspired the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Invisible War and instigated a landmark lawsuit against the Pentagon on behalf of victims of military sexual assault. Benedict has published widely and spoken at Harvard University, TED Talks, West Point, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the United Nations, among other campuses and organizations. A recipient of the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, among other awards, Benedict is also recently the author of the novel Wolf Season, the non-fiction book The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women in Iraq, and a play, The Lonely Soldier Monologues.
Sven Birkerts was for many years the Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has reviewed widely and is the author of ten books, including The Gutenberg Elegies and The Art of Time in Memoir. His new book, an appreciation of Nabokov's Speak, Memory will be out in December. He co-edits the journal AGNI at Boston University, and lives in Arlington, MA.
Sam Cha is from Korea. He earned an MFA at UMass Boston. A 2017 recipient of the St. Boltoph’s Club Emerging Artists Prize, his work has appeared in apt, Assay, Best New Poets 2016, Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Memorious, and Missouri Review. His chapbook, American Carnage, was published by Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs in 2018. His full-length collection of cross-genre work, The Yellow Book, was published by [PANK] Books in 2020. Sam lives and writes in Cambridge, MA.
John J. Clayton has published nine volumes of fiction, both novels and short stories. His collection of interwoven short stories, Minyan, was published in September 2016, his collection Many Seconds into the Future in 2014. Mitzvah Man, his fourth novel, appeared in 2011. A memoir, Parkinson’s Blues, was published September, 2020. Clayton’s stories have appeared in AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, Sewanee Review, over twenty times in Commentary; in Kerem, Conjunctions, Notre Dame Review, Missouri Review and The Journal. Stories have been published recently in MQR and Missouri Review. Two personal essays have been recently published in Jewish Review of Books. His stories have won prizes in O.Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. His collection Radiance was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Clayton grew up in New York; received his B.A. at Columbia, his M.A. at NYU, his PhD at Indiana. He taught modern literature and fiction writing as professor and then Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has also written two books of literary criticism: Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man and Gestures of Healing, a psychological study of the modern novel.
J. D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award and The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His debut book The Correspondence (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) was published in 2017. His work has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, n+1, Agni, Oxford American, Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere, including The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.
Jeff Dietrich is a founding member of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, a lay community dedicated to progressive social justice work and part of the Catholic Worker movement founded over 80 years ago by radical Catholic thinker and activist Dorothy Day. Since 1970, Dietrich has been committed to the care of homeless, poor, and marginalized people on L.A.’s skid row. He has been arrested for acts of civil disobedience more than forty times. He has written about his political beliefs and the experience of poverty for the Catholic Agitator newspaper for more than forty-five years.
Lila Dlaboha is a poet born of Ukrainian immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She was short-listed for the Poetry International Prize 2021, and is a 2018 finalist, for her full-length manuscript, in the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize judged by Jane Hirshfield. Her poems have appeared in Arts & Letters (Georgia College), Bellevue Literary Review, Mudfish, Andre Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse, among other publications. During the 1980s she served on the editorial board of the Little Magazine, a nationally distributed literary quarterly. By profession she worked many years as a photo or text editor on general-interest magazines and the newswire before managing an international photo agency specializing in history. On and off for the past six years she has been volunteering in the war zones of eastern Ukraine under the auspices of the Ukrainian NGO GoGlobal/GoCamp. She lives in New York City.
Ginger Eager’s first novel, The Nature of Remains, won the AWP Prize for the Novel, and was chosen by the Georgia Center for the Book as a 2021 Books All Georgians Should Read. Her essays, short stories, and reviews have been published in journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Necessary Fiction, and West Branch. Ginger teaches in a variety of settings, including nonprofit writing centers and homeschool co-ops.
Ken Edwards’ books include the novels Futures (Reality Street, 1998), Country Life (Unthank Books, 2015) and The Grey Area (Grand Iota, 2020), as well as the prose works Bardo (Knives Forks & Spoons Press, 2011), Down With Beauty (Reality Street, 2013, a book with no name (Shearsman Books, 2016) and Wild Metrics (Grand Iota, 2019). Before that, he had many books of poetry published by small presses, and his Collected Poems is expected in 2021 from Shearsman. He was editor/publisher of Reality Street between 1993-2016 and now shares the new publishing venture Grand Iota with Brian Marley. He lives in St Leonards on Sea, England, where he plays bass guitar and sings with Afrit Nebula, a band he co-founded with Elaine Edwards and Jamie Harris.
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc., He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists, and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book of poems, Crank Shaped Notes, was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.
Julia Fiedorczuk is a writer, poet, translator, researcher and a practitioner of ecocriticism. Her work foregrounds the relationship between human beings and their planetary environment. She is affiliated at the Institute of English Studies at Warsaw University, and co-founded the School of Ecopoetics at Warsaw’s Institute of Reportage. She has published essays, novels and short story collections, as well as six volumes of poetry. The latest of those, Psalmy, was awarded the Wisława Szymborska Prize, Poland’s most prestigious prize for poetry. Fiedorczuk’s most recent novel, Pod Słońcem (Under the Sun) is set in Podlasie, close to the Polish-Belorussian border. Her writings have been translated into over 20 languages.
Chandra Ganguly is a PhD candidate at King’s College, London. An MFA graduate from the Bennington Writing Seminars, her work has been published in BuzzFeed, Narrative Magazine, India Currents, and NDTV. She is the founding editor of the art and literature print magazine Speak.
David Ghitelman is a graduate of Antioch College and the University of Iowa. His poems have appeared in Agni, The Antioch Review, the Black Warrior Review, the Iowa Review, and New Letters. He has written essays and book reviews for the New York Times, Newsday, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. His fiction has been published by Every Day Fiction.
Andrew Grainger is a retired Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court. He has been designated a Fulbright Senior Specialist by the U.S. Department of State. He and his wife, Kathleen Stone, have taught courses and seminars on U.S. law in numerous countries in Europe and the Far East. His writing has appeared in WBUR’s Cognoscenti and the Boston Globe.
Andrea Gregory holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her fiction has appeared in The Sun and Consequence Magazine, with a story forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly. She is a former journalist and world traveler, having spent time reporting from the Balkans after the wars. Her work from the Balkans has appeared in Transitions Online (TOL), Balkan Insight, The Christian Science Monitor, and other places. She holds a BS in journalism from Emerson College. Her journalism career ended when she came down with multiple sclerosis, but life has a way of calling writers back to their roots.
Thea Goodman is the author of a novel The Sunshine When She’s Gone (Henry Holt, 2013) a book about a marital crisis that ensues upon the birth of a first child. Her short story, “Evidence,” the title story of a collection in-progress, was chosen by The New York Public Library for Stories on The MTA, a Digital Archive, 2019. She’s published short fiction, essays, and poems in The New England Review, Catapult, The Rumpus, Columbia, The Penn Review, Other Voices, The Huffington Post and The Coachella Review, among other venues, and won a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, The Columbia Fiction Award and fellowships at Yaddo and The Ragdale Foundation. She was a visiting faculty member teaching creative Writing at The University of Chicago between 2016-2019 and is currently at work on a new novel.
Houman Harouni was born in Iran, 1982. He is a lecturer at Harvard University, and his writings on education, philosophy, the arts, politics, and history of science have been published in The Guardian, Harvard Review of Education, American Reader, and the White Review, among other venues.
Jean Hey was a journalist in South Africa before immigrating to America. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Plain Dealer, The Chicago Tribune, Solstice Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books and The MacGuffin. She holds a dual-genre MFA in fiction and nonfiction from Bennington College where she won the Sven Birkerts award for nonfiction. She is at work on a collection of memoiristic essays about immigration and race.
Rowena Hill was born in England in 1938, and has lived for forty-five years in Venezuela. She has published five books of her own poetry in Spanish, as well as translations of South Indian poetry including medieval metaphysical poems, a collection of the work of the dalit poet Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy, and an anthology of contemporary women poets. Her translations into English include South Indian poetry, a bilingual compilation of Venezuelan women poets (Profiles of Night, bid&co, 2007), Selected Poems of Rafael Cadenas (bilingual, bid&co, 2009), Goodbye to the Twentieth Century, Eugenio Montejo (bilingual, Ed. Actual ULA, 2014), and The Blind Plain, Igor Barreto, (Tavern Books, 2018).
Nidia Hernández was born in Venezuela, and has been living in the US since 2018. She is a poet and translator of Portuguese poetry, an editor, broadcaster, and radio producer, and a poetry curator. Nidia directs the editorial project lamajadesnuda.com, which won the 2011 WSA prize for Cultural Heritage. She curates Poesiaudio (Arrowsmith Press) and is a contributor for Mercurius Magazine. She has presented works drawn from the 31 years of her radio program (also called La maja desnuda) which has more than 1,560 broadcasts. Currently, she is broadcasting the program through UPV Radio 102.5 FM in Valencia, Spain.
Judith Hertog is an essayist, journalist, and teacher. She is originally from Amsterdam but moved to Israel as a teenager, and, after some wandering around the world, eventually ended up living in Vermont with her family. Her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Longreads, The Sun, Hotel Amerika, Tricycle and many others.
Fanny Howe is the author of more than thirty works of poetry and prose, including Love and I, The Needle's Eye, Come and See, and The Winter Sun. Howe was the recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She also won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for her Selected Poems, and has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice.
Dan Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an advocacy and communications firm. Inventor of H-IQ, the first assessment of individual imagination and ideation, available on line at www.hunter-iq.com. H-IQ is being used in pilot programs in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and New York. He is co-author, with Dr. Rex Jung and Ranee Flores, of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal. He’s served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed his one-man show ABC, NPR, BBC and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). His most recent book, Atrophy, Apathy & Ambition, offers a layman’s investigation into artificial intelligence and is currently under consideration by publishers.
Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection Songs from an Apartment and the chapbook Memory Project. Her translation with Oksana Lutsyshyna of Artem Chekh’s Absolute Zero was released in 2020 by Glagoslav. Her novel Temporary Shelter is forthcoming in 2021 from Cervena Barva Press. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MA from the University of Alberta. She is the founder and curator of the Poets of Queens reading series.
Julia Juster lives in Cambridge, MA. She teaches middle school English, and is a Teaching Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was born in Cleveland, OH.
Umang Kumar is a writer based in the National Capital Region of Delhi, India
James Brandon Lewis is a critically-acclaimed composer, saxophonist, and writer. He has received accolades from NPR, ASCAP Foundation, Macdowell, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He has released several critically-acclaimed albums, most recently highly touted 2021's Jesup Wagon, and is a member and co-founder of American Book Award winning Ensemble Heroes Are Gang Leaders. James was recently voted Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist by Downbeat magazine's 2020s International Critics poll, and most recently named top Tenor Saxophonist for 2021 by Jazz Times Magazine. Lewis was recently named the Inaugural recipient of the Phd Fellowship in Creativity by the University of the Arts in collaboration with The Balvenie, drummer and Academy Award-Winning Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.
Woody Lewis is the author of Three Lost Souls: Stories about race, class and loneliness (Gotham Lane, 2016). His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, AGNI Online, Consequence, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he spent most of his adult life in northern and southern California, returning in 2010 to New York City. In 2018, he moved to Guilford, Connecticut, where he is at work on a memoir, and a novel about Silicon Valley. Lewis has a B.A. in music and an M.B.A. in finance from Columbia University, and an M.F.A. in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars.
Julia Lieblich is an award-winning journalist and author specializing in human rights. A former religion writer for the Chicago Tribune and the Associated Press, her news and feature stories and op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Nation, Time, Life, Ms, and AGNI. Lieblich's first book, Sisters: Lives of Devotion and Defiance, is about how obedient nuns evolved into radical sisters. Her most recent book, Wounded I Am More Awake: Finding Meaning After Terror, co-authored with Esad Boskailo, tells the story of a Bosnian concentration camp survivor who becomes a psychiatrist helping survivors of war. Her upcoming book is a memoir about her enduring relationship with a Maya family of weavers in a Guatemalan village. She is a Fellow at University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture, a Scholar-in-Residence at the Newberry Library and an Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University’s Dart Center for journalists who cover trauma.
Jonny Baltazar Lipshin is a writer based in Dorchester, MA. His work has been published by Oyster River Pages and Flaunt Magazine. He is an MFA Candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is also a Graduate Teaching Fellow. Before moving east, Jonny was an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles.
Shahriar Mandanipour, one of the most accomplished writers of contemporary Iranian literature, has held fellowships at Brown University, Harvard University, Boston College, and at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He taught Persian literature, cinema, and creative writing at Brown University and Tufts University. His honors include the Mehregan Award, the Golden Tablet Award, and Best Film Critique at the Press Festival in Tehran. He is the author of nine volumes of fiction, one nonfiction book, and more than 100 essays. His work has been published in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Two of Mandanipour’s novels have been translated into English, the widely celebrated Censoring an Iranian Love Story and Moon Brow.
Lena Marecki is an Adult Education teacher in Chelsea, MA. She holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts-Boston and Cornell University, and her work has appeared in Fiction Southeast and Rathalla Review.
Kai Maristed is a novelist, playwright, and translator living in Paris and the US. She studied political science and journalism at the University of Munich and holds a M.S. from MIT. Her books include Broken Ground, a novel of Berlin praised by John Coetzee, and the story collection Belong to Me, starred by Publishers Weekly. Stories and essays have been broadcast by Germany’s WDR, and appeared in the Kenyon Review, Zoetrope, The American Scholar, the Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, Agni, The Michigan Quarterly, the Iowa Review, and Ploughshares.
Brian Marley's most recent book is The Shenanigans (Grand Iota, 2020)
Megan Marshall is the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Margaret Fuller. She is also the author of The Peabody Sisters, which won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and of 2017's Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor and teaches narrative nonfiction and the art of archival research in the MFA program at Emerson College. Most recently, Megan edited The Blood of San Gennaro by her late partner Scott Harney, published by Arrowsmith Press (2020).
Monica McAlpine was the first in her family to go to college. She took her BA from Nazareth College and her PhD in English from the University of Rochester. Over a thirty-six-year career at University of Massachusetts Boston, she taught many first-generation students like herself. Specializing in medieval literature, she published two books on Chaucer (with Cornell University Press and University of Toronto Press), and several articles. Her study of Chaucer’s Pardoner, in PMLA, 1980, has been reprinted several times. Winter Bride (Main Street Rag Press, 2021) is her first volume of poems. Other poems of hers have appeared in Ibbetson Street, Leon, Poetry Quarterly, The Aurorean, and Wilderness House Literary Review.
Jill McCorkle, a native of North Carolina, is the author of four story collections and seven novels, most recently Hieroglyphics. Her work has been published in many periodicals and included in Best American Short Stories. She is core faculty in the Bennington Writing Seminars and affiliated with the MFA Program at NC State University.
Askold Melnyczuk’s book of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow, appeared in 2021. His four novels have variously been named a New York Times Notable, an LA Times Best Books of the Year, and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. He is also co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian Writers. His published translations include work by Oksana Zabuzhko, Marjana Savka, Bohdan Boychuk, Ivan Drach, and Skovoroda. He’s received a three-year Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction, the McGinnis Award in Fiction, and the George Garret Award from AWP. Founding editor of Agni and Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Most recently he has been organizing readings in support of writers in Ukraine, as well as interviewing writers for his For the Record series which appears online at Agni Online, as well as on Arrowsmith Press’s website.
Rishona Michael is a rising senior at Emerson College, majoring in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. She enjoys studying and writing poetry and prose, and is excited to see where her writing will take her. Recently joining the Arrowsmith Press team as an intern, she has been working to spread the word about recent publications.
Jo-Ann Mort returned a few years ago to poetry writing after a 22-year hiatus. Her poems have recently appeared in Plume Poetry, The Women’s Review of Books, Atlanta Review, Stand (UK), Upstreet, and Sources Journal (published in Jerusalem). A journalist and analyst too, she is a member of the editorial board of Dissent Magazine, where she writes frequently and has recently published there as well as in Democracy Journal, Index on Censorship, The American Prospect, and the New York Review of Books Daily. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Ruth Mukwana is a fiction writer from Uganda. She is also an aid worker currently working for the United Nations in New York. She’s a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars (MFA) and holds a Bachelors degree in Law from Makerere University. Her short stories have appeared in Solstice Magazine, Black Warriors Review, Consequence Magazine, The Compassion Anthology, and Speak the Magazine.
Judith Nies is the award winning author of four nonfiction books including Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West (Nation Books, 2014). She has published essays and book reviews in Orion, American Voice, Women’s Review of Books, and Solstice Literary Magazine. Her current book in progress is called The Long Forgetting: America’s Origin Stories Retold, about how the codfish aristocracy of early Massachusetts became the Boston Brahmins.
Thomas O’Grady was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island. He retired in December of 2019 after 35½ years as Director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was also Professor of English and a member of the Creative Writing faculty. His articles, essays, and reviews on literary and cultural matters have been published in a wide variety of scholarly journals and general-interest magazines, and his poems and short fiction have been published in literary journals and magazines on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border and on both sides of the Atlantic. His two books of poems — What Really Matters and Delivering the News — were published in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.
Romeo Oriogun was born in Lagos, Nigeria. He is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) and the chapbooks Museum of Silence (Arrowsmith Press) and The Origin of Butterflies (APBF). He currently is an MFA candidate for poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received the John Logan Prize for Poetry.
Mark Pawlak is the author of nine poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies. His latest book is Reconnaissance: New and Selected Poems and Poetic Journals (Hanging Loose). His work has been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, and Polish. My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov, a memoir, is forthcoming in 2021 from MadHat Press.
Douglas Penick’s work appeared in Tricycle, Descant, New England Review, Parabola, Chicago Quarterly, Publishers Weekly, Agni, Kyoto Journal, Berfrois, 3AM, The Utne Reader, and Consequences, among others. He has written texts for operas (Munich Biennale, Santa Fe Opera), and, on a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, three separate episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic. His novel, Following The North Star was published by Publerati. Wakefield Press published his and Charles Ré’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace In Rome. His book of essays, The Age of Waiting, which engages the atmospheres of ecological collapse, will be published in 2020 by Arrowsmith Press.
Joyce Peseroff's fifth book of poems, Know Thyself, was designated a "must read" by the 2016 Massachusetts Book Award. Recent poems and reviews appear or are forthcoming in On the Seawall, Plume, Plume Anthology, and The Massachusetts Review. She directed UMass Boston's MFA Program in its first four years, and currently blogs on writing and literature at www.joycepeseroff.com
Tomasz Pudłocki is Professor of History at Jagiellonian University, Krakow (Poland). He specializes in the history of Galicia from the socio-cultural point of view, as well as the history of women and intellectual history. His latest book covers Polish-British intellectual connections in the interwar period (Ambasadorzy idei. Wkład intelektualistów w promowanie pozytywnego wizerunku Polski w Wielkiej Brytanii w latach 1918-1939, Historia Iagellonica: Kraków 2015). He recently co-edited (with Kamil Ruszała) a collective volume Intellectuals and World War I. A Central European Perspective (Jagiellonian University Press: Kraków 2018) and with Andrew Kier Wise, "For Your Freedom and Ours": Polonia and the Struggle for Polish Independence (TPN, IPN: Przemyśl 2019). He is currently working on a book about neophilologists in interwar Poland trapped between science and service to the State.
Thaila Ramanujam is a physician in private practice in California. Raised in a literary family as the daughter of a prominent Tamil author, she developed a passion for Immunology early on and moved to the University of Washington to pursue research. She writes both fiction and non-fiction, and her work have been published/ or won awards in Nimrod, Asian Cha, Glimmer Train, and Readers. Her translations have appeared in International Literary Magazines. She is a columnist for a Tamil literary magazine, Kalachuvadu with international readership and has an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Bennington College, Vermont.
Steven Ratiner has published three poetry chapbooks, and is completing work on two full-length collections. His work has appeared in scores of journals in America and abroad including Parnassus, Agni, Hanging Loose, Poet Lore, Salamander, QRLS (Singapore), HaMusach (Israel), and Poetry Australia. He's also written poetry criticism for The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Giving Their Word – Conversations with Contemporary Poets was re-issued in a paperback edition (University of Massachusetts Press) and features interviews with many of contemporary poetry’s most important figures. In 2019, he was appointed as the Poet Laureate for Arlington, Massachusetts.
Sarah Rifky is a writer and curator from Cairo living in Somerville, MA. She writes essays around art, as well as non-fiction stories, and has contributed to publications including Art in America, Art Agenda, Bidoun, the Exhibitionist, and Mada Masr, among others. She is co-editor of Thresholds 47:Repeat, Positionen: Zeitgenössische Künstler aus der Arabischen Welt and Damascus: Artists, Tourists and Secret Agents. She wrote The Going Insurrection (2012). A journal and non-profit artistic platform are both named after “Qalqalah,” the eponymous protagonist of two of her stories. Rifky is a Ph.D. candidate in History, Theory and Criticism, and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT.
Shuchi Saraswat is the director of the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith and a nonfiction editor at AGNI. She currently lives in Boston, where she's working on a book about windows.
Originally from Macon, Georgia, Tony Schwalm spent much of his adult life as an Army officer, serving as a tank company commander in the First Gulf War in 1991 and leading Green Berets during the Haiti invasion in 1994. Retiring from the Army in 2004, he works as a consultant to the Department of Defense and lectures to business students at the University of South Florida on the merits of improvisation as learned in the world of guerrilla warfare. In 2009, his essay, Trek, won first prize at the Mayborn Literary Non-fiction Conference at the University of North Texas and was the basis for the book The Guerrilla Factory: the Making of Special Force Officers, the Green Berets published by Simon and Schuster in 2012. He makes his home in Tampa, Florida.
Lloyd Schwartz’s poems have been selected for the Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. He is also a noted Elizabeth Bishop scholar, co-editor of the Library of American’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, & Letters, and editor of the centennial edition of Bishop’s prose. In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his columns on music in The Boston Phoenix. Since 1987, he has been the classical music critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. Recently retired, he was the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
George Scialabba is a Boston-area book critic referred to by James Wood as “one of America’s best all-around intellects.” He has authored five collections of essays, including Divided Mind (2006), The Modern Predicament (2011), and Low Dishonest Decades: Essays & Reviews, 1980-2015. Richard Rorty wrote that he is “one of many readers who stay on the lookout for George Scialabba’s bylines. His reviews and essays are models of moral inquiry.” His reviews can be found in many publications. Learn more at http://georgescialabba.net
Huma Sheikh was born and raised in the war-torn territory of Kashmir. She then came to the United States, where she received multiple degrees in Asia-Pacific Leadership, Creative Writing, English Literature, and Journalism and Communication Studies. She has taught writing and literature classes at Florida State University, University of South Dakota, Texas A&M University, and Long Island University (Brooklyn). Sheikh's currently pursuing her PhD at Florida State University. Her work has appeared in Consequence Magazine, Arrowsmith Journal, Solstice Literary Magazine, Commonline Journal, East West Center, Gravel, Cargo Literary Journal, The New Writers Series Anthology, Poetry from Texas, Downtown Brooklyn, and others.
Jess Skyleson is a former aerospace engineer who began writing poetry after being diagnosed with stage IV cancer at age 39. Their poems have been selected as finalists in the Tor House and Yemassee Poetry Prizes, and have been published by Oberon Poetry Magazine, Stillhouse Press, Nixes Mate Review, and Ponder Review, among others.
Grace Singh Smith's stories and essays have appeared in Shenandoah, AGNI, Santa Monica Review, Cleaver, Aster(ix), The Texas Review, Home (Heady Mix), and elsewhere. Her story “Oshini” was selected for the 2018 Best of the Net anthology, and her story “The Promotion" was cited as notable in The Best American Short Stories 2016. She is Santa Monica College's spokesperson and is blog editor at AGNI.
Lara Stecewycz will enter the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as a freshman this August. She plans to study English in the Commonwealth Honors College. Her poetry and short stories have been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and she has been a finalist for her school’s chapter of Poetry Out Loud. Lara worked as an editor for her high school’s literary magazine. She has also taught English as a second language. In June, Lara began working as an intern at Arrowsmith Press, where she contacts potential reviewers, publicizes journal columns, proofreads manuscripts, and is building Arrowsmith’s social media platforms. She is also the co-author of her first column in Arrowsmith Journal.
Shilpi Suneja was born in India. Her first novel, about the long shadow of the 1947 partition of India, has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and is slated for publication in Fall 2022 from Milkweed Editions.
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, fiction writer, and essayist from Gaza. He is the founder of the Edward Said Public Library, and in 2019-2020 was a visiting poet and scholar at Harvard University. He gave talks and poetry readings at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, the University of Arizona (w/ Noam Chomsky), and the American Library Association conference. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, Solstice, Arrowsmith, Progressive Librarian Guild, among others. Mosab is the author of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, forthcoming from City Lights Books in April 2022.
Christie Towers is a poet and educator at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she is currently earning her MFA. She is on the pastoral care team for MANNA, a ministry for the unhoused community of downtown Boston at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. She has published poems in various journals, online and in print, most recently in Meridian, LETTERS Journal, and Cathexis Northwest. Her work has been featured in Ted Kooser’s project, American Life in Poetry. She is currently working on a collection of poems about the visions of Hildegard von Bingen.
Kate Tsurkan is a writer, editor, and translator. She is the co-founder of Apofenie Magazine. Her previous work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Calvert Journal, Asymptote and Literary Hub.
John Wronoski is a former antiquarian bookseller, art dealer, and curator. He is the author of the book-length exhibition catalogue, Boris Lurie: A Life in the Camps, and has essays in numerous art-related publications, most recently, Heide Hatry’s Icons in Ash (Station Hill Press).