Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian writer and environmentalist. His poems are featured or forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Prairie Schooner, Hobart, Vinyl, Gigantic Sequins, and elsewhere. His chapbook was a finalist for the 2017 Hyacinth Girl Press contest.
Sarah Booker is a PhD student in Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill where she studies contemporary Latin American literature and translation studies. She has also translated works by Cristina Rivera Garza, Amparo Dávila, Ruth Mariela Fuentealba Millaguir, Patricio Pron, and Ricardo Piglia and her translations have appeared in Latin American Literature Today, Literal Online, Sprachbund, and Translation Review. Her translation of Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest was published with Feminist Press in October, 2017.
Xurxo Borrazás was born in Galicia in 1963. He graduated in English Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He is the author of novels, stories, essays and various volumes of miscellanea in the Galician language, some of which have been translated into Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, and Polish, and English. He’s appeared in Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction, Asymptote, and his novel, Vicious, came out from Small Stations Press in 2015. He has received the Spanish Critics Award for Fiction and the Galician Critics Award for Non-Fiction, among others. He writes regularly in the Galician Press about culture, ideology and politics, and recently published an article in the Charles River Journal. He has translated Henry Miller and William Faulkner into Galician.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania where her research focuses on contemporary American poetry about the Holocaust. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and TENT Conferences as well as the Auschwitz Jewish Center. Julia is the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014) and her poems appear in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, and Missouri Review Online, among others. Julia is also Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine (www.constructionlitmag.com) and when not busy chasing her toddler around the playgrounds of Philadelphia, she writes a blog about motherhood (https://otherwomendonttellyou.wordpress.com/)
Chelsea Dingman is a Canadian citizen and Visiting Instructor at the University of South Florida. Her first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). In 2016-17, she also won The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, The Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, and Water-stone Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in Ninth Letter, The Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Cincinnati Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.
Bernard Ferguson is a Bahamian immigrant living in Minnesota. He’s excited to convince you that Fall is not that great of a season. He has work featured/upcoming in Best New Poets 2017, Winter Tangerine, Raleigh Review and Santa Ana River Review, among others. Please tell him about your favorite reggae songs.
Judith Sara Gelt completed a gratifying, thirty year, middle-school teaching career before pursuing her passion for writing at age fifty-five. Her memoir, RECKLESS STEPS TO SANITY has a release date of Spring 2019 with The University of New Mexico Press. Her essays can be found in Iron Horse Literary Review, Portland Review, Broad Street Magazine, Best of Referential Magazine and Superstition Review. She’s a member of Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.
Karen Havelin completed her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in 2013 and is now back in her native Norway. Her poems have been published in Norwegian literary magazines and her fiction, nonfiction and translations have been published in Agave Magazine, Wordswithoutborders.org, Narrativenortheast.com, Brooklyn Rail InTranslation, Lunchticket.org and Brooklyn Quarterly, as well as the Oslo Writers League anthologies These Twisted Roots and Some Shape of Beauty. Other translations of CYF’s work by Havelin have been published by M-dash. Find out more at www.karenhavelin.com
Zach Hester is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky. His work can be found in the Colorado Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas, where he has held fellowships in poetry. He currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Christy Hutchcraft is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her MFA from Columbia University in Playwriting, where her work was staged at both The Horace Mann Theater and The Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Christy has worked as a theatre reviewer, editor and copywriter, and as a New York City educator. Her reviews and feature articles have been published in The Brooklyn Rail. She is currently a CUNY Writers’ Institute fellow in New York City, where she is developing several pieces of fiction.
Katerina Ivanov is a graduate of Boston College, where she studied English. She has won various writing awards, including the McCarthy Award for Poetry and the Cardinal Cushing award for Fiction. She has been published in Bird’s Thumb and has forthcoming poems in Sooth Swarm, Going Down Swinging, and Dialogist. You can find her in Jamaica Plain.
Alicia Lai was born and raised in Pennsylvania. In 2014, she was named a United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts; in 2017, she was selected to work with Tracy K. Smith and Bob Holman as a creative writing certificate candidate. Her work has been shown at the Smithsonian Institute, the Sundance Institute, and the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and published in Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, Humber Literary Review, and Curio Poetry, among others. Alicia is currently studying neuroscience and poetry at Princeton University.
Devin Mawdsley is the founder, creative director and lead illustrator of Eyes of the Cat Illustration, a newly-formed illustration studio, rooted in Chicago. EoC’s work focuses primarily on sequential arts–original graphic novels, as well as illustration/editorial cartoons and album/single art. EoC’s vision is to create works that capture and reflect the wonders and horrors of the human condition, to tell compelling stories, both fiction and non-fiction, historical as well as future-facing.
Gerardo Pacheco Matus, a Mayan Native and recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, and The Frost Place, was awarded the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Work-Study, and The Katharine Bakeless Nason Endowment Scholarship. His poems and essays have appeared and are forthcoming from La Bloga, Spillway, Grantmakers in the Arts, Apricity Press, The Amistad, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Poets Responding to SB 1070, The Packinghouse Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, West Branch Wired, Four Way Review, The Cortland Review, and Tin House Magazine. His manuscript, Child of the Grasses, was chosen as the finalist for the Andrés Montaya Poetry Prize, and his chapbook, A Heap of Ashes, was the finalist for the Bull City Press’s 2017 Chapbook Open Reading Period.
Meghann Plunkett is a poet, coder, and lover of dogs. She is the 2017 winner of the Third Coast Poetry Prize judged by Natalie Diaz. She was a finalist for the 2017 North American Review’s Hearst Poetry Prize as well as the 2016 Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest. Meghann has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets in both 2016 and 2017. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, Rattle, The North American Review, Third Coast, Washington Square Review, The Paris-American, The Journal, Winter Tangerine, and Muzzle Magazine, among others. She was recently added to the masthead as a poetry reader at the Adroit Journal and works as an editor and web-master for the Crab Orchard Review. (visit her at meghannplunkett.com)
Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of Novena, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize (Pleiades Press, February 2017) and Love in a Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). He has held poetry fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets, among others. He lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician prose and poetry living in Spain. His previous publications include Xurxo Borrazás’ story, “Initials” (Asymptote – 2017); ‘Metromania’ and ‘Orange Dream,’ two stories by Xavier Queipo (PRISM International and Your Impossible Voice – 2017); Carlos Casares’ novella, His Excellency (Small Stations Press – 2017); short fiction and poetry by Begoña Paz (The Brooklyn Rail InTranslation – 2016); and an excerpt of Xabier López López’s novel, Chains (Portico of Galician Literature-2016). Further work by López López is forthcoming in Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2019.
Chris Russell‘s art and writing has been published in The Believer, Juxtapoz.com, Literary Hub, Higher Arc, 50 Watts, Poetry Ireland Review, Muftah, and 92Y’s Podium, among other places. He is the contributor illustrator for Stonecutter Journal and is currently working on a graphic translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, forthcoming from Siglio Press. He lives in Queens, NY, and works in the field of deaf-blindness and special education.
David Sims, after 30+ of teaching in colleges, universities, military bases, and prisons from Alaska to Louisiana, retired to the mountains of central Pennsylvania where he now dwells and creates. His most recent comix appear in the inaugural issue of Swamp Ape Review, and as the front and back album covers for Pull the Plug, Scott Spearly’s August 2017 release of original music.“The Escape Artist,” another dark fable, is forthcoming in the Winter 2018 issue of Gigantic Sequins. He can be reached at tincansims@gmail.com.
Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is Editor-in-Chief at NELLE, a literary journal out of the University of Alabama at Birmingham that publishes work by women. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference and author of the poetry collection, a lesson in smallness, which was a finalist for the Rousseau Prize for Literature and the Eric Hoffer Award in poetry. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Pleiades, Kenyon Review Online, Sugar House Review, Carolina Quarterly, Raleigh Review, and other places. She is an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Alexandra Tanner was born and raised in Florida. A graduate of the MFA program at The New School, her writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Joyland, and Ninth Letter, and has received support from the Center for Fiction and the MacDowell Colony.
Ross White is the author of two chapbooks, How We Came Upon the Colony (Unicorn Press, 2014) and The Polite Society (Unicorn Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. His manuscript in progress, Guilt Ledger, was selected by Edward Hirsch to receive the 2016 Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend from Warren Wilson College. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Follow him on Twitter: @rosswhite.
Gabriela Wiener was born and raised in Lima, and currently lives in Madrid. She frequently works within the genre of the crónica and her published work includes Sexografías (2008), Nueve lunas (2010), and Llamada perdida (2014). She regularly writes for the newspapers El País (Spain) and La República (Peru) and her work has also appeared in Etiqueta Negra, Anfibia, among others, and in translation (Lucy Greaves) in Words Without Borders and The White Review.
Christian Yde Frostholm (b. 1963), is Danish writer, translator and visual artist, based in Copenhagen. He has been publishing poetry and prose since 1985. His most recent books are the travelogue Paris en brugsanvisning [Paris a User’s Manual] (2013) that was nominated for two Danish literary awards, and the novel Selvportræt med dyr [Self Portrait with Animals] (2011.) In 2016 CYF published the interactive book Kalender for natten [Calendar for the Night] (2016) created for iPad in collaboration with the illustrator Simon Bodh Nielsen. As a visual artist he has also published the photo book Things Left Behind (2012.) CYF was a founding editor of the website for visual poetry Afsnit P (1999-2009).