David Alworth is completing a degree in Creative Writing and Literature at New York University. Recently he was a Wesleyan Scholar in Poetry at the Wesleyan University Writer’s Conference. He has won the Editor’s Choice Award from Dirt Press and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Prize in Poetry from NYU. In addition to writing poetry, David directs a reading series in New York City and works as a free-lance editor and writer.

Robert Arnold is a writer, photographer, and editor living in Boston.

Rusty Barnes co-founded and oversees Night Train, and has published around forty stories, most recently in Pif, Red Rock Review, and Cadenza.

Paula Bohince is the author of three poetry collections from Sarabande, most recently Swallows and Waves (2016).

Kelle Groom’s poetry collections are Five Kingdoms (Anhinga Press, 2009), Luckily, a Florida Book Award winner (Anhinga, 2006), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida, 2004). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, DoubleTake, Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others. Groom is poetry editor of The Florida Review. She lives in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

Thom Gunn (1929–2004) published more than thirty books of poetry in the United States and Britain, including his Collected Poems (1994); The Man with Night Sweats (1992), for which he received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Passages of Joy (1983); Selected Poems 1950-1975 (1979); Jack Straw’s Castle (1976); To the Air (1974); Moly (1971); My Sad Captains (1961); Touch (1968); and The Sense of Movement (1959). He also wrote the essay collections The Occasions of Poetry (1999) and Shelf Life (1993). His honors include a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He taught at the University of California in Berkeley.

Christopher Hennessy’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares’ special Emerging Writers issue and has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Wisconsin Review, Natural Bridge, the James White Review, Bay Windows, Full Circle (online) and elsewhere. Other poems appear in a recently released anthology of new gay male poets, edited by Rudy Kikel. His book Outside the Lines: Interviews with Contemporary Gay Poets was published in 2005 by University of Michigan Press.

Jill McDonough is the author of Habeas Corpus (Salt, 2008), Oh, James! (Seven Kitchens, 2012), Where You Live (Salt, 2012), and REAPER, forthcoming from Alice James Books. She is the winner of a 2014 Lannan Literary Fellowship and three Pushcart prizes. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and Stanford’s Stegner program, she taught incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program for thirteen years. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Nation, The Threepenny Review, and Best American Poetry. She directs the MFA program at UMass-Boston and 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center online.

Muriel Nelson has two collections of poems, Part Song (Bear Star Press, 1999) and Most Wanted (ByLine Press, 2003). Her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and others. She teaches at the Muckleshoot Tribal College in Washington State.

Daniel Nester is the author of God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and God Save My Queen II (2004), both collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His creative work has appeared in jubilat, Crazyhorse, Open City, Spoon River Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2003, among other places; he also writes for Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, and Bookslut. He publishes and edits the online journal Unpleasant Event Schedule and is Assistant Web Editor for Sestinas for McSweeney’s. He is an assistant professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

Jon Papernick is the author of the short story collection The Ascent of Eli Israel (Arcade, 2002). His piece from this issue is excerpted from a recently completed novel entitled Who by Fire, Who by Blood. He lives outside Boston with his wife and is at work on a second story collection. His website can be found at www.jonpapernick.com.

Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna is one of the leading and most prolific literary figures in Brazil. Poet, critic, journalist, teacher, he’s the author of more than a dozen volumes of poems, essays, and chronicles. He has been president of the National Library Foundation in Brazil and a visiting writer at the University of Iowa.

Lloyd Schwartz is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Classical Music Editor of The Boston Phoenix, and a regular commentator for NPR’s Fresh Air. His books of poems are These People (Wesleyan Poetry Series), Goodnight, Gracie and Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press), and the chapbook Lloyd Schwartz: The Greatest Hits 1973-2000 (Puddinghouse Press). He is currently co-editing, with Robert Giroux, the collected works of Elizabeth Bishop for the Library of America. He has won awards and grants from ASCAP (for his writing on music), the National Endowment for the Arts (for poetry), and the United States Information Agency (for his work on Elizabeth Bishop). His poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Pushcart Prize, and (twice) The Best American Poetry. In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; and Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015). He drives a taxi in New York City.

Justin Vicari was born in New York City. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Phoebe, Interim, Rhino, Eclipse, Gin Bender Poetry Review, Slant, Poetry Motel, Spillway, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, Softblow, Stirring, The Adirondack Review, Avatar Review, Snow Monkey, Perigee, Poems Niederngasse, Eratio, and other reviews. In 2005 he received the Third Coast Poetry Prize and the New Millennium Writings Poetry Prize. He is the author of two chapbooks, In a Garden of Eden (Plan B Press, 2005) and Woman Bathing Light to Dark (forthcoming from Toad Press, 2006). He lives in Pittsburgh.

Samuel Wharton’s poems have recently appeared in The GSU Review, Redivider, and the 5th edition of Literature and Ourselves. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a contributing editor at Wild Plum.