TRACY BRIMHALL is the current Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Field, Southern Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.

BEVERLY BURCH grew up in Atlanta and is currently a psychotherapist in Berkeley.Her recent fiction and poetry appear in Ontario Review, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Antioch Review, and Southern Humanities Review. She won the Gival Poetry Prize and Lambda Literary Award for Sweet to Burn (Gival Press, 2004).

JORDAN DAVIS lives in New York. His prose appears in the Nation and the Times Literary Supplement.

JOHN GALLAHER is the author of three books of poetry—most recently, Map of the Folded World (University of Akron Press, 2009) and The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way Books, 2007). He lives in rural Missouri where he co-edits the Laurel Review.

IAN GANASSI’s most recent publications include poems in New Haven Review, Center, and Skidrow Penthouse, among others. His translations of Books 2, 4, and 6 of the Aeneid have appeared previously in NER.

MAX GARLAND is a former rural letter carrier and the author of two books of poetry, The Postal Confessions (University of Massachusetts, 1995) and Hunger Wide as Heaven (Cleveland State University, 2006). His poems and fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories. He lives and teaches in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

JENNIFER GROTZ is the author of Cusp (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). Some of her poems and translations recently appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poetry International, TriQuarterly, Southern Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and serves as the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

JAMES HOCH’s first book, A Parade of Hands, won the Gerald Cable Award and was published in 2003 by Silverfish Review Press. His latest book is Miscreants (W. W. Norton, 2007). He has received fellowships from the NEA, Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences, St. Albans School for Boys, and Summer Literary Seminars, and he was the 2008 Resident Poet at The Frost Place. At present he resides with his wife and son in Nyack, New York, and is Associate Professor at Ramapo College and, recently, M. F. Steinhardt Visiting Writer in the MFA Program at Rutgers, Newark.

ANNA M. JAMESON (1794–1860) was a writer on art, literature, and travel. Among many other works, she produced Loves of the Poets (1829), Celebrated Female Sovereigns (1831), Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical (1832), Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), and the five-volume series Sacred and Legendary Art (1848–64).

ERIC KARPELES is a painter who grew up in New York and was educated there in its cultural institutions, as well as at Haverford College, Oxford University, and The New School. Karpeles has created monumental paintings both under personal motivation—the Sanctuary, a meditation space for the HIV/AIDS communities that traveled across the United States—and private commission—the Rockefeller Chapel, a permanent installation at the HealthCare Chaplaincy in New York. His recent book, Paintings in Proust (Thames & Hudson, 2008), was included on over a dozen “best of the year” lists in America and Britain. He lives in northern California.

MICHAEL KIMMAGE is Assistant Professor of History, Catholic University of America.

BEN KOSTIVAL used to live in Alaska but now lives in Maine. “Islanders” persisted through four years and twenty-five rejections before being published.

JONATHAN LEVY is the author of many plays for adults and children as well as several works of scholarship and criticism. He is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has contributed frequently to NER.

SAMUEL LIGON is the author of Drift and Swerve (Autumn House, 2009), a collection of stories, and Safe in Heaven Dead, a novel (HarperCollins, 2003). His stories have appeared in the Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, Post Road, Keyhole, Sleepingfish, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He teaches at Eastern Washington University and is the editor of Willow Springs.

WILLIAM LOGAN’s most recent book of essays and reviews, The Undiscovered Country (Columbia University Press, 2005), received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. His new book of poetry, Strange Flesh (Penguin), was published in October. A new collection of essays and reviews, Our Savage Art, will be published this spring.

DIANE K. MARTIN’s work has appeared in Field, Poetry Daily, Crazyhorse, ZYZZYVA, and Third Coast, among others. She was awarded second place in the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize competition, judged by B. H. Fairchild, in 2004, and her work was included in Best New Poets 2005. In 2006, she was semifinalist for the “Discovery”/The Nation Award and she has received a Pushcart “Special Mention.” She lives in San Francisco and works as a technical writer and editor.

P. J. MURPHY’s stories have been included most recently in Other Voices, Tampa Review, South Carolina Review, and Sou’wester. He has published a collection of short stories, Way Below E (White Pine Press, 1995), and has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State and a Masters of Divinity from San Francisco Theological Seminary. He has worked for NASA and taught English at Florida State, Eastfield College, and the University of Texas. While working on a novel, he is currently employed in law enforcement as an Inspector in the Alcohol Testing Program and has recently been accepted into the Masters program in Forensic Toxicology at the University of Florida.

CARL PHILLIPS is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Speak Low (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

GREGORY SPATZ’s short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Santa Monica Review, Kenyon Review, Epoch, and several times in New England Review. His most recent book is the novel Fiddler’s Dream (Southern Methodist University Press, 2006). He teaches in and directs the program for creative writing at Eastern Washington University, The Inland Northwest Center for Writers.

KAREN SUBACH’s work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, CutBank, Folio, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kalliope, New Letters, North American Review, and other journals, and she has been a resident at Yaddo. “A Wolf Should Roam” is the first chapter of her novel, Divine Providence. Subach teaches for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and works as an editor at Blue Wings Literary in Salt Lake City; she has a chapbook of poems forthcoming with Finishing Line Press.

MATTHEW THORBURN is the author of Subject to Change (New Issues, 2004) and the recipient of a 2008 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress.

G. C. WALDREP’s third collection of poems, Archicembalo, won the 2008 Dorset Prize and will be released in April 2009 by Tupelo Press; his most recent chapbook is One Way No Exit (Tarpaulin Sky, 2008). He lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Bucknell University.

ELLEN WEHLE teaches creative writing at Columbia College of Chicago, where she tells her students “Poetry requires faith: expect to see miracles, and you will.” Recent poems appear in Iowa Review, Web Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Southern Poetry Review, and the anthology Strange Attractors: Mathematical Love Poems. Her first book, The Ocean Liner’s Wake, is forthcoming this fall from Shearsman.

STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. Among his books are The Jews of Odessa; Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism; and Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity. He has won the National Jewish Book Award, the Smilen Prize, and the Leviant Prize of the Modern Language Association.