Lindsay Ahl’s chapbook, The Abyssians, was a finalist for the 2013 National Poetry Chapbook Award. Her novel, Desire (Coffee House Press, 2004) was nominated for a Discover New Writer’s Award and Ruth Lily Award. She was a Fletcher Fellow at Bread Loaf for Fiction in 2004. Her fiction and poetry have been published in the anthology From the Fishouse, and also in BOMB Magazine, Fiction Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Drunken Boat, RHINO, Vallum, The Patterson Review, and many others. She publishes Shadowgraph, (www.shadowgraphmagazine.com) an arts & culture journal.

Aaron Apps is a PhD student in English Literature at Brown University. His first book of poetry Compos(t) Mentis came out from BlazeVOX [Books] in 2012, and his second book of hybrid-genre prose Intersex is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2014. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in LIT, Washington Square, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, [PANK], Caketrain, and elsewhere.

Liam Baranauskas is an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi. His work has also appeared in Lent Mag and [PANK]. He is from South Philadelphia.

Chelsey Clammer received her MA in Women’s Studies from Loyola University Chicago and is currently enrolled in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program. She has been published in The Rumpus, Atticus Review, The Coachella Review and Make/shift among many others. She has won many awards, most recently the Owl of Minerva Award 2014 from the women’s literary journal Minerva Rising. Clammer is the Managing Editor and Nonfiction Editor for The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, as well as a columnist and workshop instructor for the journal. Her first collection of essays, There is Nothing Else to See Here, is forthcoming from The Lit Pub in Fall 2014. You can read more of her writing at: chelseyclammer.com.

Christopher Cokinos is the author of three books of literary nonfiction: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, and Bodies, of the Holocene, a new collection of lyric prose. His chapbook Held as Earth is just out from Finishing Line Press. He is co-editing an anthology, A Literary Field Guide to the Sonoran Desert, which is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press. Poems are recent or forthcoming in december, Jelly Bucket, Western Humanities Review and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Arizona.

Lydia Conklin has received a Pushcart Prize, work-study scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, Millay, Jentel, the Astraea Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, Brush Creek, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others. Her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine, New Letters, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. She has drawn graphic fiction for Gulf Coast, Salt Hill, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

J. Jerome Cruz lives and writes in Homer Glen, Illinois. His poems have recently appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Stephany Daniel is an MFA fiction candidate at Emerson College. Born and raised in Kentucky, she left those green, rolling hills behind for the opportunity to live and work in Boston. When she’s not busy writing and researching Chinese history for her first novel, she likes to bake sweet treats and binge-watch her way through the entire Netflix catalog. This is her first published story.

Anne Delatte holds a B.A. in English from Louisiana State University. Her work can be found in Belle Journal, Plain China, and smoking glue gun. She is currently pursuing projects in poetry and language in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans areas, including performances with the New Orleans Poetry Brothel.

Kayla Escobedo is an artist born and raised in Texas. She graduated with an honors thesis in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College in May 2013 and served as Art Director for the Harvard Lampoon. Kayla has exhibited in Cambridge, New York, Houston and Dallas. She currently lives and works in Dallas, TX. Her website can be viewed here.

Brian W Hedgepeth holds a BFA in Poetry from the University of North Carolina–Wilmington. He was the recipient of the 2011 Ludvik Vaculik Essay Award from Western Michigan University’s Prague Summer Program. He is currently a Sutherland Fellow at Illinois State University where he received the 2012-13 William Morgan Poetry Award. He also curates Word Bombing, a rapid-fire creative performance series in Central Illinois. His work can be found in Similar:Peaks::.

Jade Hidle holds an MFA in creative writing from CSU Long Beach and a PhD in literature from UC San Diego. As a featured writer for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network’s website, diacritics.org, she contributes articles on topical issues in Vietnamese art and culture, as well as creative non-fiction about her experiences growing up as a second-generation, mixed-race Vietnamese in Southern California. Her work has also appeared in the International Journal of Comic Art, Spot Literary Magazine, Beside the City of Angels: An Anthology of Long Beach Poetry, wordriver, and Ethnic Studies Review.

Winner of the 2012 Longleaf Press Chapbook Contest, Brad Johnson has published four chapbooks of poetry. His first full-length collection, The Happiness Theory (Main Street, 2013), is available here. Work of his has also been accepted by Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Permafrost Magazine, Poet Lore, Salamander, The South Carolina Review, Southern Indiana Review, and others.

Henry W. Leung is a Kundiman Fellow with an MFA from the University of Michigan. He was a long-time writer for the Lantern Review‘s “Panax Ginseng” column on Asian American poetics. He is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Paradise Hunger (Swan Scythe 2012), and has recent prose and poetry appearing in Crab Orchard Review, The Collagist, and Kartika Review.

Naomi Lore‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Briar Cliff Review, CutBank and Weave Magazine among other journals and anthologies. She was the recipient of two writing residency awards in 2012—one at Kimmel Harding Nelson Arts Center and another at Playa in Summerlake, Oregon. She now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Maggie Millner lives in California. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Phoebe, [PANK], and elsewhere.

Sue Owen recently won the 2013 Gretchen Warren Award from the New England Poetry Club for the best poem published by a member in the last year. She is the author of four books of poetry, including The Devil’s Cookbook (LSU Press, 2007), and taught poetry writing at LSU before she retired to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dustin Parsons has nonfiction appearing or forthcoming in Seneca Review, Crab Orchard Review, Fugue, and Fourth River. He lives in western New York state with his wife and sons.

Born in Cincinnati, Anthony Ramstetter, Jr. began studying singing at the age of eight, music history at the age of fifteen and poetry at the age of twenty-one. He is currently a graduate student in the MFA Poetry Program at Louisiana State University and he has earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Poetry from Miami University of Ohio where he was Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Magazine from 2012 to 2013. A recipient of the Betty Jane Abrahams Memorial Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and a Runner-Up for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence, Anthony’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Drupe Fruits., Five Quarterly, HTMLGIANT, Poetry Foundation, and The Puritan (CA).

Daniel Eduardo Ruiz was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, but now lives in Tallahassee. He is a full-time student at Florida State University and a part-time barista at Barnes & Noble. His poems have appeared in New Delta Review and Foliate Oak Literary Journal, and he was lucky enough to be nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Joe Sacksteder is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah in fiction. Later this year, Punctum Records will release his album (as The Young Vish) of Werner Herzog sound poems. His pieces in this issue come from an ongoing set, Various Boners, all based on corporate slogans. Other recent publications include Quarterly West, Fourteen Hills, Passages North, The Literary Review, and sleepingfish.

Gerard Sarnat is the author of two critically acclaimed poetry collections, 2010’s HOMELESS CHRONICLES from Abraham to Burning Man and 2012’s Disputes. His flash fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in over seventy-five journals and anthologies. Harvard and Stanford educated, Gerry’s been a physician who’s set up and staffed clinics for the disenfranchised, a CEO of health care organizations, and a Stanford professor. For The Huffington Post’s review of his work and more, visit GerardSarnat.com. “Brain Noise” may appear in Gerry’s third collection, 17s, in which each poem, stanza, or line has seventeen syllables.

Mark Smith’s poetry has appeared in some forty journals including recent appearances in Poetry East, Pleiades, New Ohio Review, The Gettysburg Review and New Letters. In 2014 his novels Toyland, The Middleman, The Delphinium Girl and Doctors Blues will be published by Foreverland Press as e-books, as will his The Death of the Detective, an NBA finalist, by Brash Books. He lives in DeLand, Florida.

Nancy Takacs is a recipient of a 2014 Ucross artist residency, the 2013 Sherwin W. Howard Poetry Prize for the “best poems in Weber—the Contemporary West,” the Nation Discovery Award, and the Kay Saunders New Poet Prize. She has three poetry chapbooks and one book of poems. A new book is forthcoming from Blue Begonia Press. She lives in Wellington, Utah, and northern Wisconsin near Lake Superior.

Catherine Wagner‘s latest book is Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012).