Ubah Cristina Ali Farah was born in Verona, Italy, of a Somali father and an Italian mother. She grew up in Mogadishu but fled to Europe at the outbreak of the civil war at the age of eighteen. She is a writer, a oral historian and performer, and a teacher. She has published stories and poems in several anthologies, and in 2006 she won the Lingua Madre National Literary Prize. Her novel Madre piccola (2007) was awarded a Vittorini Prize and has been translated into English with the title Little Mother (2011). Il comandante del fiume was published by 66thand2nd in 2014.
Leah Angstman is a historian, transplanted Midwesterner, and appointed board member of a Colorado historical commission. She serves as editor-in-chief for Alternating Current Press and The Coil magazine, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, and an interviewer and proofreader for Pacific Standard. Her work has won several awards and has appeared in numerous journals, including Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Slice Magazine, The Maine Review, and Shenandoah. You can find her at leahangstman.com and @leahangstman.
Conor Bracken is a poet and translator. His work has appeared or will soon in the Colorado Review, Indiana Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and elsewhere, and his chapbook, Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), was selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of the Fifth Annual Frost Place Chapbook Competition. His translation of Khaïr-Eddïne’s _Scorpionic Sun_ will be the first time any of his books has been brought into English.
Brandi Bradley was born in Bells, Tennessee and raised by a rodeo clown and a snake-oil salesman. Her work has been featured in Juked, Louisiana Literature, and Carve. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida State University and maintains the website Books and Boots. Explore her publications at brandibradley.com.
Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese. Her recent short story translations have appeared in Granta, Wasafiri, Words Without Borders, Asia Literary Review, and on BBC Radio 3. Forthcoming publications include Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon (Balestier, 2019) and Lake Like A Mirror by Ho Sok Fong (Granta, 2019). She lives in Santiago, Chile.
David Brunson is a poetry MFA candidate and translator studying at the University of Arkansas. He serves as Outreach Director, Assistant Translation editor, and Assistant Poetry editor at the Arkansas International.
Grady Chambers is the author of North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions, 2018), selected by Henri Cole as the winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His poems and stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Joyland, Diode, The Iowa Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere, and new work is forthcoming from Kenyon Review Online and Boulevard. Grady was born and raised in Chicago. He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, and lives in Philadelphia.
Heather Christle is the author of four poetry collections: Heliopause and What is Amazing, both published by Wesleyan University Press, and The Trees The Trees and The Difficult Farm, both published by Octopus Books. New poems have recently appeared or will appear soon in Granta, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. Her first book of nonfiction, The Crying Book, will be published by Catapult Books this Fall.
Johnny Damm is the author of The Science of Things Familiar (The Operating System, 2017) and three chapbooks, including Your Favorite Song (Essay Press, 2016). His work has appeared in Poetry, the Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He lives in Santa Cruz, CA and teaches at San José State University. More information about his work is available at johnnydamm.com.
Jeffrey Dillenbeck is a photographer and visual artist. He studied religion and studio art at the University of Virginia. He is interested in how the transcendent and physical interact with each other, especially in regard to the sacred and the profane and the animate and inanimate. The untitled collection in this issue of Nashville Review explores the relationships between people and the spaces they create and inhabit. Jeffrey currently resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Matthew Gellman’s poems are featured in Narrative, Poetry Northwest, The Common, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Adirondack Review and elsewhere. He is the recipient of awards and honors from the Academy of American Poets, the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Vermont Studio Center. In 2018, Matthew was awarded a Brooklyn Poets fellowship and was a finalist for the Missouri Review‘s Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize and for Narrative‘s Tenth Annual Poetry Contest. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in New York, where he teaches at Hunter College and the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Maggie Graber is a queer poet from the Midwest. She’s been the recipient of grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and her poems have appeared in The Louisville Review, Southern Indiana Review, Hobart, The Adroit Journal, Moon City Review, RHINO, and elsewhere. She currently lives in New Mexico. Find her online at maggiegraber.com.
Hope Campbell Gustafson has an MFA from the Literary Translation Workshop at the University of Iowa and a BA from Wesleyan University. Her translations can be found in Asymptote, The Brooklyn Rail, EuropeNow, and Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations (Comma Press/Deep Vellum). Hope was a 2018 resident at the Art Omi Translation Lab with writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, and she received a 2018 Pen/Heim grant for her translation of Ali Farah’s novel. A Minneapolis native, Hope currently resides in Brooklyn.
Z.D. Harrod is a professor of English at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Reservation. He graduated from the University of Arkansas’s MFA program where he served as the poetry editor for The Arkansas International. His poetry recently appears or is forthcoming in journals such as Pleiades, The Cimarron Review, and The Southwest Review among others. He’s from Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddïne (1941 – 1995) was a Moroccan Amazigh (aka Berber) writer who wrote over a dozen books in his lifetime, among them Soleil Arachnide (1969). He was a member of the Francophone avant-garde in the Maghreb in the late 60’s, and he assisted Abdellatif Laabi, Mostafa Nissaboury, and others in founding Souffles, a groundbreaking literary magazine which propounded new, radical approaches to postcolonial literature, art, and politics. His work is visceral, brutal, and constantly pushing the French language to the edge of its capabilities as a form of both revenge and postcolonial representation.
John Paul Martinez is a Filipino-Canadian poet writing out of the Midwest. He was selected as a semifinalist for the 2019 Djanikian Scholars Program and a finalist for the 2018 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest. His poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and is forthcoming or has appeared in wildness, Redivider, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Raleigh Review, Figure 1, and elsewhere. He holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin—Madison.
Ben Powell writes and teaches in Worcester, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Flock, Gigantic Sequins, and other publications.
Melanie Ritzenthaler is currently a Ph.D. candidate in fiction at Ohio University. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, The Florida Review, The Pinch, and Hobart, among others. She holds a MFA from McNeese State University.
Kristin Robertson is the author of Surgical Wing (Alice James Books, 2017). Her poetry appears recently or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and Kenyon Review, among other journals. She teaches creative writing at Tennessee Wesleyan University.
Dorothy Tse is the author of four short story collections in Chinese, including So Black and A Dictionary of Two Cities. Her collection, Snow and Shadow (translated by Nicky Harman) was long-listed for the University of Rochester’s 2015 Best Translated Book Award. A recipient of the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award, Tse is a co-founder of the Hong Kong literary magazine Fleurs de lettres. She currently teaches literature and writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Sara Emanuel Viloria (Maracaibo, Venezuela, 1990), earned a Fine Arts degree from the Universidad Centroccidental Lisandro Alvarado. She researches and practices both two-dimensional conceptual illustration and watercolor, as well as digital illustration. Sara incorporates fine art themes into her narrative and poetry—a distinct characteristic of her work—in which she writes to “heal” the wounded canvas. “Casa”/”House” first appeared in her plaquette Incendiario, published by the Chilean-Venezuelan journal and publishing house Los Poetas del Cinco (LP5).