John Cotter is the author of the forthcoming memoir Losing Music (Milkweed Editions, 2023) and the novella Under the Small Lights (Miami University Press, 2010). Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman (selected by Tayari Jones), and an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature her work has also been named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book and received an honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards.

She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at San Francisco State University. May-lee Chai is the author of ten books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her latest short story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants (Blair, 2018), recipient of the American Book Award. His book The Monotonous Chaos of Existence is forthcoming in January 2022 from Mason Jar Press.

Hisham is the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Fellowship for Artists and Writers for 2017. His book The Perception of Meaning (Syracuse University Press, 2015) won the University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. His fiction and poetry have been translated into many languages, with English-language translations appearing in the Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly. Hisham Bustani is an award-winning Jordanian author of five collections of short fiction and poetry. His first book, a collection of stories, In the Shadow of Our House (Southern Methodist University Press, 2015), was named a best collection of the year by Forward magazine. His first novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here (New Issues, 2009), won the AWP Prize for the novel and a 2011 Whiting Award for fiction.

Scott Blackwood’s novel See How Small (Little, Brown, 2015) won the 2016 PEN USA Award for fiction, was named a Great Reads best book by NPR and an Editor’s Choice book by the New York Times, and was selected as a Texas Book of the decade by the Texas Observer. He lives in the border cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, CHIH, México. His work has appeared most recently in the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day,” AGNI, Best New Poets, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and CantoMundo.

Aldo Amparán is the author of Brother Sleep (Alice James Books, forthcoming 2022), winner of the 2020 Alice James Award.

The Bird Skinner by Alice Greenway