Genese Grill holds a BFA from Cooper Union in painting, and an MA and PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in Germanic literatures and languages. She is the author of The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil’s “The Man without Qualities”: Possibility as Reality (Camden House, 2012) and the translator of a collection of Musil’s short prose, Thought Flights (2015); his short-story collection Unions (2019); and Theater Symptoms: Robert Musil’s Plays and Writings on Theater (forthcoming)—with these three all from Contra Mundum. Her literary essays, translator introductions, and scholarly writing have appeared in The Georgia Review, Numero Cinq (where she is on the masthead as special correspondent), Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, the Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Her completed, as-yet-unpublished collection of essays celebrates the relationship between matter and spirit.

David Gessner’s Ultimate Glory, his memoir of his years playing Ultimate Frisbee, is due out in June 2017 from Riverhead Books. He is the author of All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West (W. W. Norton, 2015), as well as eight other books—among them The Tarball Chronicles (2011), My Green Manifesto (2011), and Sick of Nature (2003). Founder of Ecotone, the literary journal of place, Gessner served as host of the National Geographic Explorer television show, Call of the Wild, which explored how our constant use of screens is damaging our brains and how nature can be restorative.

James Alan McPherson (1943–2016), a native of Savannah, Georgia, was recently selected for induction into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. He won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his second short-story collection, Elbow Room, and in 1981 he was in the inaugural group of MacArthur Fellowship recipients. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences added McPherson to its membership in 1995, and in 2000 his “Gold Coast” was included by editor John Updike in Houghton Mifflin’s Best Short Stories of the Century. McPherson was educated at Morgan State University, Morris Brown College, and Harvard Law School—after which he decided to get an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1971). Elbow Room was preceded by the fiction collection Hue and Cry (1969) and followed by two nonfiction works, Crabcakes: A Memoir (1998) and A Region Not Home: Reflections on Exile (2000). Beginning in 1969, McPherson taught briefly at the University of California–Santa Cruz, Harvard, Morgan State, and the University of Virginia; he returned to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a faculty member in 1981, and he was associated with that program for the rest of his life.