Bruegel: Census and Massacre

Martin Harries teaches at the University of California, Irvine, and works on twentieth-century theater, modernism, and theory. He is the author of two books, Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship (Fordham University Press, 2007) and Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (Stanford University Press, 2000), while recent publications include “S.N. Behrman, Comedy, and the Extermination of the Jews: Broadway, Christmas Eve, 1934,” in Modern Drama. He is finishing “Theater after Film,” a book about the impact of mass culture on postwar drama.

In the Ecotone

Janine Joseph was born in the Philippines. She is the author of Driving Without a License (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her writing appears in the Atlantic, World Literature Today, The Poem’s Country, Zócalo Public Square, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. Her commissioned libretti for the Houston Grand Opera/HGOco include In Our Care; What Wings They Were: The Case of Emeline; “On This Muddy Water”; and From My Mother’s Mother. A co-organizer for Undocupoets and a MacDowell Fellow, Janine is an assistant professor of poetry at Oklahoma State University.

on The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer 

Rachel Kincaid lives in Minneapolis, where she is working on and off at writing about ghosts.

on Savage Conversations by LeAnne Howe 

Shanae Aurora Martínez is an assistant professor of English specializing in Indigenous literatures at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. She holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the University of California at Davis. She has served as an editor and labor organizer, and her work can be found in Studies in American Indian Literatures, The Georgia Review, and Cream City Review.

on Loudermilk, or, The Real Poet, or, The Origin of the World by Lucy Ives

Toby Altman is the author of Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2023) and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He has held fellowships from MacDowell, Millay Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Beloit College.

on The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom by Magdalena Zurawski

Peter Burzynski recently completed a PhD in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an MFA in poetry from the New School University, and an MA in Polish literature from Columbia University, and works as the book center manager at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. Burzynski is also the translator of Martyna Buliżańska’s This Is My Earth (New American Press, 2019).

on 100 Poems by Seamus Heaney

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of several books, including The Trembling Answers (BOA Editions, 2017), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the essay collection We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress (Graywolf, 2018).

Market at the Children’s Museum; Recognition; & What Proximity Does My Life Have to the Life of the World?

Sasha West’s first collection, Failure and I Bury the Body (Harper Perennial 2013), was a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor of creative writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.

Liberia, Day Zero; All the News That’s Fit to Print; Misdiagnosis; Filovirus Phylogenetic Tree; & Self-Portrait as Virus

Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award–winning journalist, medical doctor, and author, who traveled to Liberia to report on the 2014–16 Ebola epidemic with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Her poems in this issue, part of a forthcoming book titled If God Is a Virus: The Ebola Poems, are also a result of that reporting trip. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news reporting in 2017 with a team at the Dallas Morning News, Yasmin is a clinical professor at Stanford University where she studies the spread of health misinformation. Her second book, Muslim Women Are Everything, will be published by HarperCollins in April 2020.