Valerie Nieman’s fourth novel, To the Bones, appeared this spring from West Virginia University Press. Her third poetry collection, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse (Press 53, 2018), includes work that first appeared in the Missouri Review, Chautauqua, Southern Poetry Review, and other journals. Other poems have been published in numerous anthologies, including Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. Nieman teaches creative writing at North Carolina A&T State University.

Jeff Gundy’s eighth book of poems, Without a Plea, was published in early 2019 by Bottom Dog Press. Recent poems and essays are in Cincinnati Review, River Teeth, Forklift, Ohio, Terrain, and Christian Century. He is at work on a series of lyric essays about the Illinois prairie with the working title “Wind Farm.”

Alberto Ríos’s latest collections of poems are A Small Story About the Sky (2015), The Dangerous Shirt (2009), and The Theater of Night (2007)—this last the winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, and all three from Copper Canyon Press. A finalist for the National Book Award in 2002 for The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body and the recipient of the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, Ríos has taught at Arizona State University for over thirty-five years. He is Arizona’s inaugural poet laureate, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at ASU.

Lola Haskins’s latest collection of poems, her fifteenth, is Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).

Keith Ratzlaff teaches poetry and literature at Central College in Pella, Iowa. His most recent books of poetry, Then, A Thousand Crows (2009) and Dubious Angels: Poems after Paul Klee (2005), are from Anhinga Press, as will be his next, Who’s Asking? His poems and reviews have appeared recently in the Cincinnati Review, Arts and Letters, Colorado Review, and the American Reader; his honors include the Theodore Roethke Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2009. 

Adam Tavel’s third poetry collection, Catafalque, won the 2017 Richard Wilbur Book Award (University of Evansville Press, 2018). He is also the author of The Fawn Abyss (Salmon Poetry, 2017) and Plash & Levitation (University of Alaska Press, 2015), the latter a winner of the Permafrost Book Prize in Poetry.

Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collection Late in the Empire of Men (Four Way Books, 2017). Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner fellowship from Stanford University, he is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Chicago.

Andrea Hollander’s first published poem appeared in the Winter 1982 issue of The Georgia Review. Her first full-length poetry collection won the 1993 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize; her fourth was a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award. Her many other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and creative nonfiction) and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. After living in the woods of the Arkansas Ozarks for thirty-five years, she moved to downtown Portland, Oregon, in 2011.