Joyce Carol Oates is the author of some one hundred books in multiple genres, including the novel Little Bird of Heaven (2009), the story collection Sourland (2010), and the memoir A Widow’s Story (2011), all from Ecco. The 2010 recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement of the National Book Critics Circle, Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1978. Oates’s “Ballerina” appeared in our fortieth-anniversary retrospective (Spring 1986).

William Heyen’s Shoah Train: Poems (Etruscan Press, 2004) was a finalist for the National Book Award; Mayapple Press will publish his book-length poem, The Angel Voices, in 2010. A past Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany, Heyen has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim, and American Academy of Arts and Letters fellowships, among other prizes and honors. He lives in Brockport, New York.

Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) authored ten collections of poems and four works of nonfiction. Elegy Landscape: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime, his most recent book, was published by W. W. Norton in 2018. His many honors and awards include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Truman Capote Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. He was the founding director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Maryland, where he had been a professor of English since 1985. Middle Distance, a collection of poems he finished before his death, will be published by W. W. Norton in 2020.