Chase Twichell’s most recent book is Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), which won both the Kingsley Tufts Award from Claremont Graduate University and the Balcones Poetry Prize. A new book, Things as It Is, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2018.

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).

Susan Ludvigson, Professor Emerita at Winthrop University, was the 2014 winner of the James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points magazine. She has published eight collections of poems with LSU Press, including Escaping the House of Certainty (2006). The first line of “Dead,” appearing here, is the title of her next collection. Most recently, her poems can be found in the Yale Review and the Southern Review.