Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her first novel, Dark Rooms, was published by William Morrow–HarperCollins in March 2015.
Rachel Z. Arndt is an MFA candidate both in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, the Awl, Pank, and elsewhere.
Amy Benfer’s first piece about the serial fiction heroines of her youth was written on Nancy Drew when she was a young editor at Salon.com way back in the late nineties. Since then, she has written on Nancy, Eloise, Little House and the Prairie, and tried to explain teenage girls’ mysterious fascination with Ayn Rand and her total antipathy for the Divergent trilogy. She regularly reviews young-adult fiction for the Barnes and Noble Review and the LA Times. She has lived in San Francisco, Boise, Brooklyn, and Berlin. As you read this, she could be pretty much anywhere.
Rebecca Bengal writes about such things as death, drifters, obsessive teenagers, photography, country singers, trains, old cars, prison whistles, dive bars, secret boats, lost communes, moonshiners, melon farmers, steelworkers, destroyed theme parks, Graceland’s daily visitor, and a Russian cat circus. Her fiction has been published in Best American Nonrequired Reading and Southwest Review.
Tim Bennett is a filmmaker, musician, and HAM radio enthusiast.
Stephen (sometimes Stephanie) Burt is Professor of English at Harvard and the author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, including Belmont and Close Calls with Nonsense: for more, see closecallswithnonsense.com.
Lena Dunham is a filmmaker and writer who lives in New York.
Josh Fischel is a sixth grade teacher and occasional writer. He lives with his wife and their dog in Acton, Massachusetts.
Tavi Gevinson is a writer, actress, and founding editor-in-chief of Rookie. She recently interviewed Taylor Swift for Elle, and starred in Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth on Broadway. Rookie Yearbook Four will be published by Penguin Random House this fall.
A co-founder of the Weeklings, Jennifer Kabat writes frequently for Frieze, is devoutly attached to the essay form, and is working on a book on art, war, and the landscape called Growing Up Modern. She teaches at NYU and lives in rural upstate New York.
Rebecca Lindenberg’s essays and criticism have appeared widely. Her collection of poetry, Love, An Index (2012), focuses on her relationship with her partner, the poet Craig Arnold; Terrance Hayes described the poems as a “litany of losses and retrievals” that “remake the elegy form.” Lindenberg’s honors include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a MacDowell Colony Residency, and a fellowship at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive (named one of the top twenty-five books of its year by the Voice Literary Supplement) and The Fun Parts and three novels: The Ask, The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the first annual Believer Book Award. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
Brian McMullen is an artist, writer, and dad living in Bayview, San Francisco. His work has recently been collected in Curiosity & Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine and the deluxe edition of The Best of McSweeney’s.
Kevin Moffett is the author of two story collections and, with Matthew Derby and Eli Horowitz, The Silent History. He lives in Claremont, California.
Kathleen Ossip is the author of three books of poems, including The Do-Over, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She teaches at The New School in New York, and she is a founding editor of the poetry review website SCOUT.
Nicole Pasulka’s work has been published at Mother Jones, BuzzFeed, Vice, and NPR. Her last feature for the Believer was a history of the Village People.
Alan Michael Parker’s most recent book is The Committee on Town Happiness, a novel. He is the author of three other novels, eight books of poetry, and editor of The Imaginary Poets and The Manifesto Project, among other volumes. Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College, he also teaches in the University of Tampa’s low-residency M.F.A.
Jason Polan is a freelance artist living in New York City. He has exhibited work all over the United States and Europe. He is a member of The 53rd Street Biological Society and Taco Bell Drawing Club. Polan’s illustrations and projects have appeared in Metropolis Magazine, the New Yorker, and ARTnews, and his books have generated wide acclaim.
Nick Poppy is a writer and filmmaker living in New York. You can read more of his work at nickpoppy.com.
Simon Rich is the author of two novels and four short story collections including Spoiled Brats, Ant Farm, and The Last Girlfriend on Earth. His books have been translated into a dozen languages.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. Her most recent book is the novel O, Democracy!.
Tag Savage is the head writer for Tumblr, where he writes more than 200 million blogs. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and dog.
Michael Schulman works at the New Yorker, where he covers theater and other subjects for The Talk of the Town. He is working on a book about Meryl Streep.
Ronnie Scott is the author of Salad Days (Penguin) and editor of The Best of The Lifted Brow (Hunter).
John Semley lives and works in Toronto. He is currently writing a book about The Kids in the Hall.
Matthew Simmons is the author of A Jello Horse (Publishing Genius Press, 2009), Happy Rock (Dark Coast Press, 2013), and The In-Betweens (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). He is the series editor for Instant Future e-books (thisisinstantfuture.com). More at matthewjsimmons.com.
Ginger Strand is the author of many magazine features, a novel, and two books of nonfiction: Inventing Niagara and Killer on the Road. Her fourth book, The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic, comes out this November.
Adrian Van Young is the author of a collection of stories, The Man Who Noticed Everything (Black Lawrence Press), and a novel, Shadows in Summerland, forthcoming in 2016 from ChiZine Publications. His fiction and non-fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, the Collagist, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, the American Reader, VICE, and Slate, among others. He lives in New Orleans with his wife Darcy and son Sebastian.
Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. He is the author of eight collections of plays and a book of essays. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. The poem published in this book is from White Egrets, his collection of poems published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010.
Jennifer Willoughby is a poet and advertising copywriter based in Minneapolis. Her first collection, Beautiful Zero, won the 2015 Lindquist-Vennum Prize, chosen by Dana Levin.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Sun Bear, 2014. Why Poetry, a book of prose, is forthcoming from Ecco Press in 2016. An Associate Professor in the St. Mary’s College of California MFA program, he is also Editor at Large at Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, California.
Rachel Zucker is the author of nine books, most recently The Pedestrians and MOTHERs. She lives in New York City with her husband and three sons. She teaches poetry at NYU.