Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999), and of the widely celebrated and influential novel, Rails Under My Back

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is the recipient of the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing, which was awarded for her short story, “Weight of Whispers”, described by the BBC as a “subtle and suggestive work of

Mahmoud Saeed is a prominent and award-winning Iraqi novelist. He has written more than 20 novels and short story collections, including Port Said and Other Stories, which was published in 1957. The first military-Baathist Iraqi

Benjamin Matvey is a writer who lives in Brooklyn . His fiction has been featured in Stickman Review, Sunday Salon, Generation X Journal and twice in Philadelphia ‘s prestigious Writing Aloud series. His story “Big

Cassandra Neyenesch wrote about visual art, fashion and movies for newspapers in East Asia and more recently has done book reviews for Kirkus Special Projects and the Brooklyn Rail. She’s just finished her second novel,

Elise Miller hosts and curates East Side Oral, “the reading series your mother warned you about,” monthly, on the Lower East Side. Her first novel, Star Craving Mad (Warner Books) part romantic comedy, part celebrity

Stephanie Sherman does things that are deemed useless in a capitalist society, like poetry-writing and dancing. She spent two years in Quito, Ecuador on a Fulbright scholarship, teaching and choreographing works that reflected the realities

Poet and photographer Thomas Sayers Ellis, co-founded The Dark Room Collective (in Cambridge, Massachusetts); and received his M.F.A. from Brown University. He is the author of The Maverick Room (2005), which won the John C.