Summer 2018

Traci Brimhall is the author of Saudade (Copper Canyon, 2017), Our Lady of the Ruins (Norton, 2012), and Rookery (Southern Illinois, 2010). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Slate, Poetry, the Believer, the New Republic, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the National Endowment for the Arts. She’s an associate professor of creative writing at Kansas State University.

Sergio García Sánchez is a cartoonist and illustrator, and is coauthor, with Nadja Spiegelman, of the graphic novel Lost in NYC: A Subway Adventure (TOON, 2015). His work has been published by the New York Times and others. He teaches at the University of Granada as well as the European School of the Image, and frequently runs workshops and lectures around the world. His work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, and the Sierre International Festival.

Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel, The Residue Years (Bloomsbury, 2013), won the Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. Jackson’s honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Paris Review, the Guardian, Tin House, and elsewhere. His nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family is forthcoming from Scribner. He is a Clinical Associate Professor of Writing in Liberal Studies at New York University. 

Carmen Maria Machado’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, the Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. Her debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf, 2017), was the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, among others. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts, among others. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. “Mary When You Follow Her” is adapted from Tiny Crimes (Catapult, 2018).

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a VQR columnist. His work has appeared in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, AGNI, Kenyon Review, Callaloo, Massachusetts Review, the Bitter Southerner, LitHub, Pacific Standard, and the Los Angeles Times. He is the winner of the Iowa Review Fiction Award, the Soto Speak Journal Short Story Award, and the William Faulkner Competition for Novel in Progress. His first novel, We Cast A Shadow (Random House, 2019), is forthcoming.