Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, Pank, The Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books 2015). Her second book of poetry, Good Boys, was a finalist for the Kundiman Book Prize (2018), the Saturnalia Book Prize (2018), and is forthcoming with Tin House Books in February 2020. Fernandes is an Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College and teaches courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata is a poet, journalist, translator and lecturer. She is the Foreign Editor of the award-winning online journal Truthdig, and works as a lecturer at University of Massachusetts, Boston and London’s Poetry School. Hakimi Zapata holds a Creative Writing M.F.A. from Boston University and both a B.A. in Spanish and a B.A. in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of California, Los Angeles. For her journalism and literary criticism, she has received three Southern California Journalism Awards and two National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards. Literal Publishing has also released full-length bilingual editions of her translations of Alicia Borinsky’s My Husband’s Woman and Liliana Lukin’s Theater of Operations.
Polly Atkin lives in Cumbria. Her first collection, Basic Nest Architecture, was published by Seren in 2017. An extract from this was awarded New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize in 2014 for ‘reflect[ing] a strong sense of place or the natural environment’. Her first pamphlet bone song (Aussteiger, 2008) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Pamphlet Award, 2009, and second, Shadow Dispatches (Seren, 2013), won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize, 2012. Her third pamphlet, With Invisible Rain (New Walk, 2018) draws on Dorothy Wordsworth’s late, unpublished journals to articulate pain. She has taught English and Creative Writing at QMUL, Lancaster University, and the Universities of Strathclyde and Cumbria. She is a Penguin Random House WriteNow mentee, for a hybrid memoir exploring place, belonging and living with chronic illness. In 2019 she co-founded the Open Mountain initiative with Kendal Mountain Festival, which seeks to centre voices that are currently at the margins of outdoor, mountain and nature writing.