Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (SIU, 2017), winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. His poems and translations have appeared in A Public Space, The Baffler, Boston Review, LitHub, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, he holds degrees in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and Dartmouth College and an MFA in poetry from NYU. Originally from the Bronx, he has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Frost Place, the Fulbright Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Starworks Foundation.

Ruchika Tomar is a writer from the Inland Empire, California. She holds a BA in English Literature from the University of California, Irvine, and an MFA from Columbia University. In 2015 she received The Center for Fiction’s Emerging Writers Fellowship, as well as fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and Vermont Studio Center.