Fall 2016

Lauren Markham is an award-winning writer based in California whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, and the New York Times Magazine. She is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (Crown, 2017), A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (Riverhead, 2024), and Immemorial (Transit, 2025). She is a contributing editor at VQR. 

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. 

Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which was the winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is currently a professor of English at Virginia Tech. Her newest book, Useful Junk, is forthcoming (BOA Editions, 2022). 

Ryan Spencer Reed’s work has been exhibited at the New-York Historical Society, the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston, and the Field Museum of Natural History, among other places. He attended the Eddie Adams Workshop by invitation and was a finalist for the 2015 Leica Oskar Barnack Award. His collaboration with Erika Meitner, “This Is Not a Requiem for Detroit,” was featured in the Spring 2011 issue of VQR. To view the rest of this series, please visit his website.

Amy Woolard is a civil rights attorney and advocate in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her debut poetry collection, Neck of the Woods, received the 2018 Alice James Award from Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Poetry, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, and elsewhere, while her essays and reporting have been featured in such publications as Slate, the Guardian, and VQR. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. She also teaches courses on the intersection of law, artistic expression, and justice at the UVA School of Law, and holds a community residency with the Sound Justice Lab, a program of the Karsh Institute of Democracy at UVA.