Spring 2020

Kelli Jo Ford’s debut, Crooked Hallelujah, will be published by Grove Press in July 2020. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, a Katherine Bakeless Nason Award at Bread Loaf, a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, VQR, and the Missouri Review, among other places. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

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. 

Jen Renninger is an editorial illustrator who works in collage and painting. Her illustrations have been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, and Chronicle Books.

Stu Sherman is a writer, artist, legal-aid attorney, and political activist. His writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Brooklyn Magazine, Broken Pencil, and Anthem Magazine, and his art has been displayed in galleries in New York and Massachusetts. He is also a leader in the fight for health equity and justice, and recently announced his candidacy for the New York City Council serving the 33 district in Brooklyn. 

Kevin Young is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He previously served as director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Young is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including Stones, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; Brown; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Jelly Roll: a blues, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry; Bunk, a New York Times Notable Book, longlisted for the National Book Award and named on many “best of” lists for 2017; and The Grey Album, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The poetry editor of the New Yorker, where he hosts the poetry podcast, Young is the editor of nine other volumes, most recently the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Society of American Historians, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. He is a contributing editor to VQR.