SHERI J. BOOKER is an author, poet, and educator from Baltimore, MD. Her memoir Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home is the recipient of the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Debut Author. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. Sheri spent nine years working in the funeral business in Baltimore, and eight months living in the African bush, but nothing prepared her for the wilderness that she would face after losing the most important thing in her world.

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ERIN CELELLO lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband and two young sons, but she will forever be a Yooper at heart. She holds a MFA in fiction from Northern Michigan University and is the author of two novels: Miracle Beach and Learning to Stay, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award for fiction. Her nonfiction has appeared in Zocalo Public Square. In the hours not spent toddler-wrangling or writing, she teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

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KEVIN HAWORTH is the author of an essay collection, Famous Drownings in Literary History, and a novel, The Discontinuity of Small Things. He teaches at Ohio University and at Tel Aviv University and writes regularly about Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza for Michigan Quarterly Review. If you’re in north Tel Aviv, he recommends Benedict’s for brunch, Basel Congress for a late-afternoon snack, and Café Jeremiah any time of the day.

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KELLY SUNDBERG‘s essays have appeared in Guernica, Quarterly West, The Los Angeles Review, Mid-American Review, PANK, and others. A piece of her work was listed as “Notable” in Best American Essays 2013. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Nonfiction at Ohio University where she is also the Managing Editor of Brevity Magazine: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction.

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ALEX TEN NAPEL lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied at the School for Photography in The Hague. His work has been exhibited—in solo and group shows—at the Epson Photo Festival, Paris Photo (France), Pobeda Gallery (Russia), Cook Fine Art (New York), Galeria Omar Alonso (Mexico) Foto Art Festiwal (Poland), Miami Photo, International Festival of Photography (Lodz), and KievFotoCom (Kiev). His work has also been published in Le Monde Magazine, ZOOM, Nowy Biuletyn, Fotograficzny, ŚwiatObrazu and Foto&Video.

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A collector of communities, JACQUELYN THOMAS grew up in the driftless area of Wisconsin, where for 790,000 years glaciers feared to tread. Her poetry has appeared in over thirty small presses and was presented at the Wisconsin Academy of Arts and Sciences, where she dined with limnologists. This is her first prose publication.

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JONATHAN TRAVELSTEAD served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro. Having finished his MFA at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he now works on an old dirt-bike he hopes will one day get him to the salt flats of Bolivia. He has published work in The Iowa Review on Poetrydaily.com, among others, and his first collection, How We Bury Our Dead, will be published by Cobalt/Thumbnail Press in February 2015.

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MATTHEW WERNER is a freelance writer born and raised in a small town in Massachusetts. He is a recent graduate of Westminster College of Salt Lake City, where he earned a degree in English with an emphasis in creative writing. Werner works as a carpenter when he’s not writing about his experiences and mishaps in the outdoors. Werner currently lives with his yellow Labrador Ruger in a poorly built tree fort somewhere in the canyons of Utah.

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French-Swiss Photographer MICHAEL ZUMSTEIN graduated from the Ecole Superieure de Photographie de Vevey in Switzerland. Whether working on commission for the French or International press or on his personal projects, Zumstein’s photographic work follows the heritage of photojournalism and objective observation which allows him to honestly render situations and to go beyond stereotypes. While following the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Ivory Coast, and Sudan, he chooses to focus his photography on the “ambiguous relations between Africa and the West.” His work can be seen in Le Monde, Elle Magazine France, Télérama, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, among others.

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INSTAGRAM CONTRIBUTORS for this issue include: Sigal Bar-el (Israel), Scott Hall (Idaho), Daantje Jacobs (The Netherlands), Geoff Lawrence (Maryland), Bradley Marlow (Wyoming), Élise Melagne (Ivory Coast), Chrissy Murrah (Idaho), and others. Read their bios and about their images on our Instagram contributors’ page.