The Kiss

by Brian Turner

  Siobhan Fallon is the author of You Know When the Men Are Gone (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2012), which won the 2012 Pen Center USA Literary Award in Fiction, a 2012 Indies Choice Honor Award, the 2012 Texas Institute of Letters Award, and was listed as a Best Book of 2011 by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Public Library, and Janet Maslin of the New York Times. Theatrical productions of her stories have been staged in California, Colorado, Texas, and France. More of Fallon’s work has appeared in Women’s Day, Good Housekeeping, New Letters, Publishers Weekly, Huffington Post, Washington Post Magazine, and Military Spouse magazine. Her first novel, The Confusion of Languages (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017), is about two American women navigating the Middle East during the Arab Spring. Siobhan currently lives with her family in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

  Beth Ann Fennelly directs the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She’s won grants and awards from the NEA, United States Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil, and a Pushcart Prize. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and one of nonfiction, all with W. W. Norton, and a novel co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin. She’s currently finishing a collection of micro-memoirs.

  Nick Flynn has worked as a ship’s captain, an electrician, and as a caseworker with homeless adults. His most recent book is My Feelings (Graywolf, 2015). A new collection of poems, I Will Destroy You, is forthcoming from Graywolf.

  Kimiko Hahn is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Brain Fever and Toxic Flora. Both of these were triggered by rarefied fields of science in much the same way that previous work was triggered by Asian-American identity, women’s issues, necrophilia, entomology, premature burial, black lung disease, and so on. A passionate advocate of chapbooks, Hahn’s latest is Resplendent Slug (Ghost Bird Press, 2016). She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.

  Cameron Dezen Hammon is a writer and musician whose work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Rumpus, Ecotone, the Houston Chronicle, The Butter, The Literary Review, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, Columbia Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Review, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere. Her essay “Infirmary Music” was named a notable in Best American Essays 2017. She is cofounder of The Slant reading series, host of The Ish podcast, and teaches creative writing to fifth graders through Writers in the Schools. Cameron’s music has been featured on Houston Public Media KUHF, Houston Pacifica Radio KPFT, as well as the PBS television programs Skyline Sessions and Oxford Sounds. She earned her MFA from Seattle Pacific University and is at work on a memoir about religious and romantic obsessions.

  Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha, 1999). How To Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015) is his most recent collection of poems.

  Pico Iyer is the author of two novels and ten works of nonfiction, including such bestsellers as Video Night in Kathmandu (Knopf, 1988), The Lady and the Monk (Knopf, 1991), The Open Road (Knopf, 2008), and The Art of Stillness (TED Books, 2014). He has also written introductions to more than sixty other books, as well as liner notes for Leonard Cohen, a screenplay for Miramax, and words for a piece by a New Zealand chamber orchestra. Based in Nara, Japan, since 1992, he contributes regularly to the New York Times, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, and many others, and has seen his books translated into twenty-three languages. He currently serves as Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University.

  Major Jackson is the author of four collections of poetry, including Roll Deep (W. W. Norton, 2015), which won the 2016 Vermont Book Award and was hailed in the New York Times Book Review as “a remixed odyssey.” His other volumes include Holding Company (W. W. Norton, 2010), Hoops (W. W. Norton, 2006), and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Jackson has published poems and essays in the American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and in several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among other honors. He serves as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review.

  Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, activist, and is author of the memoir The Other Side (Tin House, 2014). For its frank and fearless confrontation of the epidemic of violence against women, The Other Side was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, and was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Nonfiction; it was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writer Selection for 2014, and was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus, Library Journal, and the Houston Chronicle. She is also the author of Trespasses: A Memoir (University of Iowa Press, 2012). Her third book, The Reckonings, is forthcoming from Scribner in 2018. She teaches creative nonfiction in the low-residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College and at Rice University.

  Christian Kiefer is the author of the novels The Infinite Tides (Bloomsbury, 2013) and The Animals (Liveright, 2015), and the novella One Day Soon Time Will Have No Place Left to Hide (Nouvella, 2016). He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for his short fiction and is a contributing editor at Zyzzyva and a fiction reader for VQR. Kiefer has a long second career in music, under the auspices of which he has collaborated with members of Smog, Sun Kil Moon, Wilco, Low, and the Band. He holds a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of California at Davis and is the director of the low-residency MFA at Ashland University. He lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada northeast of Sacramento, California, with his wife and family.

  Matthew Komatsu is a writer based in Anchorage, Alaska. A veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is a graduate of the University of Alaska with an MFA in nonfiction. His work has appeared online and in print in the New York Times; War, Literature & the Arts; Brevity; The Normal School, and other fine literary establishments. As he is still in uniform, he is obliged to remind the reader that his words do not represent official policy or position.

  Ilyse Kusnetz (1966–2016), poet, essayist, and journalist, is the author of Small Hours (Truman State University Press, 2014), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and The Gravity of Falling. Her next book, Angel Bones, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2019. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Orion, Rattle, Guernica Daily, Islands Magazine, and Crab Orchard Review, among others, as well as in anthologies, including The Room and the World; The Book of Scented Things; Devouring the Green: Fear of a Transhuman Planet; and Monstrous Verse: Angels, Demons, Vampires, Ghosts, and Fabulous Beasts. She also guest-edited Scottish poetry features for Poetry International and the Atlanta Review. Kusnetz taught at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, where she lived with her husband, Brian Turner. Ilyse and Brian recently collaborated on a poetic text called “Vox Humana,” which premiered with the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra.

  Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), which was named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a finalist for the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award, and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by the New York Times. Her other books include Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press, 2006), This Big Fake World (Pearl Editions, 2006), and Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010).

  Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Borrower (Penguin, 2012) and The Hundred-Year House (Penguin, 2015), and the collection Music for Wartime (Penguin, 2016)—six stories from which have appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. The recipient of a 2014 NEA Fellowship, Makkai has taught at the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently on the faculty of the MF
A programs at Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University.

  John Mauk grew up on the Ohio flatland. He has a Ph.D. in English from Bowling Green State University. His stories have appeared in a range of fine magazines such as Arts & Letters, New Millennium Writings, and Salamander. He has also contributed essays to online magazines including Writer’s Digest, Beatrice.com, Three Guys One Book, The Portland Book Review, and Rumpus. His first short collection, The Rest of Us (Michigan Writers Cooperative Press, 2012), won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press chapbook contest. His first full collection, Field Notes for the Earthbound (2014), is available from Black Lawrence Press. He currently teaches at Miami University and lives whenever possible in Traverse City, Michigan.

  Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire (White Pine Press, 1995), for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain (Random House, 2005); The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War (Milkweed Editions, 2011); and Self-Portrait with Dogwood (Trinity University Press, 2017). His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; and his honors include a Chevalier from the French government in the Order of Arts and Letters. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He serves on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, and in April 2012 President Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.

  Philip Metres is the author of Pictures at an Exhibition (University of Akron Press, 2016), Sand Opera (Alice James Books, 2015), I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2015), A Concordance of Leaves (Diode Editions, 2013), To See the Earth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2008), and others. His work has garnered a Lannan Fellowship, two NEAs, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts & Letters, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. He is a professor of English and the director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

  Kathryn Miles is the author of four books, including Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake (Dutton, 2017). Her essays and articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Best American Essays, the Boston Globe, Ecotone, the New York Times, Outside, Popular Mechanics, and Time. She currently serves as writer-in-residence for Green Mountain College.

  Dinty W. Moore is author of The Story Cure: A Book Doctor’s Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir (Ten Speed Press, 2017), the memoir Between Panic & Desire (Bison Books, 2010), and many other books. He has published essays and stories in the Southern Review, the Georgia Review, Harper’s, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Arts & Letters, The Normal School, and elsewhere. A professor of nonfiction writing at Ohio University, Moore lives in Athens, Ohio, where he grows heirloom tomatoes and edible dandelions.

  Honor Moore’s most recent book is The Bishop’s Daughter (W. W. Norton, 2009), a memoir, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year. Her most recent collection of poems is Red Shoes (W. W. Norton, 2006). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, American Scholar, Salmagundi, the New Republic, Freeman’s, and many other journals and anthologies. For the Library of America, she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems (2004) and Poems from the Women’s Movement (2009), an Oprah summer readings pick which is featured in the documentary about American feminism, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry (2014). She has been poet-in-residence at Wesleyan and the University of Richmond, visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts, and three times the Visiting Distinguished Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Moore currently lives and writes in New York, where she is on the graduate writing faculty of the New School.

  Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four collections of poems, most recently Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). Her collection of lyric nature essays is forthcoming from Milkweed. Honors include a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is poetry editor of Orion magazine and a professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.

  Bich Minh Nguyen, who also goes by Beth, is the author of three books: the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (Penguin, 2008), which received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award; the novel Short Girls (Penguin, 2010), which received an American Book Award; and most recently the novel Pioneer Girl (Penguin, 2015). Her work has been widely anthologized and featured in numerous university and community reading programs. She is a professor in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

  Téa Obreht’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife (Random House), won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and a New York Times bestseller. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire, and Zoetrope: All-Story. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She lives in New York, teaches at Hunter College, and is married to Dan Sheehan, with whom she often revives the debate outlined in their essay in this book.

  Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This (Pantheon, 2017). She is the art director and New York editor of The Believer magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.

  Suzanne Roberts is the author of the award-winning memoir Almost Somewhere (Bison Books, 2012), as well as four collections of poetry. Her work has been published in Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, and National Geographic Traveler, among others. She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada, Reno, and teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at Sierra Nevada College Tahoe and Chatham University. She lives in South Lake Tahoe.

  Roxana Robinson’s most recent novel, Sparta (Picador, 2014), was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the BBC, and was short-listed for the Dublin IMPAC Award. It won the James Webb Award from the USMCHF and the Maine PWA for Fiction. She is the author of four other other novels, Cost (Sarah Crichton, 2008), Sweetwater (Random House, 2007), This Is My Daughter (Random House, 1988), and Summer Light (Viking, 1988), as well as three story collections and a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these books were New York Times Notable Books. Robinson’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, and The Best American Short Stories, as well as the New York Times, Harper’s, Tin House, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Robinson was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, and has received fellowships from the NEA, the MacDowell Colony, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College. She lives in New York City.

  Schafer John c is a writer, actor, and fisherman. Born and raised on the north side of Chicago, where he was shot, he was a member of the Latino Chicago Theater Company and earned a degree in sociology from Illinois State University . . . after playing basketball for five different colleges. As an actor, he’s appeared in a number of films and on The Drew Carey Show, Dharma & Greg, and SeaQuest DSV. He’s played everyone from a jealous boyfriend, to a brooding sculptor, to a horny vampire. His screenplays for Bruised Orange and The Unconcerned have been produced and his short stories have appeared in Amor Fati, the Writer’s Compass, Short Story magazine, and Guernica. He’s fished in Brazil, Vietnam, the Baja, the Yucatán, and . . . northern Michigan. He lives in Virginia, where has just finished Transcend
ental Blues, a novel in three parts, and is at work on more. He can’t stop.

  Dan Sheehan is an Irish fiction writer, journalist, and editor. His writing has appeared in the Irish Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, TriQuarterly, Words Without Borders, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and numerous other publications. He lives in New York, where he is the Book Marks editor for Literary Hub and a contributing editor at Guernica magazine, and was a recipient of the 2016 Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellowship. His debut novel, Restless Souls, will be published in 2018 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK) & Ig Publishing (U.S.).

  Tom Sleigh’s many books include Station Zed (Graywolf, 2015); Army Cats (Graywolf, 2017), winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and Space Walk (Mariner, 2008), which received the Kingsley Tufts Award. In addition, Far Side of the Earth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003) won an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Dreamhouse (University of Chicago Press, 1999) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The Chain (University of Chicago Press, 1999) was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. He’s also received the PSA’s Shelley Prize, a Guggenheim, two NEAs, and many other awards. His poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, and many other magazines. In February 2018, Graywolf is publishing The Land Between Two Rivers: Poetry in an Age of Refugees, and a book of poems, House of Fact, House of Ruin. He is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and has worked as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa.