Editors’ Note

Jamie Lyn Smith is a writer, editor, and teacher. She earned her BA in English and Theater from Kenyon College, her MA in Education from Fordham University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University. Smith reads fiction for The Kenyon Review and is a founding member of BreakBread Literacy Project, former fiction editor at BreakBread Magazine, and the founding editor of Bridge. Her work has appeared in The Pinch, Mississippi Review, The Kenyon Review, American Literary Review, Yemassee Journal, Bayou Magazine, Ploughshares, and other fine literary maga-zines. Her debut short story collection, Township, was published by Cornerstone Press in January 2022. She is currently writing Lifeguards, a novel about millennial crises and the rise of white nationalism in the rural Midwest, for which she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Smith lives in Ohio, but New York will always be home.

Brian Michael Murphy is associate professor of American Studies at Williams College and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. His book We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World (University of North Carolina Press, 2022) received the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association, and his writing has appeared in the The Wall Street Journal, The Kenyon Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, Narrative, and in Italian translation in Ácoma, among other places. A Fulbright Scholar, Murphy also has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council.

Andrew Grace taught at Stanford University, Washington University, and the University of Cincinnati before recently joining the Department of English at Kenyon. His books of poetry include A Belonging Field (Salt Publishing, 2002), Shadeland (The Ohio State University Press, 2008), and Sancta (Ahsahta Press, 2012). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, and Prairie Schooner. Grace was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford and is the winner of an Academy of American Poets prize.