Originally from Cape Town, South Africa, Henk Rossouw’s book-length poem Xamissa won the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize and will be published in Fall 2018 by Fordham University Press. Best American Experimental Writing 2018 (Wesleyan University Press) features an excerpt. His chapbook Xamissa: The Water Archives is part of the boxset New-Generation African Poets: Tano (Akashic Books/African Poetry Book Fund), along with the work of ten other writers connected to the continent. His poems have come out in The Paris Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Boston Review. He holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a PhD from the University of Houston. Currently, Henk is a visiting assistant professor in the University of Houston’s Honors College and an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly.
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of the forthcoming novel House of Stone (Atlantic Books, UK, June 2018, W. W. Norton, USA, January 2019). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2015), where she was a recipient of the Maytag and TWF Fellowships, as well as a Rydson Award, she is a native of Zimbabwe, has lived in South Africa and the USA, and is a recipient of the Inprint Fondren Foundation/Michael and Nina Zilkha Fellowship at the UH Creative Writing Program. Shadows, her short story collection, was published to critical acclaim by Kwela in South Africa (2013) and awarded the 2014 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. Novuyo has received writing residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation’s prestigious Bellagio Programme and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She has work forthcoming in McSweeney’s (Issue 52, March 2018) and The Displaced (Abrams Press, April 2018), an anthology edited by the Pulitzer Prize winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. Novuyo serves on the Editorial Advisory Board and is a Fiction Editor at The Bare Life Review, a journal of refugee and immigrant literature.