STACY MATTINGLY is a U.S. writer and the founder of the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop, a bilingual group of poets and prose writers in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has been leading the workshop since 2012. Stacy holds an MFA in fiction from Boston University, where she was a Marcia Trimble Fellow, a Leslie Epstein Global Fellow, and recipient of the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award. She has worked as a collaborative writer for people in the news on books including, with Ashley Smith, the New York Times bestseller Unlikely Angel, which recounts an Atlanta hostage story now being made into a feature film starring Kate Mara (House of Cards) and David Oyelowo (Selma). Stacy has taught creative writing at Boston University and is slated to teach for Boston’s Grub Street. She is currently writer-in-residence at the Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and has just completed a first novel, set in the Balkans.

ELIZABETH D. HERMAN is a Boston-born researcher and journalist currently pursuing a PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She spent 2011 in Bangladesh as a Fulbright Fellow, researching how politics influence the writing of national histories in textbooks. Upon returning to the U.S., she worked for a number of national and international news outlets, based in New York and reporting from both home and abroad. For the past four years she has been working on A Woman’s War, an oral history and documentary photography project examining the lives of women who have served in conflict worldwide, taking the work to six countries on four continents. Elizabeth has also served as a journalism and documentary filmmaking instructor at NuVu Studios, teaching intensive, hands-on workshops to middle school and high school students. Elizabeth graduated from Tufts University with a BA in Political Science and Economics in 2010. While at Tufts she received Highest Thesis Honors in Political Science for her research on representations of 9/11 in history textbooks worldwide. She currently serves on the Student Advisory Board of Tufts Institute for Global Leadership’s new Program for Narrative & Documentary Practice, founded and directed by Gary Knight. Her research and photography have been featured in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, Newsweek Japan, GlobalPost, NPR, Jezebel, and The Daily Beast, among others.

MIRZA PURIĆ is a literary translator working from and into German, English, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. He has translated novels, stories, essays, and poems by Nathan Englander, George Orwell, Michael Köhlmeier, Miodrag Stanisavljević, Rabih Alameddine, Chris Abani, Faruk Šehić, Darko Cvijetić, and many others. He serves as an editor-at-large at Asymptote, translates for the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop, and plays Bass VI and baritone guitar in Gudron.

MARIELA MATOS SMITH was born in Caracas in 1986. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and in Mass Communication – Audiovisual Arts – from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB). She is a professor of Introduction to Communication Studies, Communication Theories, Semiotics, and Image Theory at the School of Mass Communication (UCAB, Caracas). She is also a researcher in the field of Urban imaginary at the Research Center of Communication (CIC-UCAB). Mariela is part of the Editorial Committee of Revista Comunicación (Communication Magazine) at Gumilla Center and part of the editorial coordination, composition, and layout of Revista Temas de Comunicación (Communication Issues Journal) at UCAB. She has attended national and international congresses as a speaker. 

DANIEL ARTURO NARVÁEZ (Caracas, 1981) is a Venezuelan translator/language instructor currently residing in Toronto, Canada. He graduated with a BA in Translation and Interpreting from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), where he studied French and German. His graduation thesis, a Spanish translation of selected works by German philosopher Hans Jonas, has been used as reading material in the UCV’s School of Philosophy. As a freelance translator, he has done extensive work in the technical and corporate fields since 2005. For the past few years, Daniel has been collaborating with Venezuelan author and close friend Hensli Rahn in the translation of Hensli’s prose into English, focusing on his short stories. Daniel has taught languages for several years and holds a TESL certificate from George Brown College (Toronto). Through this institution, he participated as instructor in an English summer camp at the Chongqing Foreign Languages School (China) in 2012; he was the only non-Canadian applicant selected by the college. 

BEVERLY PÉREZ REGO is the author of five volumes of poetry, Artes del vidrio (1992), Libro de cetrería (1994), Providencia (1998), Grimorio (2002) and Escurana (2004), collected in 2006 as Poesía reunida by Monte Avila Editores Latinoamericana. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, and she has also published translations of Anne Waldman, Nathalie Handal, Louise Glück and Mark Strand. She received the Rafael Bolívar Coronado Biennial Literary Prize in Poetry and the Elías David Curiel Poetry Award. In 2010, she was a Fellow at the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa. A native of Venezuela and based in Caracas, she is currently living in Iowa City.

SUSANNAH SHIVE is the Distance Learning Coordinator at the IWP and a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston | Tufts University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Before joining the International Writing Program, she taught fiction writing and creative writing at the University of Iowa. Her professional background includes Marketing Management and Research Knowledge Management for Higher Education as an Associate at Perkins+Will.

SKYLAR ALEXANDER is the Distance Learning Assistant at the IWP, the Editorial Director of the Midwest Writing Center's Young Emerging Writers Program, an active volunteer at the Iowa Youth Writing Project, and a freelance book designer.