J. A. Bernstein’s works include Rachel’s Tomb (New Issues, A.W.P. Award Series Novel Prize, 2019); Desert Castles (Southern Indiana Review Press, Wilhelmus Prize, 2019); Northern Cowboy (Green Rabbit Press, Wilt Prize, 2021); Glass Essays (Variant, 2023); and a forthcoming memoir, Afterlight (Galileo, 2024). His stories, poems, and creative nonfiction have appeared in about a hundred journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Washington Square, The Threepenny Review, Boston Review, CutBank, Northwest Review, and Notre Dame Review. He has also published academic articles in The Conradian, Western American Literature, and other volumes, and won the Harkness Young Conrad Scholar Award from the Joseph Conrad Society of America. A Chicago-native and former Fulbright Scholar, he studied Middle Eastern History and Arabic at Brown University and completed a Ph.D. in the Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California. The Director of Graduate Studies in English and an associate professor in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, he is the fiction editor of Tikkun, as well as a contributing editor at Mississippi Review.