MARCIA ALDRICH is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W. W. Norton and part of the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Series. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Her book Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in The Best American Essays. She is at work on Haze, a narrative of marriage and divorce during her college years. Her website is MarciaAldrich.com.
ROBERT ATWAN is the founder and series editor of The Best American Essays. The 2016 volume, the thirty-first in the series, is guest-edited by Jonathan Franzen. Atwan has published on a wide variety of subjects, from American advertising, early photography, and political discourse to dreams and divination in the ancient world, Hollywood memoirs, and Shakespearean drama. His criticism, essays, humor, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous periodicals nationwide. He lives in New York City. His personal account for Essay Daily of how The Best American Essays series got started can be found at http://www.essaydaily.org/2015/12/robert-atwan-best-american-essays-some.html.
AMY BENSON is the author of Seven Years to Zero, winner of the 2016 Dzanc Books Nonfiction Prize, and The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, winner of the 2003 Bakeless Prize in Nonfiction. Recent work has appeared in journals such as AGNI, BOMB, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, and New England Review. She teaches creative writing at Rhodes College in Memphis and is the co-founder of the First Person Plural Harlem Reading Series.
CHELSEA BIONDOLILLO is the author of the prose chapbooks Ologies and #Lovesong. Her essays are collected in The Best American Science and Nature Essays 2016 and Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women and have appeared in Orion, Passages North, River Teeth, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and others. She has a dual MFA in creative writing and environmental studies from the University of Wyoming and keeps a journal at RoamingCowgirl.com.
KEN CHEN is the 2009 recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, the oldest annual literary award in the United States, for his debut poetry collection Juvenilia. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ conference, Ken is the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and one of the founders of CultureStrike, a national artist movement on immigration.
STEVEN CHURCH is the author of The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record, Theoretical Killings: Essays and Accidents, The Day After the Day After: My Atomic Angst, and a collection of essays, Ultrasonic. A fifth book of nonfiction, One with the Tiger: On Savagery and Intimacy was released by Soft Skull Press in November 2016. His work has been published in Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Brevity, AGNI, the Rumpus, Salon.com, Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments, and others. He is a founding editor and nonfiction editor for the Normal School and teaches in the MFA program at Fresno State.
MEEHAN CRIST is writer-in-residence in biological sciences at Columbia University. Previously, she was editor-at-large at Nautilus and reviews editor at the Believer, and her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Tin House, Lapham’s Quarterly, New Republic, the Believer, Nautilus, Scientific American, and Science. Awards include the 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, as well as fellowships from MacDowell, the Blue Mountain Center, Ucross, and Yaddo.
JOHN D’AGATA is the author of About a Mountain, Halls of Fame, and The Lifespan of a Fact and the editor of the three-volume series, A New History of the Essay. He directs the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa.
ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING is the author, most recently, of Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit and a book of poems, Stairway to Heaven. She is Agnese Nelms Haury Chair of Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona and a 2015 Guggenheim fellow.
EMILY DEPRANG is a writer and investigative journalist in Austin. Her work has appeared in several outlets, including the Atlantic, Marie Claire, and VICE, and has been honored by the American Society of Magazine Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, Media Consortium, and the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, among others. She is working on a novel about radiation.
DANIELLE CADENA DEULEN is the author of three books: Lovely Asunder, which won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award; The Riots, which won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award; and Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, which won the Barrow Street Book Contest in poetry. She has been the recipient of a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. She lives in Salem, Oregon, where she teaches creative writing at Willamette University.
CÉSAR DÍAZ is a writer living in Austin, Texas. He teaches creative nonfiction at St. Edward’s University. His essays and other think pieces have been published in Guernica and Essay Daily. He is also writing a memoir about his experiences as a migrant farmworker.
BRIAN DOYLE is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. He is the author of many books of essays, “proems,” and fiction, most recently the novels Martin Marten and Chicago.
MATT DUBE’s family finally got a VCR on January 28, 1986, the day the Challenger shuttle exploded. It was the first major purchase after his father left, and actually, they leased it from Rent-A-Center’s downtown Worcester Store. In that massive media showroom, disaster occupied every screen, in every degree of fidelity. If it was too big, find a smaller TV. If it was too loud, find a TV whose captions replaced sound: there were no words on the screen that the image didn’t communicate more clearly. It’s luck his brother didn’t choose to record that instead of Repo Man.
T CLUTCH FLEISCHMANN is the author of Syzygy, Beauty (Sarabande), the curator of the digital chapbook Body Logic for Essay Press, and a nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM. Clutch is currently an emerging-writer-in-residence at Columbia College in Chicago and can be reached at tee.fleischmann@gmail.com.
V. V. GANESHANANTHAN teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at the University of Minnesota. Her debut novel, Love Marriage (Random House), was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2008. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, she is at work on a second novel, excerpts of which have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014.
ALBERT GOLDBARTH has been publishing notable books of poetry for over four decades, two of which have received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has published five collections of essays, most recently The Adventures of Form and Content, published by Graywolf Press in January 2017. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, completely offline: his fingers have never touched a computer/tablet/laptop keyboard.
RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose and the editor of Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and the winner of the American Book Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is a contributing editor for Poets & Writers magazine and is a professor of English at Rutgers–Newark, the State University of New Jersey.
PETER GRANDBOIS is the author of seven previous books, including most recently, The Girl on the Swing (Wordcraft of Oregon 2015). His work has previously appeared in such journals as the Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, and DIAGRAM, among many others, and has been short-listed for both The Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is a senior editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio.
ROBIN HEMLEY is the author of eleven books of nonfiction and fiction and the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and many other awards for his prose. From 2004–13 he was the director of the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa, and he is the founder of the biennial conference NonfictioNOW. A contributing editor of the Iowa Review, he currently directs the writing program and is writer-in-residence at Yale-NUS in Singapore and is a visiting professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
PAM HOUSTON is the author of five books of fiction and nonfiction including Contents May Have Shifted, Waltzing the Cat, and Cowboys Are My Weakness. Her work has been widely anthologized, appearing, among other places, in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize anthology series, and The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She teaches in many different venues around the country and the world, is the director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers, and lives in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
MAYA L. KAPOOR’S work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Terrain.org, ISLE, The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide, and Edible Baja. Prior to completing an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona, she received a master’s degree in biology from Arizona State University. She currently lives in Tucson, where she writes about ecology, the environment, and underappreciated desert species.
MEGAN KIMBLE is the editor of Edible Baja Arizona, a local food magazine serving Tucson and the borderlands. She is the author of Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food. Her work has been anthologized in Best Food Writing 2015 and Coming of Age at the End of Nature.
JULIE LAUTERBACH-COLBY lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she serves as deputy director for the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona. A graduate of the University of Arizona MFA program in nonfiction, her work has appeared in CutBank, DIAGRAM, Lost Magazine, and Small Po[r]tions, among others.
DAVID LEGAULT’s first collection of essays, One Million Maniacs, will be published by Outpost 19 in June of 2017. His other recent work appears in Passages North, the Sonora Review, and Continue? The Boss Fight Books Anthology of Video Game Writing. He lives and writes from Prague in the Czech Republic. More information and writing can be found at www.davidlegault.com
PAUL LISICKY is the author of five books: The Narrow Door, a New York Times Editor’s Choice; Unbuilt Projects; The Burning House; Famous Builder; and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in Tin House, Conjunctions, Fence, Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, the Offing, and other magazines and anthologies. A 2016 Guggenheim fellow, he teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University–Camden and at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. He divides his time between New York, Provincetown, and Philadelphia.
PHILLIP LOPATE’S most recent books are Portrait Inside My Head (the fourth collection of his personal essays) and To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. He directs and teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.
PATRICK MADDEN, author of Sublime Physick (University of Nebraska Press 2016) and Quotidiana (University of Nebraska Press 2010), teaches creative nonfiction at Brigham Young University. His essays have appeared in the Iowa Review, Portland Magazine, Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, and other journals, as well as in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. He coedited After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays (Georgia 2015) and cotranslated Eduardo Milán’s Selected Poems (Shearsman 2012). He maintains an anthology of classical essays and essay resources at http://quotidiana.org.
BETHANY MAILE received an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona. Her essays have appeared in some places, including the Normal School, Prairie Schooner, and River Teeth. She lives in Alaska with her husband and baby and teaches creative writing at the University of Alaska.
LUCAS MANN is the author of Lord Fear: A Memoir and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere. His essays have appeared in the Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Guernica, BuzzFeed, Slate, and elsewhere. He earned his MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, where he was the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction, and is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
THOMAS MIRA Y LOPEZ’s essays appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, the Georgia Review, the Normal School, and Seneca Review, among others. He holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Arizona and is an editor for Territory, a literary project about maps and other strange objects. He’s at work on his first book, an essay collection on resting places.
DAVE MONDY has been lauded for work in many genres: food writing (Best Food Writing 2014), travel writing (four National Solas Awards), sports writing (2014 Iowa Review Awards), memoir (Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, NPR), and live storytelling (national tours of solo theatrical shows); he’s recently served as Randolph College writer-in-residence and the New York Mills artist-in-residence. In addition to literary magazines, you can find his writing at prominent online sites (like Slate), and he’s also penned work for many public radio programs (like A Prairie Home Companion). He’s currently working on a book about the stories and real people behind famous sports photos.
DANICA NOVGORODOFF is an artist, writer, and horse wrangler from Kentucky who currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her graphic novels include The Undertaking of Lily Chen (First Second Books 2014), Refresh, Refresh (First Second Books 2009), Slow Storm (First Second Books 2008), and A Late Freeze. Her art and writing has been published in The Best American Comics, Esquire, Slate, Orion, Seneca Review, Ecotone Journal, and many others. She is a 2015 fellow in literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
BRIAN OLIU is originally from New Jersey and currently teaches at the University of Alabama. He is the author of three full-length collections, So You Know It’s Me (Tiny Hardcore Press 2011), a series of Craigslist missed connections; Leave Luck to Heaven (Uncanny Valley Press 2014), an ode to eight-bit video games; and Enter Your Initials for Record Keeping (Cobalt Press 2015), essays on NBA Jam. He is also the author of i/o (Civil Coping Mechanisms 2015), a memoir in the form of a computer virus. His works-in-progress deal with professional wrestling and long-distance running (not at once).
ELENA PASSARELLO is the author of the essay collections Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses, both with Sarabande Books. The winner of the 2015 Whiting Award in nonfiction, she teaches in the MFA program at Oregon State University and is a-Twitter as @elenavox.
JOHN T. PRICE is the author of three nature memoirs—Daddy Long Legs: The Natural Education of a Father (Shambhala 2013), Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinships (Da Capo 2008), and Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands (University of Nebraska Press 2004)—and the editor of The Tallgrass Prairie Reader (University of Iowa Press 2014). A recipient of an NEA fellowship and other recognitions, he teaches at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he directs the English Department’s creative nonfiction writing program.
KRISTEN RADTKE is the author of the graphic memoir Imagine Wanting Only This (Pantheon 2017). She is the managing editor of Sarabande Books and the film and video editor of TriQuarterly magazine. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing program and lives in New York.
BONNIE J. ROUGH is the author of The Girls, Alone: Six Days in Estonia, selected by Amazon editors as one of the Best Kindle Singles of 2015, and the memoir Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA (Counterpoint 2010), and she is the winner of a Minnesota Book Award. Her essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Iowa Review, Florida Review, Brevity, and Brain, Child. Recent anthologies featuring her work include I’ll Tell You Mine: Thirty Years of Essays from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program (University of Chicago Press 2015) and Because You Asked: A Book of Answers on the Art and Craft of the Writing Life (Lost Horse Press 2015).
AISHA SABATINI SLOAN is the author of the essay collection The Fluency of Light (University of Iowa Press 2013). Her nonfiction has appeared in journals such as Callaloo, Ninth Letter, Guernica, Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sierra Nevada Review, the Offing, and Ecotone. A contributing editor for Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics and a staff writer for Autostraddle, her essays have been named notable by The Best American Essays and The Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her most recent book of essays, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, won the 1913 Open Prose Book contest judged by Maggie Nelson and will be published in 2017.
KATHERINE E. STANDEFER won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. Her recent work appears in The Best American Essays 2016 (edited by Jonathan Franzen), the Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, CutBank, Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments, and the High Country News, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She writes about the body, consent, and medical technology from Tucson, where she earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona. She teaches intimate classes that help people write their experiences of sexuality, illness, and trauma and lectures at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine in a narrative medicine pilot. Follow her @girlmakesfire.
JONI TEVIS is the author of two books of essays, The Wet Collection: A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory and The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse, both published by Milkweed Editions. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. She serves as the Bennette E. Geer Professor of Literature at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.
RYAN VAN METER is the author of the essay collection If You Knew Then What I Know Now, published by Sarabande Books. His work has appeared in journals and magazines and has been selected for anthologies, including The Best American Essays and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. He lives in California, where he teaches at the University of San Francisco.
PATRICIA VIGDERMAN is the author of The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner and Possibility: Essays against Despair, both from Sarabande Books. Her new book, The Real Life of the Parthenon, is forthcoming from Ohio State University Press. Her writing has appeared in the Boston Review, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, the Nation, New York Times, Raritan Quarterly, Seneca Review, Southwest Review, and other places. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches at Kenyon College.
NICOLE WALKER is the author of Egg from Bloomsbury, Canning Peaches for the Apocalypse from Atticus Press, Micrograms from New Michigan Press, and Quench Your Thirst with Salt, which won the Zone 3 Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the author of a collection of poems, This Noisy Egg from Barrow Street Press, and is a coeditor, with Margot Singer, of Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction from Bloomsbury and, with Rebecca Campbell, “7 Artists, 7 Rings: An Artist’s Game of Telephone” for the Huffington Post. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM and an associate professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, where it rains like the Pacific Northwest, but only in July.
ERIN ZWIENER is at work on a memoir about mules, the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail, and the legacy of women in the American West. Her essays have previously appeared in the Butter and the blog VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Erin is also the author of the children’s picture book Little Red Riding Boots and the forthcoming Snow White and the Seven Burros. She was the 2015 Pattie Layser Writer-in-Residence at the Murie Center in Grand Teton National Park.