Jesse Ball is the author of fourteen books, most recently the novel How to Set a Fire and Why. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Kyle Boelte is the author of The Beautiful Unseen, a book about fading memory, his brother’s suicide, and San Francisco’s fog. His writing has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Orion Magazine, Full Stop, Adventure Journal, and High Country News. He lives on the West Coast.
Molly Brodak is the author of A Little Middle of the Night, winner of the 2009 Iowa Poetry Prize, and three chapbooks of poetry. She held the 2011-2013 Poetry Fellowship at Emory University and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Endnotes is a journal of communist theory published by a discussion group of the same name based in Germany, the U.K., and the US.
Kendra Fortmeyer is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer, a teen librarian, and the prose editor for Broad!, an all-women’s and trans writers’ literary magazine. Her work has been recognized by grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Michener Center for Writers, and has appeared in One Story, The Toast, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in fiction from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. She is the author of the chapbook The Girl Who Could Only Say sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2017.
Mark Hitz was born and raised in Idaho. He spent ten years recording sound for documentary and reality television, and was a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, where he won the 2014 Keene Prize for Literature. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Mateo Hoke and Cate Malek began working together in 2001, while studying journalism at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Their interest in human rights journalism began on a project in which they spent eight months interviewing undocumented Mexican immigrants about their daily lives. From 2009 until 2015, Cate lived in the West Bank, where she worked as an editor and taught English at Bethlehem University. She previously worked as a newspaper reporter, receiving multiple Colorado Press Association awards. Mateo holds a master’s degree from the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In addition to his work in the Middle East, he has reported from the Amazon jungle and the Seychelles. His writing has received awards from the Overseas Press Club Foundation and the Knight Foundation, among others.
Dan Hoy is the author of The Deathbed Editions (Octopus Books, 2016) and several poetry chapbooks, including Omegachurch (Solar Luxuriance, 2010) and Glory Hole (Mal-O- Mar Editions, 2009). His work has been featured in Triple Canopy, Action Yes, Novembre Magazine, Jubilat, and other magazines and anthologies.
Laurel Hunt is an MFA candidate at the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in Pleiades; Forklift, Ohio; Salt Hill; Diagram; and elsewhere.
Gary Indiana is a writer, playwright, filmmaker, and artist. He is the author of seven novels, including Do Everything in the Dark and The Shanghai Gesture, as well as several plays, collections of poetry and nonfiction, and essays in publications from Art in America to Vice. His most recent publication is the memoir I Can Give You Anything But Love.
N. R. “Sonny” Kleinfield is a reporter at the New York Times, where he is a member of the Metro department’s investigations and projects team. His story on the death of George Bell was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. He has also received the Polk Award, the Meyer Berger Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. He is the author of eight nonfiction books, and has written for Harper’s, the Atlantic, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine.
Anna Kovatcheva was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and holds an MFA in fiction writing from New York University. Her novella, The White Swallow, was selected by Aimee Bender as the winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition. Her stories have appeared in the Kenyon Review and the Iowa Review. She lives in New York City.
Sharon Lerner covers health and the environment for The Intercept. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, and the Washington Post, among other publications, and has received awards from The Society for Environmental Journalists, The American Public Health Association, the Women and Politics Institute, and The Newswomen’s Club of New York.
Jason Little is the author of Borb, Shutterbug Follies, and Motel Art Improvement Service. His work-in-progess, The Vagina, is currently being serialized in the French magazine Aaarg! Jason teaches cartooning at the School of Visual Arts.
Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the story collection Music for Wartime, as well as the novels The Hundred-Year House and The Borrower. Her short fiction was featured in The Best American Short Stories anthology in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011, and appears regularly in publications such as Harper’s, Tin House, and Ploughshares, and on public radio’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. The recipient of a 2014 NEA Fellowship, Rebecca has taught at the Tin House Writers’ Conference, Northwestern University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Anthony Marra is the author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. “The Grozny Tourist Bureau first appeared in Zoetrope, where it received the National Magazine Award for Fiction.
Michael Pollan is author of five New York Times bestsellers: The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, The Botany of Desire, In Defense of Food, Food Rules, and, mostly recently, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. In 2010 he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. Pollan served for many years as executive editor of Harper’s Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Bel-zer, and their son, Isaac.
Da’Shay Portis is completing her MFA at San Francisco State University.
Ariana Reines is the author of The Cow, Coeur de Lion, Mercury, and the Obie-wining play Telephone. Her translations include Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by Tiqqun and The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal by Jean-Luc Hennig. Her artworks, performances, and collaborations appear internationally, including Mortal Kombat at the Whitney Museum and Pubic Space at Modern Art, London.
Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama. She is the author of Lila, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Robinson’s nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She lives in Iowa City, where she taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop for twenty-five years.
Yuko Sakata’s stories have appeared in the Missouri Review, Zoetrope, the Iowa Review, and Vice. Born in New York, she grew up in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and she has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She currently lives in Queens with her husband and young daughter.
sam sax is a 2015 NEA Fellow and finalist for The Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He’s a Poetry Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, where he serves as the editor-in-chief of Bat City Review. He’s the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion and author of the chapbooks A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters (Button Poetry, 2014), sad boy / detective (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), and All The Rage (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016). His poems are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Guernica, and Poetry Magazine. He’s the winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award.
Michele Scott is a writer who gardens passionately, and is involved in many peer education, restorative justice, victim impact, and spiritual groups at the Central California Women’s Facility, where she is serving a life sentence without eligibility for parole.
Dana Spiotta is the author of four novels: Innocents and Others (2016), from which “Jelly and Jack" was excerpted; Stone Arabia (2011), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in fiction; Eat the Document (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and Lightning Field (2001). She lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.
Adrian Tomine was born in 1974 in Sacramento, California. He is the writer/artist of the comic book series Optic Nerve, as well as the books Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Summer Blonde, Scenes from an Impending Marriage, Shortcomings, and New York Drawings. His comics and illustrations have appeared in the New York Times, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review, and he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His most recent book, published by Drawn & Quarterly, is Killing and Dying.
Inara Verzemnieks teaches in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her writing has appeared in such publications as the New York Times Magazine, the Iowa Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Tin House. She is a Pushcart Prize winner, the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and in her previous life as a daily newspaper reporter, she was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. Her first book, a memoir, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.
David Wagoner was born in Ohio and raised in Indiana. Before moving to Washington in 1954, Wagoner attended Pennsylvania State University, where he was a member of the Naval ROTC, and received an MA in English from Indiana University. Wagoner was selected to serve as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978, replacing Robert Lowell, and he served as the editor of Poetry Northwest until its last issue in 2002. Known for his dedication to teaching, he was named a professor emeritus at the University of Washington.
Xuan Juliana Wang was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her short stories been published by the Altantic, Ploughshares, The Brooklyn Rail, Gigantic, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Born in Jiamusi, China, she resides in New York City.