ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

GABRIELLE BELLOT is a staff writer for Literary Hub. She grew up in the Commonwealth of Dominica. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Shondaland, Guernica, Slate, Tin House, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Cut, Vice, Electric Literature, The Normal School, The Toast, TOR.com, Caribbean Review of Books, Small Axe, Autostraddle, and many other places. She is the recipient of the 2016 Poynter Fellowship from Yale and also holds a Legacy Fellowship from Florida State University. Bellot holds both an MFA (2012) and a PhD (2017) in Fiction from Florida State University, and currently teaches classes at Catapult and Gotham Writers Workshop.

NICKOLAS BUTLER is the internationally bestselling and prize-winning author of Shotgun Lovesongs, Beneath the Bonfire, The Hearts of Men, Little Faith, and Godspeed. His work has been translated into more than ten languages and won or been shortlisted for some of France’s most prestigious literary prizes. His journalism, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many publications, such as Ploughshares, Narrative, and The New York Times Book Review to name a few; he also writes a regular column for his local newspaper. Butler lives with his wife and their two children just south of his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on sixteen acres of land adjacent to a buffalo farm.

OMAR EL AKKAD was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. His fiction and nonfiction writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international best seller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Oregon Book Award for Fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. His second novel, What Strange Paradise, was published in 2021 by Knopf.

DELIA FALCONER is the author of two novels, The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers. Her 2010 nonfiction work, Sydney, a personal history of her hometown, won the CAL Waverley Library Award for Literature and was shortlisted for other major national prizes including the New South Wales Premier’s History and National Biography awards. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at University of Technology, Sydney. In 2018 her essay for the Sydney Review of Books, “The Opposite of Glamour,” won the Walkley-Pascall Award for Arts Criticism.

MELISSA FEBOS is the author of the memoir Whip Smart and two essay collections: Abandon Me, a Lambda Literary Award finalist and Publishing Triangle Award finalist, and Girlhood, a national best seller, which was released on March 30, 2021. Catapult will publish a collection of her craft essays, Body Work, in March 2022. The inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from Lambda Literary and the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the BAU Institute, Vermont Studio Center, the Barbara Deming Foundation, and others, her essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Granta, Tin House, The Sun, and The New York Times. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa.

MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR is the co-host and co-creator of the Hot Take newsletter and podcast and a climate justice essayist. Her essays about race and climate change have appeared in Vox, Dame, and other places. She holds a BA in English from Oberlin College and a certificate in editing from New York University.

LACY M. JOHNSON is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and author of the essay collection The Reckonings, the memoir The Other Side—both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists—and the memoir Trespasses. Her writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Travel Writing, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Guernica, and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the founding director of the Houston Flood Museum. In 2020 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for General Nonfiction.

POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR is the author of the memoir SICK, the essay collection The Brown Album, and the novels Tehrangeles, The Last Illusion, and Sons and Other Flammable Objects. Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Elle, Bookforum, VQR, and many other publications.

ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN is the author of the novels Something New Under the Sun and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, as well as Intimations, a story collection. The winner of a Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, and the Bard Fiction Prize, her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and n+1, among other publications. She is an assistant professor at the New School and lives on Staten Island.

LYDIA MILLET has written more than a dozen novels and story collections, often about the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction. Her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. Her latest novel, A Children’s Bible, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and one of The New York Times Book Review’s Top 10 Books of 2020.

TRACY O’NEILL is the author of The Hopeful, one of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2015, and Quotients, a New York Times New & Noteworthy Book, TOR Editor’s Choice, and Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan Prize, and was a Narrative Under 30 finalist. In 2012, she was awarded the Center for Fiction’s Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her short fiction was distinguished in the Best American Short Stories 2016 and earned a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2017. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Literary Hub, BOMB, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Believer, The Literarian, The Austin Chronicle, New World Writing, Narrative, Scoundrel Time, Guernica, Bookforum, Electric Literature, Grantland, Vice, The Guardian, VQR, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Catapult. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York and an MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University. While editor-in-chief of the literary journal Epiphany, she established the Breakout 8 Writers Prize with the Authors Guild. She currently teaches at Vassar College.

EMILY RABOTEAU’s books are The Professor’s Daughter and Searching for Zion, winner of an American Book Award. Her next book, Caution: Lessons in Survival, is forthcoming from Holt. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Raboteau teaches creative writing at the City College of New York in Harlem.

RACHEL RIEDERER is a writer from Kansas City, focusing on science, culture, and climate. She is a member of the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON is an American science fiction writer. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the international best-selling Mars trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, and 2312, which was a New York Times best seller nominated for all seven of the major science fiction awards—a first for any book. In 2008 he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and UC San Diego’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. His latest novel is called Ministry for the Future.

ELIZABETH RUSH is the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a 2019 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, and Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar. Her writing has been supported by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and other organizations. She is currently at work on a book about motherhood and Antarctica’s diminishing glaciers. She lives in Providence, where she teaches at Brown University.

MEERA SUBRAMANIAN is an award-winning journalist who has explored the disappearance of India’s vultures, questioned the “Good Anthropocene,” and investigated perceptions of climate change among conservative Americans. She is a contributing editor of Orion, and former MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow and Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University. Her narrative nonfiction book, A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, was a 2016 Orion Book Award finalist. You can find her at www.meerasub.org.

PITCHAYA SUDBANTHAD is the author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain. The novel, published by Riverhead Books (U.S.) and Sceptre (U.K.), was selected as a notable book of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. He has received fellowships in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts and MacDowell, and currently splits time between Bangkok and Brooklyn.

TERESE SVOBODA is a Guggenheim fellow and the author of nineteen books, most recently Theatrix: Poetry Plays. She has won the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an NEH grant for translation, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation prize for video, the O. Henry award for the short story, a Bobst prize for the novel, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. She is a three-time winner of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and has been awarded Headlands, James Merrill, Hawthornden, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Bellagio residencies. Her opera, WET, premiered at L.A.’s REDCAT Theater in Disney Hall.

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH is the national best-selling author of the novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award’s Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader’s Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories of Violence. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader’s Choice. The Misfit’s Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books. Her new collection of fiction, Verge, was published by Riverhead Books in February 2020. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband, Andy Mingo, and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.