Latifa Ayad is a Libyan American writer who was born and raised in Sarasota, Florida. She is a MacDowell Fellow, and the 2017 winner of the Master’s Review/PEN America Flash Fiction Prize and the Indiana Review 1/2K Prize. Her work has been published in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and others. She currently resides in Columbus, Ohio, where she is at work on her first novel.
Renée Branum currently lives in Cincinnati, where she is pursuing a PhD in fiction. She holds MFAs from the University of Montana (in creative nonfiction) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (in fiction). Renée’s fiction has appeared in Blackbird, The Georgia Review, Tampa Review, Narrative Magazine, and Alaska Quarterly Review.
Sylvia Chan is a poet from Hayward, California. Formerly a jazz pianist in the San Francisco East Bay, she teaches in the writing program at the University of Arizona and serves as nonfiction editor for Entropy and court advocate for foster kids in Pima County. Her debut poetry collection is We Remain Traditional (Center for Literary Publishing, 2018).
Andrea Long Chu is an essayist and critic living in Brooklyn. Her writing has been published in n+1, Boston Review, New York, Bookforum, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into several languages. Her first book, Females (Verso, 2019), is out now.
Keith Donnell Jr. received his MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and his MA in English from the University of Southern California. His work has appeared in journals, including Redivider, New American Writing, Lumina, and Puerto del Sol’s Black Voices Series. He was the 2017–2018 editor in chief of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review.
David Drury lives in Seattle. He has been kicked out of so many casinos he briefly earned the distinction “Most Notorious Card Counter in America.” He earned a master’s degree in Christian studies from Regent College, University of British Columbia. He also appeared in a rock-and-roll feature film set in Tokyo, which several people have seen and which made Dave Matthews cry. His fiction can be found at daviddruryauthor.com.
Angela Garbes is the author of Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy, which was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times and New York Magazine’s The Cut, and was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air. She lives in Seattle with her husband and daughters and was a staff writer at the city’s newsweekly The Stranger.
Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War (YesYes Books, 2020), which won the Pamet River Prize. Her poems have recently appeared in Pleiades, 32 Poems, Passages North, and Blackbird, among others. She is a recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as well as the winner of The Pinch’s 2017 Literary Award in poetry. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska.
Devin Gordon is contributing writer for a number of publications, including the New York Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, GQ, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. He is working on a book about the Mets and the fine art of being terrible, due out in summer 2020 (HarperCollins). Gordon lives in New York City with his wife, two kids, and their dog.
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards. A new book of fiction, Cleanness, is forthcoming from FSG in early 2020. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE. He lives in Iowa City.
Mikko Harvey is the author of Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit (House of Anansi, 2018). He received a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from Ohio State University, and he currently lives in Ithaca, New York.
In September 2018, friends of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s Holton Arms Class of 1984 leapt to her defense. Samantha Semerad Guerry and Virginia White wrote and spearheaded the class letter to attest to Dr. Ford’s character and to urge Congress to give serious consideration to her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Ms. Guerry also served as the class spokeswoman in major national and international media to protect and amplify not only Dr. Ford’s story but also the voices of women across the country as they collectively broke their silence about sexual violence and trauma.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling is a Vermont-based writer whose nationally recognized long-form journalism has appeared in Popular Science, Foreign Policy, USA Today, and the Weather Channel, among others. He is a recipient of the George Polk Award, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a Maine Journalist of the Year. His investigative work led to national reforms of the federal Section 8 housing program. His first book, Bearing Arms, is due out in 2020.
Matt Huynh is a Sydney-born, New York-based visual artist and storyteller. His bold brush-and-ink paintings are informed by calligraphic Eastern sumi-e ink traditions, the mechanical reproduction of popular Western comic books, and their limitations. Huynh’s work has been exhibited by MoMA, the Smithsonian, the Sydney Opera House, the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the New-York Historical Society.
Charles Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary scholar, philosopher, cartoonist, screenwriter, and professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle, as well as a MacArthur fellow. His fiction includes Night Hawks, Dr. King’s Refrigerator, Dreamer, Faith and the Good Thing, and Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award. In 2002 he received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Seattle.
Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a teaching artist, writer, performance poet, and playwright from Chicago. Currently she is a Teaching Artist Fellow at Young Chicago Authors and is a staff member and writer for Black Nerd Problems. She has been published in Poetry, Vinyl, Day One, Seven Scribes, The Offing, and Kinfolks Quarterly, and is a 2015 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. Her debut book, Black Queer Hoe, was released by Haymarket Books in September 2018.
Robin Coste Lewis, the winner of the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, is the poet laureate of Los Angeles. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, a Cave Canem fellow, and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, as well as the recipient of a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. His current book is the best-selling short story collection The Refugees. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer. He is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.
Uche Okonkwo is a Nigerian writer and an MFA candidate in fiction at Virginia Tech. Her work has been published in One Story, Ploughshares, Lagos Noir, Per Contra, and Ellipsis.
Maddy Raskulinecz lives in San Francisco. Her fiction has appeared in Zyzzyva, Guernica, Joyland, Diagram, and elsewhere, and has been included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins University.
Emily Rinkema lives and teaches in Vermont, where she got her master’s degree from the Bread Loaf School of English. Her short fiction has appeared in Syntax, Phoebe, The Newer York, SmokeLong Quarterly, Sixfold, and The Sun. When not working or writing, she can be found on the patio or in front of the fire with her husband, Bill, her dogs, Stella and Frankie, and Jack Reacher the cat. She can be contacted at emilyrinkema@gmail.com.
Margaret Ross is the author of A Timeshare (Omnidawn, 2015). Her poetry has been recognized by scholarships and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Fulbright Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo, and has appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and Poem-a-Day. A former Stegner Fellow, she is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford.
Nathaniel Russell was born and raised in Indiana and spent several years in the San Francisco Bay Area making posters, record covers, and woodcuts. He returned to his home city of Indianapolis and now spends his time creating drawings, fake fliers, sculptures, cut-outs, and music. Russell’s work is regularly shown all over the world in both traditional galleries and informal spaces. His illustration and commercial work can be seen on album covers, on skateboards, in the New York Times, and in independent publications both local and international.
Patricia Sammon was born and raised in Canada and earned degrees from Cornell University and Queen’s University in Ontario. She now lives in the United States. Her short stories have won a Nelson Algren Award, a Hackney Literary Award, and a prize from the Asheville Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have been anthologized in Ordinary and Sacred as Blood: Alabama Women Speak and Alabama Bound. They have been published in literary journals such as december, Narrative, New Millennium Writers, and Mid-American Review. She has just completed a collection of four novellas set in northwest Australia.
Deborah Taffa (Yuma/Laguna Pueblo/Shoshone Paiute) received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa in 2013. She teaches CNF at Webster University in Saint Louis, and is an Ellen Meloy Desert Writers’ Award recipient. Her stories have appeared in A Public Space, Salon, The Rumpus, Brevity, HuffPost, and other places. Visit her website at www.deborahtaffa.com.
Jane Wong’s poems can be found in Best American Poetry 2015, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, Poetry, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the US Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and others. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016) and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James Books, forthcoming). She is an assistant professor at Western Washington University.