Vi Khi Nao

Vi Khi Nao is the author of many books and is known for her work spanning poetry, fiction, play, film, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her forthcoming novel, The Italian Letters, is scheduled for publication by Melville House in 2024. In the same year, she will release a co-authored manuscript titled, The Six Tones of Water with Sun Yung Shin, through Ricochet. Recognized as a former Black Mountain Institute fellow, Vi Khi Nao received the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022. https://www.vikhinao.com

Barrie Jean Borich

Barrie Jean Borich is the author of the lyric memoir Apocalypse, Darling (2018), which was short-listed for a Lambda Literary Award. PopMatters said “Apocalypse, Darling soars and seems to live as a new form altogether. It's poetry, a meditation on life as ‘the other,’ creative nonfiction, and abstract art.” Her hybrid memoir-in-essays Body Geographic (2013) won a Lambda Literary Award in Memoir, and in a starred review Kirkus called the book “…an elegant literary map that celebrates shifting topographies as well as human bodies in motion, not only across water and land, but also through life.” Borich’s previous book, the memoir My Lesbian Husband (2000), won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award. Borich’s most recent work appears in the literary journal Conjunctions, and her essays have been anthologized in: Bending Genre, Isherwood in Transit; Critical Creative Writing; Waveform: Twenty-First Century Essays by Women; and in After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays, and have been cited in Best American Essays and Best American Non-Required Reading. She is a professor in the Department of English-MFA/MA in Creative Writing and Publishing Program at DePaul University in Chicago, where she directs the LGBTQ Studies minor and edits Slag Glass City, a journal of the urban essay arts. Visit BJB at https://barriejeanborich.com

Knar Gavin

Knar Gavin (they) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, where they recently served as the Poetic Practice Fellow. Their dissertation, "'Fend for Meaningful Speech': Matters of Social Fact in Post-9/11 Docupoetry," attends to the prefigurative political possibilities that emerge in works of documentary and ecopoetry. Knar is also an environmental justice organizer engaged in efforts to oppose extractive industries and ecocidal development projects. They are the author of Vela. and their poetry and other writings have appeared in Annulet, Poetry, the Denver Quarterly, AGNI, the Journal, NiCHE, and Birdfeast, among others.

Lakita Wilson

Lakita Wilson is the author of several novels and nonfiction projects for children and young adults, including What is Black Lives Matter? and Who is Colin Kaepernick? part of the New York Times bestselling Who HQ Now series, the middle grade novel Be Real, Macy Weaver, and the young adult novel Last Chance Dance. Lakita was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Prince Goerge's County, Maryland. A 2017 recipient of SCBWI's Emerging Voices Award, Lakita received her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She can be found online at lakitawilson.com

Amaranth Borsuk

Amaranth Borsuk is the author of the poetry collections Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press) and Handiwork (Slope Editions) as well as three collaborative books of poems. Her latest volume is The Book (MIT Press), a concise introduction to the book as object, content, idea, and interface. She is director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell. www.amaranthborsuk.com

Caren Beilin

Caren Beilin is the author of the novel Revenge of the Scapegoat (Dorothy, 2022), winner of the Vermont Book Award. Other recent books include Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019) and SPAIN (Rescue Press, 2018). Her work appears in Fence, AGNI, and Dreginald. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and lives close by, in Vermont. 

Jessica Zafra

Jessica Zafra is the author of the novel The Age of Umbrage, and of The Collected Stories of Jessica Zafra. Twisted, her influential column in the 1990s, spawned a dozen collections of books on travel, movies, music, and popular culture. Jessica’s essays have also appeared in Newsweek and The New Yorker. She has won Palanca Awards for her short stories and the National Book Award for her essay collection. Jessica has presented current affairs talk shows and travel documentaries on Philippine television. She is the holder of the Henry Lee Irwin, SJ Professorial Chair in Creative Writing at Ateneo de Manila University. She has just finished her second novel.

Liz Kay

Liz Kay holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska, where she was the recipient of both an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Wendy Fort Foundation Prize for exemplary work in poetry. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Nimrod, Willow Springs, and Sugar House Review. Her debut novel, Monsters: A Love Story (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), was published in 2016. Her most recent book, the poetry collection The Witch Tells The Story And Makes It True (Quarter Press), is a retelling of Hansel and Gretel. It is illustrated by Devin Forst. Liz lives in Omaha, NE with her husband and 3 sons.

Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Carolyn Jess-Cooke is an award-winning poet and novelist published in 23 languages. Her most recent novel, The Lighthouse Witch (published as CJ Cooke), was an international bestseller, and a TV series is in development. She is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

Kim Fu

Kim Fu is the author of the story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Fu’s first novel, For Today I Am a Boy, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. Fu’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Atlantic, the New York Times, BOMB, Hazlitt, and the TLS. She lives in Seattle.

Hal Shrieve

Hal Schrieve is a children’s librarian in Manhattan and the best part of hir job is facilitating comics clubs and creative writing workshops with young people. Hir first book, Out of Salem, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Hal’s comics are featured in We’re Still Here: an all-trans comics anthology and the zine Very Online. Hal’s next novel, How To Get Over The End Of The World, will be released in 2023. Follow Hal at @howlmarin on Instagram and @hal_schrieve on Twitter and @howlmarin on Instagram.

CMarie Fuhrman

CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems and co-editor of Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has published or forthcoming poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals, including Terrain.org, Emergence Magazine, Platform Review, Northwest Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Northwest, and several anthologies.  CMarie is a regular columnist for the Inlander, Translations Editor for Broadsided Press, and the Director of the Elk River Writers Workshop. CMarie directs the Poetry Program at Western Colorado University, where she also teaches Nature Writing. She is the current Idaho Writer in Residence and resides in the mountains of West Central Idaho.

CMarieFuhrman.com

Anna Cabe

Anna Cabe is a Pinay American writer living and working in Atlanta. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slate, Rappler, The Margins, Bitch Media, Vice, The Cincinnati Review, The Masters Review, Slice, StoryQuarterly, The Toast, Joyland, and Fairy Tale Review, among others and has been anthologized by Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, Not My President: The Anthology of Dissent, and Unbroken Circle: Stories of Cultural Diversity in the South. She received her MFA in fiction from Indiana University and has been supported by organizations like the Fulbright Program in the Philippines and Millay Arts. She is currently a fiction editor for Split Lip Magazine and is completing a novel set during Philippine martial law. You can find Anna at annacabe.com.

Ira Sukrungruang

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of four nonfiction books This Jade World, Buddha’s Dog & other Meditations, Southside Buddhist, and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist; the short story collection The Melting Season; and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the recipient of the 2015 American Book Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Anita Claire Scharf Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. He is one of the founding editors of Sweet: A Literary Confection (sweetlit.com), and is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. For more information about him, please visit: www.buddhistboy.com.

Shauna Barbosa

Shauna Barbosa is the author of the poetry collection Cape Verdean Blues (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Boston Review, AGNI, Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Society of America, PBS Newshour, Lit Hub, and others. She was nominated for PEN America’s 2019 Open Book Award and was a 2018 Disquiet International Luso-American fellow. Shauna received her MFA from Bennington College in Vermont and is currently working on a compilation of stories.

Matt Bell

Matt Bell’s latest novel, Appleseed, was published by Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in March 2022 from Soho Press. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Leah Pileggi

Leah Pileggi grew up in Kane, Pennsylvania, a tiny town in the middle of the Allegheny National Forest. She didn’t start writing until she was almost 50, after having lived in California, Connecticut, and Texas. She now lives in the big small town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she studied creative writing at Chatham University and professional writing at Carnegie Mellon. Her work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Chautauquan Daily, Hopscotch Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. Prisoner 88 is her first novel. Awards for Prisoner 88 include: NCTE Notable Book in the Language Arts, IndieBound Kids’ Next List, Dorothy Canfield Fisher Book Award List (Vermont), Golden Sower Award List (Nebraska), and the Charlie May Simon Honor Book (Arkansas) for 2016. Leah also blogs and writes poetry and screenplays.

Namrata Poddar

Namrata Poddar writes fiction and nonfiction, serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli where she curates the series Race, Power and Storytelling, and teaches literature at UCLA’s Honors Program. Her work has appeared in several publications including Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and The Best Asian Short Stories. Her debut novel, Border Less, was a finalist for The Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether Prize, and is forthcoming from 7.13 Books. She holds a PhD in French literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures from UCLA. Find her on Twitter,  @poddar_namrata, or on Instagram, @writerpoddar.

Natanya Ann Pulley

Natanya Ann Pulley is Diné and her mother’s clans are Kinyaa’áani (Towering House) and Táchii’nii (Red Running into Water). Her publications include Split Lip, The Offing, and Waxwing (among others). Her essays have been anthologized in Shapes of Native Nonfiction, Counternarratives from Women of Color Academics, The Diné Reader, Women Write Resistance, and more. She is the founding editor of Hairstreak Butterfly Review and is an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. Her short story collection With Teeth (Oct. 2019) is the winner of the 2018 Many Voices Project competition through New Rivers Press.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, disabled, brown/Colombian poet, scholar, and cultural worker. Her poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) explores intergenerational memory and postcolonial trauma. Most recently, she was a spring 2021 Mellon Arts Fellow at Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Her work has been published in Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Nat. Brut, Foglifter, and Waxwing, among other places.

Nicole Walker

Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021) Sustainability: A Love Story (2018) and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet. (2019). She has previously published the books Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and This Noisy Egg (2010). She edited for Bloomsbury the essay collections Science of Story (2019) with Sean Prentiss and Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (2013) with Margot Singer. She is the co-president of NonfictioNOW and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and a noted author in Best American Essays. Her work has been most recently published in the New York Times, Longreads, and Ploughshares, among other places. She teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ. 

Lanre Akinsiku

Lanre Akinsiku is the author of Blacktop Vol. 1-4 (Penguin Young Readers, 2016-2017), a young adult series that won recognition from the New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and the Junior Library Guild. His fiction and essays have appeared in NPR, the Washington Post, the Kenyon Review, Zocalo Public Square, Gawker, and elsewhere. His forthcoming young adult novel will be published by HarperCollins.

Steven Church

Steven Church is the author of 6 books of creative nonfiction, most recently the collection of essays, I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear, and Fatherhood and the book-length essay, One With the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Humans and Animals, and he edited the anthology of essays, The Spirit of Disruption: Selections from The Normal School. He Coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State and is a founding editor of the literary magazine, The Normal School.

John Lee Clark

John Lee Clark is a DeafBlind poet and essayist. His poems recently appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Poetry magazine, which awarded him the 2019 Frederick Bock Prize. He is the author of the essay collection Where I Stand (Handtype Press, 2014), and his recent essay “Tactile Art” received the 2020 National Magazine Award. A leader in the Protactile movement, he travels widely teaching Protactile language and doing linguistic and ethnographic research, especially through grants with Western Oregon University and Saint Louis University. He makes his home in Hopkins, Minnesota, with artist and author Adrean Clark, their three sons, and a Deaf cat.

Carol Guess

Carol Guess is the author of books of poetry and prose, including Doll Studies: Forensics and Tinderbox Lawn. A frequent collaborator, she writes across genres and illuminates historically marginalized material. In 2014 she was awarded the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement by Columbia University. She teaches at Western Washington University and lives in Seattle.

Tessa Fontaine

Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, finalist for the Utah Book Award, and best book of 2018 from Southern Living, Amazon Editors’, Refinery29, PopMatters, and the New York Post. Other writing can be found in The New York Times, Glamour, The Believer, LitHub, and Creative Nonfiction. Tessa won the 2016 AWP Intro Award in Nonfiction, founded Salt Lake City’s Writers in the Schools program, and has taught in prisons and jails around the country. She currently lives in North Carolina, where she teaches creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

Roy Scranton

Roy Scranton is the author of I Heart Oklahoma! (Soho Press, 2019), Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2019), We’re Doomed. Now What? (Soho Press, 2018), War Porn (Soho Press, 2016), and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights, 2015). He has written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation, the New Republic, and elsewhere, and he co-edited What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate & Reinvent Our Future (Unnamed Press, 2017) and Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Da Capo, 2013). He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches creative writing.

Erika T. Wurth

Erika T. Wurth’s publications include two novels, Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend and You Who Enter Here, two collections of poetry and a collection of short stories, Buckskin Cocaine. A writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, she teaches creative writing at Western Illinois University and has been a guest writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Buzzfeed, Boulevard, LitHub, The Writer’s Chronicle, Bitch, Waxwing and The Kenyon Review. She will be faculty at Breadloaf in 2020, is a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Scholar, attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, and has been chosen as a narrative artist for the Meow Wolf Denver installation. She is Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee and was raised outside of Denver, where she lives with her partner, her two stepchildren, and her extremely fluffy dogs.