Ramona Ausubel’s newest novel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, was a San Francisco Chronicle and NPR best book of the year. She is the author of No One is Here Except All of Us, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, and A Guide to Being Born, a New York Times Notable Book. Her new collection of short stories, Awayland, will be published in March, 2018. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, One Story, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a faculty member of the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Melissa Barrett, a poet from Kent, Ohio, is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a Tin House writer’s scholarship, an Oboh Prize, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, the Koppenhaver Prize, and a Galway Kinnell scholarship from the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her poems have received honors from Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Better, Meridian, Diagram, Sonora Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, and Narrative. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Harvard Review, Web Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review Online, Animal Shelter, Best New Poets 2013, and Best American Poetry 2015. She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and Wittenberg University and works at a middle school in Columbus, Ohio.
Lucy Diamond Biederman is a Lecturer in English at Case Western Reserve University and an adjunct professor at Cleveland State University. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, where she specialized in creative writing and American literature. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, As Yet (Country Music, 2014), As I Walked Into the Middle of the Night Squinting (Red Bird Press, 2013), The Hardest Part is Done (Grey Book Press, 2013), and The Other World (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her poems, creative nonfiction essays, and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, BOMBlog, The Laurel Review, Ploughshares, Pleiades, and other literary journals.
Alan Heathcock’s VOLT was a “Best Book” selection from numerous newspapers and magazines, including GQ, Publishers Weekly, Salon, the Chicago Tribune, and Cleveland Plain Dealer, was named as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, selected as a Barnes and Noble Best Book of the Month, as well as a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize. Heathcock has won a Whiting Award, the GLCA New Writers Award, a National Magazine Award, has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Lannan Foundation, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts. A native of Chicago, he lives and works in Boise, Idaho.
Sophie Klahr is the author of Meet Me Here At Dawn and the chapbook _____ Versus Recovery (Pilot Books). Her work appears in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Four Way Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She has been on the editorial staff of Gigantic Sequins since 2009, where she currently co-edits Teen Sequins. Her interdisciplinary work includes dance, drama, and sculpture. Born in Pittsburgh, she now lives mostly in Los Angeles.
Marni Ludwig is the author of Pinwheel, selected by Jean Valentine for the 2012 New Issues Poetry Prize and Little Box of Cotton and Lightning, chosen by Susan Howe for a 2011 Poetry Society of America Chapbook fellowship. She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Boulevard, FIELD, Gulf Coast, High Chair, JERRY, Poetry Northwest, Western Humanities Review and other journals. She’s from Brooklyn, NY and teaches as Columbia University.
Shuchi Saraswat has received fellowships to Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Writers Omi at Ledig House, and the Writers’ Room of Boston, as well as scholarships to the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She received her MFA from Emerson College and currently lives in Boston, where she is a buyer at Brookline Booksmith.
Stephanie Soileau is a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University, where she was also a Truman Capote Fellow in the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program. Her short stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Ecotone, Tin House, Gulf Coast, StoryQuarterly, Nimrod International Journal, three volumes of New Stories from the South, and Best of the South, Volume II: From 10 Years of New Stories from the South. She is working on a collection of stories and a novel, Terre Bonne, about fishermen, oil and erosion in her home state of Louisiana.
Olga Zilberbour grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia and moved to the United States at the age of seventeen. Her third book of fiction in Russian was published in Moscow-based Vremya Press in 2016. Where Does the Sea Flow, a short film directed by Vitaly Saltykov based on one of her stories, was a finalist in the Manhattan Short Film Festival. Her English-language fiction is forthcoming from Alaska Quarterly Review, Feminist Studies, and Outpost 19’s California Prose Directory; stories have appeared in World Literature Today, Tin House online, Narrative Magazine, the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row, and other print and online publications. She serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop.