Jaime Shearn Coan lives in Brooklyn, New York, teaches at The City College of New York, and leads writing workshops with the NY Writers Coalition. Jaime’s poems have appeared in journals including the Mississippi Review Online, Drunken Boat, and The Portland Review and are forthcoming in The Anthology of Trans and Genderqueer Poetry. Jaime’s artist book, dear someone, is distributed through Printed Matter, and he has recently been awarded fellowships at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Tin House Writers Workshop, and Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts.
Vishwas R. Gaitonde is a writer whose work has been published or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, Hawaii Review, Verbatim – The Language Quarterly, Santa Monica Review, Gargoyle, and Bellevue Literary Review, among other publications. One of his short stories was cited as a “Distinguished Story” in the notable stories list in Best American Short Stories 2016. In 2017, he was awarded a Hawthornden literary fellowship from Scotland.
Allison Hutchcraft is a poet and teacher living in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, The Cincinnati Review, Barrow Street, theBeloit Poetry Journal, American Letters & Commentary, West Branch, and other journals. The recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council and a Regional Artist Project Grant from the Arts & Science Council for the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, she has been awarded scholarships from the Tin HouseWriters Workshop, the Key West Literary Seminars, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She holds an MFA from Purdue University and teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. A 2017 fellow at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences, she will be a resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast in spring of 2018.
Will Mackin lives and writes in New Mexico. His work has been published in The New Yorker, GQ, Tin House, Rhapsody, and The New York Times Magazine. His short story “Kattekoppen” was included in The Best American Short Stories 2014.
Ben Shattuck is a graduate and former Teaching-Writing Fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught fiction writing courses at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington, the University of Iowa, and on Cuttyhunk Island. He has written for The Paris Review Daily, Salon.com, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Five Chapters, The Morning News, and the Millions, among other publications. He exhibits paintings (benshattuck.com) and is currently working on his first novel. Ben is also a contra dancer, banjo player, and avid birdwatcher.
Christie VanLaningham writes fiction inspired by failed places, heirlooms, witchy women, abandoned children, lumberjacks, lovable demagogues, every kind of fairy tale, and what it means to be home. Her short stories have appeared in several North American literary journals, and she is currently working on a novel, from which her reading has been excerpted.
Gabriel Tallent grew up in Mendocino, California, thrashing through the underbrush in search of anything awesome. He attended the Mendocino Community High School and spent a lot of time backpacking, re-reading Greek tragedies, and trying to figure out Moby Dick. Tallent received his BA from Willamette University and wrote his thesis on the discursive construction of pleasure in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, which is more interesting than it sounds. He has worked as a crew leader for Northwest Youth Corps, as an extremely bored and distracted checker at Target, as dining room staff at the Alta Lodge, and as a food runner and server at The Copper Onion. He lives in Salt Lake City, where he can be found climbing or futilely trying to identify plants in Little Cottonwood Canyon. His stories have been published in Narrative and in the St Petersburg Review. His debut novel, My Absolute Darling, was published in August 2017 by Riverhead Books.