Val Brelinski was born and raised in Nampa, Idaho, the daughter of devout evangelical Christians. From 2003 to 2005, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she was also a Jones Lecturer in fiction writing. She received an MFA from the University of Virginia, and her recent writing has been featured in Vogue, MORE, Salon, VQR and The Rumpus. She received prizes for her fiction from the San Francisco Chronicle, The Charlottesville Weekly, and The Boise Weekly, and was also a finalist for the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Val lives in Northern California and teaches creative writing in Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program. Her debut novel, The Girl Who Slept with God, is now available in paperback.
Cody Carvel was raised in Oklahoma and West Texas. He received a BA in English and African-American Studies from Harvard University and an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. His work has appeared in Mirage #4 Period(ical), Userlands (ed. Dennis Cooper), Tin House Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Elderly, and the Harvard Advocate. In 2012 he was a fellow at the Millay Colony. He is married to the famous playwright and director Julia Jarcho. He lives in New York City where he skips around town looking for landmarks related to modernist poetry and art.
Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Miami Beach, Jaquira Díaz is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, the Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and an NEA Fellowship to the Hambidge Center for the Arts. She’s been awarded fellowships or scholarships from The MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Summer Literary Seminars, the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Best American Essays 2016, Rolling Stone, Pushcart Prize XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses, The Guardian, The FADER, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, Salon, Brevity, Ninth Letter, Slice, TriQuarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.
Casey Fleming is a writer and teacher in Houston, Texas where she cofounded the Poison Pen Reading Series. Her work–fiction and nonfiction–has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, Sojourners Magazine, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Sugar & Rice, and Literary Mama, among other print and online publications. Her writing has been a finalist for the Iowa Review Prize in Nonfiction, the Willis Barnstone Translating Poetry Award, and a runner-up for the Tobias Wolff Award in Creative Nonfiction. She teaches memoir writing at the Hines Center for Spirituality and Prayer and critical theory and literature at The Kinkaid School.
Nick Greer is from the San Francisco Bay Area. He is an editor of Territory, a literary project about maps and other strange objects. Recent work can be found in Salt Hill, Phantom, Witch Craft Magazine, and the Pacifica Literary Review.
Jon Lewis-Katz has taught in the New York City public school system and at Cornell University where he completed his M.F.A. in Creative Writing. He has received the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and the Alonzo Davis Fellowship at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. At present, he teaches writing at Bronx Community College and is finishing a collection of linked short stories about West Indians and West Indian-Americans in New York City.
Born in Iloilo City, Philippines, Angela Peñaredondo is a Pilipinx/Pin@y poet and artist (on other days, she identifies as a usual ghost, comet or part-time animal) . Peñaredondo is the author of All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, 2016), winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize and the chapbook,Maroon (Jamii Publications). Her work has appeared in Asian American Writers’ Workshop: The Margins, Drunken Boat, Four Way Review, Cream City Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. She/Siya is a VONA/Voices of our Nations Art fello, a recipient of a University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Grant, Gluck Program of the Arts Fellowship, Naropa University’s Zora Neal Hurston Award, Squaw Valley Writers Fellowship and Fishtrap Fellowship. She/Siya has received scholarships from Tin House, Split This Rock, Dzanc Books International Literary Program and others. Angela resides in Southern California, drifiting between deserts, beaches, lowly cities and socially engineered suburbs.
Zana Previti was born and raised in New England. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and her MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho. Her work has been published in The New England Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, RHINO Poetry, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She was recently named the recipient of Poetry International’s 2014 C.P. Cavafy Prize for Poetry and the Fall 2016 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State Altoona.
Zack Strait is pursuing his PhD at Florida State University and serving as Poetry Editor for BOAAT (boaatpress.com). Recent work can be found in Pleiades.
Caroline O’Connor Thomas is a poet living in Oakland, California. She received her MFA from St. Mary’s College of California, where she was awarded the Russell and Yvonne Lannan Prize. Her work has appeared in Foothill Journal and Quiet Lightning. She is the curator of the Living Room reading series.