Jonathan Escoffery

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the linked story collection, If I Survive You, a New York Times and Booklist Editor’s Choice, an IndieNext Pick, and an International Bestseller. If I Survive You was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize For Debut Short Story Collection, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Story Prize, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the California Independent Booksellers Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award. Jonathan is the recipient of American Short Fiction‘s 2023 Constellation Award for a Story Collection, The Paris Review’s 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction from the American Society of Magazine Editors, and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Oprah Daily, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, American Short Fiction, AGNI, and elsewhere. He has received support and honors from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, Aspen Words, Kimbilio Fiction, the Anderson Center, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing MFA Program and was a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

 

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Rita Banerjee

Rita Banerjee is the author of the poetry collections Echo in Four Beats, which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018,” and Cracklers at Night. She is also editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, and author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and has taught creative writing, pedagogy, publishing, foreign language, and literature courses at Harvard, UC Berkeley, LMU Munich, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and elsewhere. She received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University and is a recipient of the Tom and Laurel Nebel Fellowship, South Asia Initiative Grants, and Tata Grants among other awards. She serves as Editor-at-Large of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Her work appears in Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, VIDA, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto Merchants of Cool: How Female Cool Could Not Be Sold, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Brian Teare

A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and six critically acclaimed books, including Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards. His most recent publication is the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven; his seventh book, Poem Bitten by a Man, is forthcoming in the fall of 2023. His honors include Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, and fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the MacDowell Colony. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. An editorial board member of Poetry Daily, he lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Carter Sickels

Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star (Hub City Press), which won the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Fiction, the Southern Book Prize, and the Weatherford Award. It was selected as a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Best LGBTQ Book of the Year by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction, and the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. The Evening Hour was recently adapted into a 2020 feature-length film by the same title, directed by Braden King and starring Lili Taylor, and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, Guernica, Joyland, and Catapult. Carter is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He teaches at Eastern Kentucky University.

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Oliver Baez Bendorf

Oliver Baez Bendorf forthcoming book of poems is Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, September 10, 2024), which Brian Teare called a “visionary book of queer ecological thought.” He is the author of two previous books of poetry: Advantages of Being Evergreen and The Spectral Wilderness, and a chapbook The Gospel According to X, selected for the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series. His work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Publishing Triangle Award, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Vermont Studio Center, Lambda Literary, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems have been featured in publications like American Poetry Review, BOMB, The Nation, and Orion, and across various anthologies including Best American Poetry, Latino Poetry: A New Anthology, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Since 2011, he has taught poetry writing to people of all ages, including at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Kalamazoo College, and through workshops across the country. He received an MFA in poetry from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BA from University of Iowa. Born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, he now lives along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in Colorado.

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CM Burroughs

CM Burroughs is associate professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and author of The Vital System (Tupelo, 2012) and Master Suffering (Tupelo, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Book Award and L.A. Times Book Award. Burroughs’ poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Poetry, Ploughshares, Cave Canem’s Gathering Ground, and Best American Experimental Writing. Burroughs has been awarded fellowships and grants from Yaddo, MacDowell, Djerassi Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Cave Canem Foundation.

Akil Kumarasamy

Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the interlinked story collection Half Gods, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize, and was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, American Short Fiction, BOMB, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program. Her debut novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, was published by FSG in August 2022. 

Mia Alvar

Mia Alvar is the author of the story collection In the Country, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the University of Rochester’s Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Mia has been a writer in residence at Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Blue Mountain Center for the Arts; and has received fellowships from the Sewanee, Bread Loaf, and Sirenland Writers’ Conferences. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, One Story, The Missouri Review, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She has taught fiction at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she also received her MFA. Born in the Philippines and raised in Bahrain and New York, she lives in southern California.

Dilruba Ahmed

Dilruba Ahmed is the author Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama. Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares. Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books), Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s), and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has taught creative writing with Chatham University’s MFA Program, Hugo House in Seattle, and online with The Writing Lab. Website: www.dilrubaahmed.com/

Lysley Tenorio

Lysley Tenorio is the author of the novel The Son of Good Fortune, winner of the New American Voices Award, and the story collection Monstress, named a book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Stegner fellowship, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as residencies from the MacDowell Colony,
Yaddo, and the Bogliasco Foundation. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and have been adapted for the stage by The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the Ma-Yi Theater in New York City. He was a 2021 finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and will be a 2021-22 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. He is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.