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. 

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/

Robert Boswell is the author of six novels, three story collections, a play, a cyberpunk novel, and two books of nonfiction. He has received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, the John Gassner Prize for Playwriting, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harpers, and many other magazines. He is married to Antonya Nelson. They share the Cullen Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

Maud Casey is the author of five works of fiction, most recently City of Incurable Women, and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in A Public Space, Literary Imagination, New England Review, The New York Times, Poetry Daily, and The Sewannee Review. She is the recipient of the Calvino Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland.