Dominic Smith is the author of six novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and published in more than a dozen countries. His latest novel, Return to Valetto—set in the world of abandoned and dwindling Italian towns and villages—was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in June 2023 and received the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for Fiction. Dominic’s short stories, essays and criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Australian. A graduate of the University of Iowa and the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, Dominic is the recipient of the Australian Indie Book of the Year Award, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Australian Council for the Arts. He grew up in Australia and currently lives in Seattle.
Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from New York University and U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. The former managing director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and an NEA fellowship. She was most recently selected to receive a 2016 Lannan Literary Fellowship and the 2017 Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is currently an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Her first poetry collection, LOOK, published by Graywolf Press in 2016, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. She is an assistant professor at Arizona State University and has taught at Stanford University.
Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020), and including the forthcoming Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award, the Shestack Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is longtime co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile and a guest host for The Slowdown. He is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Martha Rhodes is the author of five collections of poetry: At the Gate (1995, Provincetown Arts), Perfect Disappearance (2000, winner of the Green Rose Prize, New Issues Press), Mother Quiet (2004, Zoo Press / University of Nebraska) The Beds (2012, Autumn House), and The Thin Wall (2017, University of Pittsburgh Press). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is the director of Four Way Books in New York City, publishers of poetry and fiction.
Matthew Olzmann is the author of three collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, Contradictions in the Design, and Constellation Route, all from Alice James Books. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. His writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. Previously, he’s taught in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in New Hampshire and teaches at Dartmouth College.
Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels and seven short story collections, including Funny Once, released in May 2014. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, NEA, and USA Artists Fellowships, as well as the Rea Award for Short Fiction. She lives in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
Sandra Lim is the author of Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006) and The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), selected by Louise Glück for the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize. The Wilderness won the Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015. She is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Getty Research Institute, and the Jentel Foundation. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, VOLT, Literary Imagination, and The New York Times. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and lives in Cambridge, MA.
Sally Keith’s forthcoming book of poems, Two of Everything, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. Her previous collections of poetry include River House (2015); Fact of the Matter (2012); Dwelling Song (2004); and Design, winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize in Poetry. A Guggenheim Fellow, her poetry has appeared in New York Times, New England Review, Conjunctions, and A Public Space. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at George Mason University’s MFA Program, where she also co-edits Poetry Daily.
Novelist and filmmaker T. Geronimo Johnson was born in New Orleans. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow, Johnson has taught writing at UC Berkeley, Stanford, the Writers’ Workshop, the Prague Summer Program, Oregon State University, San Quentin, Texas State, and elsewhere. He has worked on, at, or in brokerages, kitchens, construction sites, phone rooms, education non-profits, writing centers, summer camps,
ladies shoe stores, nightclubs, law firms, offset print shops, and a (pre-2016) political campaign that shall remain unnamed. He also wrote a couple of novels that have—between the two—been selected by the Wall Street Journal Book Club, named a 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, shortlisted for the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, named a finalist for The Bridge Book Award, named a finalist for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, adapted into a critically acclaimed play, included on Time Magazine’s list of the top ten books of 2015, awarded the Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and named the winner of the 2015 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Johnson was also a National Book Award judge in 2016, the recipient of the inaugural Simpson Family Literary Prize in 2017, and a 2017-2018 Rome Prize Fellow. He lives in Rome, Italy. geronimo1.com.
C.J. Hribal is the author of the novel The Company Car, which won the Anne Powers Book Award, and three other works of fiction. His collection of novellas and stories, The Clouds in Memphis, won the AWP Prize in Short Fiction. He is also the author of the novel American Beauty, the collection of stories and novellas, Matty’s Heart, and he edited the collection The Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing from the New World. His story, “Do I Look Sick to You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)” won the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bush Foundation. His BA is from St. Norbert College and his MA from Syracuse University. He is the Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
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