SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels (Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award; and Blue-Skinned Gods, which was an Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), two graphic novels (Shakti and Tall Water), one collection of short stories (The Goth House Experiment, which won The Story Prize Spotlight Award), and two award-winning hybrid chapbooks (I Once Met You But You Were Dead and Dominant Genes). Sindu’s work has been featured in Electric Literature, Best American Experimental Fiction, and Brevity, among others. Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University and is a co-editor for Zero Street, a literary fiction series featuring LGBTQ+ books published by the University of Nebraska Press. Sindu is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Dan Chaon’s most recent book is Sleepwalk (2022.) He is the author of six previous books, including Ill Will, a national bestseller, named one of the ten best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize; the national bestseller Await Your Reply; and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and the O.Henry Collection. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction and the Shirley Jackson Award, and he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland.
Tim Horvath is the author of Understories (Bellevue Literary Press), which won the New Hampshire Literary Award, and Circulation (sunnyoutside). His fiction appears in or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, AGNI, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Best Small Fictions 2021, and elsewhere; his reviews appear in Georgia Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and American Book Review. He teaches at Phillips Exeter and in the Stony Brook MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literature, as well as GrubStreet. He is a Senior Editor at Conjunctions and a co-founder of One Book, One Manchester. He is currently working on a novel called The Spinal Descent, an excerpt of which can be found in Ten Piscataqua Writers 2023.
Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her collection of 40 palindromic sonnets, titled This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, is forthcoming from Penguin Poets in Spring 2027. She’s the winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry for O, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. She’s also the author of Louder than Hearts and To Live in Autumn, as well as the chapbooks 3arabi Song and There Was and How Much There Was. Her work has appeared in LARB, Lithub, The Nation, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She’s the co-editor, with Hala Alyan, of the anthology We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. Zeina currently resides in California.
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award, and Leaving Biddle City (Sarabande Books, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Old Dominion University and teaches poetry in the Warren Wilson College MFA program for Writers.
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.
Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024), and two previous collections of poems: Advantages of Being Evergreen and The Spectral Wilderness. His chapbook, The Gospel According to X, was selected for the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series. His poems have circulated in publications like American Poetry Review, BOMB, The Nation, and Yale Review, and anthologies including Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics and Latino Poetry: A New Anthology. His work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Publishing Triangle Award. Oliver earned his BA at the University of Iowa, and an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Library and Information Studies, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, and now living along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, he is a CantoMundo fellow and teaches in the MFA program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Daisy Fried is the author of five books of poetry: My Destination (forthcoming from Flood Editions and Carcanet Press in 2026), The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships. An occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation and elsewhere, she lives in Philadelphia, but will be moving to San Francisco later this year.
Jennifer Grotz received her BA in French, English, and Art History from Tulane University, her MA in English and MFA in Poetry from Indiana University, and her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Still Falling, her fourth collection of poems, appeared from Graywolf Press in 2023. She is also the author of Window Left Open; The Needle, winner of the Helen C. Smith Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Nassar Prize; and Cusp, winner of the Bakeless Prize for Poetry and the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters, both published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; as well as the limited edition letterpress chapbook Not Body, available from Urban Editions. Psalms of All My Days, her translations from the French of Patrice de La Tour du Pin, appeared from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2013. The novel Rochester Knockings, translated from the French of Hubert Haddad, appeared in 2015 from Open Letter. And Everything I Don’t Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, is co-translated from the Polish with Piotr Sommer and appeared in 2021 from World Poetry Books and received the PEN Foundation Best Book of Poetry in Translation Award. Her poems and translations have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and in five volumes of Best American Poetry. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and The Washington Post. She has received awards from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Camargo Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches at the University of Rochester is director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.
Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. She earned her MA from the University of Wyoming, and her MFA at the University of Houston. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the 2014 PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others. In 2019-2020, was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and was a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. Her play based on Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and will have its world premiere in 2026. She has two books forthcoming: her essay collection will be published by the University of Georgia Press. And her novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, is forthcoming with Pantheon in January 2026. She teaches at Colorado State University.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
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