Deepa Anappara’s first novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time and NPR. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature. It has been translated into over twenty languages. Anappara is the co-editor of Letters to a Writer of Colour, a collection of personal essays on fiction, race, and culture, published in March 2023. Her second novel, The Last of Earth, will be published in 2025. Anappara has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative-Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She previously worked as a journalist in India, where she lived until moving to the UK. She now teaches creative writing in London.

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.

Edie Meidav is the author of novels such as Lola,California (FSG) and Crawl Space (FSG), story collections, and the recent hybrid lyric novel, Another Love Discourse (MIT Press/2022), which won the Big Other Fiction prize. Her work has received the Bard Fiction Prize for writers under 40, the Kafka Award for best novel by an American women, the Howard Fellowship, support from Lannan, Whiting, and Fulbright organizations (Sri Lanka, Cyprus), and elsewhere, and has been called an editorial pick by the New York Times, the L.A. Times and elsewhere. She directs the MFA for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst where she is provost professor.

Fernanda Eberstadt has published five novels and two books of non-fiction. Her most recent book, BITE YOUR FRIENDS: STORIES OF THE BODY MILITANT, was published by Europa Editions in the US and the UK in March 2024. She writes for publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Vogue, frieze, Granta, and Literary Hub, and is an editor at large for the European Review of Books. She got a BA and an MA in English Language and Literature from Magdalen College, Oxford, and has taught at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zelle MFA program. She lives in London. 

 

Poet, fiction writer and memoirist, Karen Brennan is the author of nine books including the forthcoming Rabbit in the Moon: The Mexico Stories, and, most recently, Television, a Memoir, a hybrid collection of micro-memoir and lyric essays. Her work has been appeared in anthologies from Norton, Penguin, Greywolf, Michigan, Georgia and Spuyten Duyvil, among others. She is a recipient of an AWP award in fiction, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. A Professor Emerita from The University of Utah, Brennan lives in Tucson where she paints, writes and ruminates abstractly and expressionistically.

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.

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.

Christopher Castellani’s fourth novel, Leading Men — for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the MacDowell Colony — was published by Viking in February 2019. His collection of essays on point of view in fiction, The Art of Perspective, was published by Graywolf in 2016. His three previous novels, a trilogy that follows an immigrant Italian family, were published by Algonquin. Castellani has just finished his two-year term as the Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, and has been a fiction supervisor and frequent member of the academic board at Warren Wilson since 2008. In 2024, he was awarded a Literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives mostly in Provincetown, MA.

David Haynes is the author of seven novels for adults and five books for younger readers.  He is an emeritus professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he directed the creative writing program for ten years. Since 1996 he has taught regularly in MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and has also taught writing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Hamline University, at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, and at the Writers’ Garret in Dallas. He has received a fellowship from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and several of his short stories have been read and recorded for the National Public Radio series “Selected Shorts.” His seventh and most recently novel is A STAR IN THE FACE OF THE SKY. He is also the author of a series for children called “The West Seventh Wildcats.” His upcoming book is a collection, MARTHA’S DAUGHTER: A NOVELLA AND STORIES.

David spent fifteen years as a K-12 teacher in urban schools, mostly teaching middle grades in Saint Paul, Minnesota.  He worked on numerous school reform efforts, including developing the influential Saturn School of Tomorrow, where he served as Associate Teacher for Humanities.  He has been involved in the work of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, coordinating efforts of the nation’s finest educators to develop standards in the fields of social studies, vocational education, early childhood education and for teachers of students whose first language is not English.

David Haynes co-founded and serves as the Board Chair for Kimbilio, a community of writers and scholars committed to developing, empowering and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora and their stories.

Alix Ohlin is the author of six books, most recently We Want What We Want: Stories (2021). Her 2019 novel Dual Citizens, like her novel Inside, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and many other places. She lives in Vancouver, where she is the Director of the UBC School of Creative Writing.