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.
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.
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.
Michael Parker is the author of seven novels and three collections of stories. His has published fiction and nonfiction in various journals including Five Points, the Georgia Review, The New England Review, The New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, Gulf Coast, Shenandoah, The Black Warrior Review, Trail Runner and Runner’s World. He has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. His work has been included in the Pushcart and New Stories from the South anthologies and he is a three-time winner of the O.Henry Prize for short fiction. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Hanna Pylväinen is the author of the novel We Sinners, which received the 2012 Whiting Award, and the novel The End of Drum-Time, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and LitHub. She is the recipient of residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Lásságámmi Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others.
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.
Marisa Silver is the author of eight works of fiction including the forthcoming At Last (Simon and Schuster, 2025). Previous work includes the novels The Mysteries, Mary Coin, a New York Times Bestseller, Little Nothing, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, The God of War, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and No Direction Home. Her story collections include Alone With You and Babe in Paradise, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her short fiction has won the O. Henry Prize and has been included in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Silver has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Dean Bakopoulos’ first novel, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, was a New York Times Notable Book; he co-wrote and co-produced the film adaptation, which debuted at the Los Angeles Film Festival and was a New York Times Critics’ Pick. His second novel, My American Unhappiness, was named one of the year’s best novels by The Chicago Tribune, and his third novel, Summerlong, was an independent bookstore bestseller and one of NPR’s best books of the year. The winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and NEA fellowships in both fiction and creative nonfiction, Bakopoulos is now an associate professor of cinema and head of screenwriting arts at University of Iowa. A WGA screenwriter, he is co-creator and executive producer of the HBO MAX series Made for Love. His first feature film, Don’t Come Back from the Moon, was a New York Times’ Critics Pick directed by Bruce Thierry Cheung and starring Rashida Jones. Bakopoulos is currently developing several original TV/film projects and adaptations at major studios and production companies, including an adaptation on his short story, “The Dog,” at Film Nation. He is at work on a new book of fiction, entitled Short Films, as well as a collection of craft essays.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
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