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.
Lesley Nneka Arimah is the author of What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, a collection of short stories from Riverhead Books. Her collection was named one of the best books of 2017 by NPR, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, Shelf Awareness, LitHub, and more. Her stories have been honored with a National Magazine Award, the Caine Prize, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and an O. Henry Award. Arimah’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and GRANTA among other publications, and has received support from The Elizabeth George Foundation, MacDowell, Breadloaf and others. What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and won the 2017 Kirkus Prize, the 2018 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club among other honors. Arimah is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Writing. She lives in the Midwest and is working on a novel about you.