Adrienne Celt Adrienne Celt’s debut novel, The Daughters, won the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the 2016 Crawford Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and the NYPL. Her second novel, Invitation to a Bonfire, was an Indie Next Pick for June 2018, an Amazon Top 10 Book of the Month, and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Financial Times of London and Electric Literature—it’s currently being adapted for television by AMC. Her latest novel, End of the World House (April 2022) has been named a Best Book of Spring 2022 by Town & Country, Lit Hub, The Millions, the Chicago Review of Books, PopSugar, Bustle, and elsewhere. Also a cartoonist, her collection of comics, Apocalypse How? An Existential Bestiary was released by Diagram/New Michigan Press in 2016. The recipient of an O. Henry Prize, a Glenna Luschei Award, the Swarthout Prize, and residencies from The Lighthouse Works, Jentel, Ragdale, and the Willapa Bay AiR, her work has appeared in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Strange Horizons, the Paris Review Daily, the Tin House Open Bar, The Rumpus, Ecotone, Epoch, and many other places. She received her MFA from Arizona State University in 2012, and was the Pima County Library Writer in Residence during the summer of 2016. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and has been publishing the webcomic loveamongthelampreys.com since 2011.

Sonya Chung is the author of the novels Long for This World (Scribner, 2010) and The Loved Ones (Relegation Books, 2016), which was a selection for Kirkus Best Fiction, NYTimes Matchbook Recommends, IndieNext, Library Journal Best Indie, The Nervous Breakdown Book Club, and Buzzfeed Books Recommends, among others. She is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Key West Literary Seminars residency, and an Escape to Create artist residency. Her essays have appeared at Tin House, Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, The Threepenny Review, and in the anthologies This is The Place: Women Writing About Home, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, Conversations with James Salter, and Short: An International Anthology. Sonya is a staff writer for The Millions, founding editor of Bloom, and has taught writing at Columbia University, NYU, the Gotham Writers Workshop, and Skidmore College, where currently she is Artist-in-Residence. She lives in New York City, where she also works as Deputy Director at Film Forum, a nonprofit art cinema.

Jane Hamilton is the author of seven novels, most recently The Excellent Lombards. Her first book, The Book of Ruth, won the Pen/Hemingway Award and the GLCA New Writer’s Award, and that novel and A Map of the World were Oprah selections.   

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.