CM Burroughs

CM Burroughs is associate professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and author of The Vital System (Tupelo, 2012) and Master Suffering (Tupelo, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Book Award and L.A. Times Book Award. Burroughs’ poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Poetry, Ploughshares, Cave Canem’s Gathering Ground, and Best American Experimental Writing. Burroughs has been awarded fellowships and grants from Yaddo, MacDowell, Djerassi Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Cave Canem Foundation.

Akil Kumarasamy

Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the interlinked story collection Half Gods, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize, and was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, American Short Fiction, BOMB, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program. Her debut novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, was published by FSG in August 2022. 

Mia Alvar

Mia Alvar is the author of the story collection In the Country, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the University of Rochester’s Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Mia has been a writer in residence at Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Blue Mountain Center for the Arts; and has received fellowships from the Sewanee, Bread Loaf, and Sirenland Writers’ Conferences. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, One Story, The Missouri Review, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She has taught fiction at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she also received her MFA. Born in the Philippines and raised in Bahrain and New York, she lives in southern California.

Dilruba Ahmed

Dilruba Ahmed is the author Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama. Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares. Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books), Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s), and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has taught creative writing with Chatham University’s MFA Program, Hugo House in Seattle, and online with The Writing Lab. Website: www.dilrubaahmed.com/

Lysley Tenorio

Lysley Tenorio is the author of the novel The Son of Good Fortune, winner of the New American Voices Award, and the story collection Monstress, named a book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Stegner fellowship, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as residencies from the MacDowell Colony,
Yaddo, and the Bogliasco Foundation. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and have been adapted for the stage by The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the Ma-Yi Theater in New York City. He was a 2021 finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and will be a 2021-22 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. He is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Robert Boswell

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.

Jamel Brinkley

Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man, finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the PEN Oakland Prize and the Ernest J Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Maud Casey

Maud Casey is the author of five works of fiction, most recently City of Incurable Women, and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in A Public Space, Literary Imagination, New England Review, The New York Times, Poetry Daily, and The Sewannee Review. She is the recipient of the Calvino Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland.

Christopher Castellani

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.

Adrienne Celt

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.