Debra Spark is the author of six books of fiction, including, most recently, Unknown Caller, The Pretty Girl, and Good for the Jews. Other books include two essay collections on fiction writing (Curious Attractions and And Then Something Happened) and the anthology Twenty Under Thirty. Spark has published numerous articles, book reviews, short stories, essays, travel articles, food articles, and op-eds in publications like Agni, the Boston Globe, the Cincinnati Review, the Chicago Tribune, Epoch, Esquire, Five Points, Food and Wine, Harvard Review, the Huffington Post, Maine Magazine, Narrative, New England Travel and Life, the New England Review, the New York Times, Ploughshares, salon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, Yale Alumni Magazine, and Yankee, among other places. For a decade, she had a side specialty in writing about art, home and design for magazines like Décor, Dwell, Elysian, Interiors, New England Home, Maine Home+Design, and Down East, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a Maine Humanities Council “One State/One Read” program, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, a Wisconsin Institute Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Michigan Literary Fiction Award, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is a professor at Colby College and has taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1996. She lives north of Portland, Maine.

Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre, Barter, and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She teaches at Princeton. She joined the Program faculty in 2012.

Sally Ball is the author of three collections of poems, Hold Sway, Wreck Me and Annus Mirabilis. She has published essays and reviews in Lithub, NOR, Pleiades, The Volta, and elsewhere. Her poems have appeared in APR, Bennington, Boston, and Harvard Reviews, Ploughshares, Tin House, Yale Review, and other magazines, as well as in The Best American Poetry anthology. Professor of English and director of creative writing at Arizona State University, Ball is also the associate director of Four Way Books. Her long poem “HOLD” has been made into a large-format artist’s book by the Czech printmaker Jan Vičar (2018).

Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from New York University and U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. The former managing director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and an NEA fellowship. She was most recently selected to receive a 2016 Lannan Literary Fellowship and the 2017 Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is currently an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Her first poetry collection, LOOK, published by Graywolf Press in 2016, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. She is an assistant professor at Arizona State University and has taught at Stanford University.

Martha Rhodes is the author of five collections of poetry: At the Gate (1995, Provincetown Arts), Perfect Disappearance (2000, winner of the Green Rose Prize, New Issues Press), Mother Quiet (2004, Zoo Press / University of Nebraska) The Beds (2012, Autumn House), and The Thin Wall (2017, University of Pittsburgh Press). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is the director of Four Way Books in New York City, publishers of poetry and fiction.