Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, The Maybe Bird (The Song Cave, 2022), Bright Raft in the Afterweather (University of Arizona Press, 2018), and Leaving Tulsa (University of Arizona Press, 2013), and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (Norton, 2020). She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Robert Frost Fellow in Poetry at the Breadloaf Writers Conference and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Jennifer received her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She currently teaches for The Rainier Writing Workshop, the Institute of American Indian Arts Continuing Education Program, Orion Magazine, and other writing programs, while serving as the literary assistant to the 23 rd U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. Foerster grew up living internationally, is of European (German/Dutch) and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco.
Michael Wasson is Nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Lenore, Idaho. He earned a BA from Lewis-Clark State College and an MFA from Oregon State University. The author of Swallowed Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2022), Self-Portrait with Smeared Centuries (Éditions des Lisières, 2018), translated by Beatrice Machet, and This American Ghost (YesYes Books, 2017), Wasson is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship in Literature, the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, and others. He currently lives in Japan.
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OSCAR HOKEAH holds an M.A. in English from the University of Oklahoma, with a concentration in Native American Literature. He also holds a B.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), with a minor in Indigenous Liberal Studies. He is a recipient of the Truman Capote Scholarship Award through IAIA, and also a winner of the Native Writer Award through the Taos Summer Writers Conference. Hokeah has written for Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, World Literature Today, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.
Oscar Hokeah is a regionalist Native American writer of literary fiction, interested in capturing intertribal, transnational, and multicultural aspects within two tribally specific communities: Tahlequah and Lawton, Oklahoma. He was raised inside these tribal circles and continues to reside there today. He is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma from his mother (Hokeah and Stopp families), and he has Mexican heritage from his father (Chavez family) who emigrated from Aldama, Chihuahua, Mexico.
BRIAN EVENSON is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press 2016) and the novella The Warren (Tor.com 2016). He has also recently published Windeye (Coffee House Press 2012) and Immobility (Tor 2012), both of which were finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann's Tongue. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, Manuela Draeger, and David B. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated into Czech, French, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Persian, Russia, Spanish, Slovenian, and Turkish. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.
Caitlin Horrocks is author of the novel The Vexations (Little, Brown), named one of the Ten Best Books of 2019 by the Wall Street Journal. Her story collection This Is Not Your City was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Another story collection, Life Among the Terranauts, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2021. Her stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, Tin House, and One Story, as well as other journals and anthologies. Her awards include the Plimpton Prize and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony. She is on the advisory board of the Kenyon Review, where she recently served as fiction editor. She teaches at Grand Valley State University and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with her family.
Khadijah Queen, PhD, is the author of six books, including I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (2017), praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating,” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out. An essay about the pandemic, “False Dawn,” appears in Harper’s Magazine. Her latest book, Anodyne, was published in August 2020 by Tin House.
Howard Axelrod is the author of The Stars in Our Pockets (2020) and The Point of Vanishing (2015), which was named one of the best books of 2015 by Slate, the Chicago Tribune, and Entropy Magazine. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, O Magazine, Politico, Salon, the Paris Review online, and VQR. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Loyola University in Chicago.
Danielle Geller is a writer of personal essays and memoir. Her first book, Dog Flowers, is forthcoming from One World/Random House in 2020. She received her MFA in creative writing for nonfiction at the University of Arizona, and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award in 2016. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Brevity, and Arizona Highways,and has been anthologized in This Is the Place. She lives with her husband and two cats in British Columbia, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria. She is also a faculty mentor for the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is a member of the Navajo Nation: born to the Tsi’naajinii, born for the white man.
Justin St. Germain is the author of A Great Love Affair: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (IG Publishing, March 2021). His previous book, Son of a Gun (Random House, 2013), won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and was named a best book of the year by Amazon, Publishers Weekly, Salon, Library Journal, and BookPage, among others. His short writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Tin House, New England Review, and many other journals, and has been appeared in anthologies including Best of the West and The Pushcart Prize. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Marsh McCall Lecturer at Stanford University, and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Yaddo. He grew up in Tombstone, Arizona, “The Town Too Tough to Die,” and received his BA and MFA from the University of Arizona. He lives in Oregon, teaches at Oregon State University and the Rainier Writers Workshop, and co-hosts I'll Find Myself When I'm Dead, a podcast about the literary essay.
Courtney Zoffness won the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the largest international prize for short fiction, as well as fellowships from the Center for Fiction and MacDowell. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, The Southern Review, Longreads, and several anthologies, and she had Notable Best American Essays in 2018 and 2019. Her first book, Spilt Milk: Memoirs (McSweeney's, 3/2/21), was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by LitHub, Refinery29, The Millions, and Books Are Magic, and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. She directs the Creative Writing Program at Drew University and lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
Kathryn Nuernberger is the author the essay collections Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past and The Witch of Eye (forthcoming in 2021). She has also written the poetry collections RUE, The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. Her awards include the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an NEA fellowship, and notable essays in the Best American series.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; a hybrid-genre photo-text entitled Intimate; and six books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pant; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, which was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize, and Nightingale. Her book, The Broken Country, won the 2016 AWP Nonfiction Prize, and her newest work of nonfiction, Appropriate: A Provocation, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2021. Her work has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship Trust and various state arts councils. Her poetry has been included in multiple editions of The Best American Poetry series, and she was guest editor for Best American Poetry 2020. She is Utah’s poet laureate.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels—Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize—and a story collection, Likes. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, and TheBest American Short Stories. The recipient of an O. Henry Award, a Whiting Award, and an NEA Fellowship, she was named one of “20 Under 40” fiction writers by The New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles.
Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and The Office of Historical Corrections. She is the winner of the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow. Her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and New Stories From The South. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Bethany Maile is the author of the memoir-in-essays, Anything Will Be Easy After This: A Western Identity Crisis. Excerpts from that book have been included as Notable Selections in The Best American Essays 2012, The Best American NonRequired Reading 2012, and The Best American Essays 2015. She earned a MFA in nonfiction writing from University of Arizona and teaches writing at Boise State University. For more on her and her work, visit bethanymaile.com. (Photo cred: Daniela Maile)
Claire Meuschke is the author of Upend (Noemi Press, 2020). She lives in Oakland and is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Sarah Minor is the author of Bright Archive, a collection of visual essays (Rescue Press 2020), Slim Confessions (Noemi Press 2021) and The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated, a digital chapbook from Essay Press (2015). Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Diagram, Mid-American Review, among other journals, and was selected for the 2018 Barthelme Prize and featured in Gulf Coast. She serves as the video editor at TriQuarterly Review and as Assistant Director of the Cleveland Drafts Literary Festival. Sarah holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and a PhD from Ohio University. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she teaches as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Cleveland Institute of Art (Photo credit: Maria Rouzzo.)
David James Poissant is the author of the novel Lake Life (Simon & Schuster, 2020), a New York Times Editors' Choice Pick, Publishers Weekly Summer Read, and a Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2020. His story collection The Heaven of Animals was a winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a Florida Book Award, a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, One Story, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and in numerous textbooks and anthologies including New Stories from the South, Best New American Voices, and Best American Experimental Writing. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters.
(Photo credit: Ashley Inguanta)
Mark Polanzak is the author of the hybrid work POP! (Stillhouse Press) and the story collection, The OK End of Funny Town (BOA Editions). His fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, The American Scholar, and anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading. Mark is a founding editor for draft: the journal of process and teaches writing and literature at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He lives in Salem, MA. (photo credit: James McGraghan)
John Washington writes about immigration and border politics, as well as prisons, foreign policy, food, and fashion for various publications. He is a regular contributor to The Nation magazine and The Intercept. He has translated eight books, including Óscar Martinez's The Beast and The Hollywood Kid. The Dispossessed—a narrative take on asylum policy and its ancient history— published by Verso this year, is his first book. Find him at @jbwashing. (Photo credit: Natascha Elena Uhlmann)
