Anne Valente is the author of the novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, and the short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names. Her fiction appears in One Story, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and The Chicago Tribune. She teaches creative writing and literature at Hamilton College.

Laura van den Berg is the author of two short story collections, more recently The Isle of Youth, which received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and the Bard Fiction Prize, and the novel Find Me. She is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University.

Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the story collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone. His stories have appeared in Conjunctions, ZYZZYVA, Black Warrior Review, and The Fairy Tale Review, among others. He is an editor of Psychopomp magazine and an assistant professor at St. Olaf College.

Shane McCrae is the author of five full-length collections of poems—most recently, The Animal Too Big to Kill and In the Language of My Captor—as well as three chapbooks, and has received a Whiting Writer’s Award and an NEA fellowship. He teaches at Oberlin College and Spalding University.

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of Night at the Fiestas, which received a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Princeton.