Sasha West’s first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, won the National Poetry Series and a Texas Institute of Letters award. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.

James Allen Hall is the author of I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, a book of lyric essays, as well as a book of poems, Now You're the Enemy, which won awards from Lambda Literary, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He teaches at Washington College.

Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, Late Empire. She is a member of the poetry faculty for the New Writers Project and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Hasanthika Sirisena's stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Epoch, StoryQuarterly, Narrative, and other magazines. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award and the 2015 Juniper Prize for Fiction. Her short story collection The Other One was released in March 2016.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author the novel, Land of Love and Drowning, winner of the First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction and the Rosenthal Family Award of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Her collection of poems, Wife, won the 2016 Forward Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.