Laurel Flores Fantauzzo is the author of The First Impulse. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, and Esquire Philippines. A 2016 finalist for the PEN/Fusion Award, she is a lecturer in the Writers' Centre at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

Dini Parayitam graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop with MFA in fiction. She is currently an Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where she is editing her first novel.

Lucas Mann is the author of Lord Fear: A Memoir and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere. His essays have appeared in Guernica, TriQuarterly, Slate, BuzzFeed, and The Kenyon Review. He earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Yuly Restrepo is a professor of composition and creative writing at the University of Tampa, as well as fiction editor of The Tampa Review. She is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe fellowship in 2009, and will become a MacDowell fellow in the summer of 2017. She is at work on her first novel.