Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of three short story collections: This Life She's Chosen, Swimming With Strangers, and What We Do With the Wreckage, which won the 2017 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She teaches high school near Seattle.

Lori Ostlund’s story collection The Bigness of the World received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award. Her novel, After the Parade, was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She teaches in the Mile-High MFA program in Denver.

Amina Gautier is the author of three short-story collections: The Loss of All Lost Things, which won the Elixir Press Award; Now We Will Be Happy, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize; and At-Risk, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

Siamak Vossoughi is a writer whose collection Better Than War received a Flannery O'Connor Award in 2015. He has had some stories published in Glimmer Train, Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Bellingham Review, Washington Square, and West Branch.

Becky Mandelbaum is the author of Bad Kansas, which received the 2016 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Washington.