Venita Blackburn received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction 2016 for her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes. She was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham and Young Lions Awards in 2018. She is an Assistant Professor of fiction at California State University, Fresno.

Anthony Varallo is the author of the short story collections Everyone Was There, This Day in History, Out Loud, and Think of Me and I'll Know. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the College of Charleston, where he is the fiction editor of Crazyhorse.

Kim Chinquee is the author of the collections Oh Baby, Pretty, Pistol, and Shot Girls. Her work has been published in journals including The Nation, NOON, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, and others. She is Senior Editor of New World Writing, and she codirects the writing major at SUNY-Buffalo State.

Sherrie Flick is the author of two short story collections: Thank Your Lucky Stars and Whiskey, Etc. Her work appears in Ploughshares, Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, and New Micro. She is series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 and teaches in Chatham University's MFA program.

Genevieve Plunkett's stories have appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017, New England Review, Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, Willow Springs, West Branch, and The Best Small Fictions.