Lynn Pruett has published a novel, stories, and essays in Michigan Quarterly Review, Border Crossing, Southern Exposure, Arts & Letters, and Farmer's Pride. She's received the Al Smith Fellowship, the Joanna Scott Award, and a residency at Yaddo. She teaches in the low-residency program at Murray State University.

Lorraine M. López, Gertrude Conaway Chair, teaches in the MFA Program at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of six books of fiction, editor or coeditor of three essay collections, and associate editor of the Afro-Hispanic Review. Her most recent publication is The Darling, a novel.

Elena Britos is a second year MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University, and she is the fiction editor of the Nashville Review. Elena received her BA from Bowdoin College. She teaches undergraduate creative writing at Vanderbilt, as well as workshops for teens and adults at GrubStreet in Boston.

Joy Castro is the author of the literary thrillers Hell or High Water and Nearer Home, the memoirs The Truth Book and Island of Bones, and the short fiction collection How Winter Began. Editor of the collection Family Trouble, she teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Lee Conell's debut story collection Subcortical was recently awarded the 2018 Story Prize Spotlight Award and an Independent Book Publishers Award. Her fiction has received the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award and appeared in Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and Guernica.