Luanne Smith has been a creative writing and film professor at West Chester University near Philadelphia for twenty-nine years. She has published short fiction in several literary journals and is currently at work on a novel. She is also coediting an anthology of women writers on badass women.

Pam Houston is the author of five books of fiction and nonfiction including Cowboys Are My Weakness and Contents May Have Shifted. She teaches in the CW programs at the Institute for American Indian Art and UC Davis, and she directs the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. 

Jaquira Díaz is the author of Ordinary Girls, forthcoming from Algonquin, and recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Kenyon Review. Her work appears in The Best American Essays, Longreads, and The New York Times Style Magazine.

Janet Fitch