Doug Dorst is the author of two novels, S. (with J.J. Abrams) and Alive in Necropolis, as well as a short story collection, The Surf Guru. He received an NEA Fellowship in fiction and teaches writing at Texas State University-San Marcos.

Daniel Orozco is the author of Orientation and Other Stories. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Idaho.

Ann Joslin Williams is the author of The Woman in the Woods, a collection of linked short stories, which won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, and the novel Down From Cascom Mountain. She's an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire.

Bret Lott is a novelist, memoirist, and professor of creative writing at the College of Charleston. Formerly editor of the Southern Review, he is nonfiction editor of Crazyhorse and a past member of the National Council on the Arts.

Anthony Varallo is the author of This Day in History, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and Out Loud, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. His third story collection, Think of Me and I’ll Know, was published in Fall 2013.