Lucas Mann is the author of Lord Fear: A Memoir and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere. His essays have appeared in Guernica, TriQuarterly, Slate, BuzzFeed, and The Kenyon Review. He earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Angela Pelster's essay collection Limber won the Great Lakes Colleges Award New Writer Award in Nonfiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the art of the essay. She has published in Ploughshares, LitHub, The Kenyon Review, and The Gettysburg Review, amongst others.

Sarah Viren is the author of the essay collection Mine, winner of the River Teeth Book Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Pen Art of the Essay award. Her work has appeared in the Oxford American, Guernica, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Arizona State University.

Zaina Arafat is an Arab American writer. Her work has appeared in Granta, New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Believer, BuzzFeed, and Vice. She holds an MFA from Iowa and an MA from Columbia. Her debut novel is forthcoming, and she's currently working on an essay collection.

José M Orduña is a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. His first book, The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Displacement is about race, class, and citizenship. He joined the creative writing faculty at the University of Nevada Las Vegas in 2017.