Josh Weil is the author of the novel The Great Glass Sea and the novella collection The New Valley, a New York Times Editors' Choice that won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a "5 Under 35" award from the National Book Foundation.

Beth Ann Fennelly directs the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. The winner of a Pushcart, an NEA, and a US Artist Grant, she has published three books of poems and a book of nonfiction. Her most recent book is The Tilted World, a novel she co-wrote with her husband.

Peter Mountford's novel A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism won the 2012 Washington State Book Award. His second novel The Dismal Science was published in 2014. A 2013-14 writer in residence at the Richard Hugo House, his essays and fiction have been in the Atlantic, Granta, and Boston Review.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of How to Escape from a Leper Colony. Her writing has won a BOCAS Fiction Prize, the Boston Review Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright scholarship, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is a professor at the New School.

Philip Graham is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, and McSweeney's. He teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in writing program, and is a co-founder and an editor of Ninth Letter.