Sheila O’Connor is the author of four novels including Keeping Safe the Stars, Sparrow Road, and Where No Gods Came. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she teaches fiction at Hamline University and serves as fiction editor for Water~Stone Review. Her work has been honored with the Michigan Prize for Literary Fiction.

M. Evelina Galang, author of One Tribe, Her Wild American Self, and Angel de la Luna and the 5th Glorious Mystery, received the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award Advancing Human Rights, and is an advocate of WWII comfort women. She directs the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Miami.

Jewell Parker Rhodes is the director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Her books for youth include: Ninth Ward, which received the Coretta Scott King Honor Author Award; Sugar, a Kirkus Best Children’s Book and Junior Library Guild Selection; and Fireflies, forthcoming in 2015.

Nicole Helget is the author of The Summer of Ordinary Ways, The Turtle Catcher, Stillwater, Horse Camp, and Wonder at the Edge of the World. She teaches in North Mankato, Minnesota.

Mick Cochrane is the author of two novels for adults, Flesh Wounds and Sport, and two novels for young readers, The Girl Who Threw Butterflies and Fitz. He teaches English and directs the creative writing program at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY.