Matt Burriesci is the author of Dead White Guys: A Father, His Daughter, and the Great Books of the Western World and Nonprofit, which won the 2013 AWP Award Series for the Novel. From 1999-2011, he served in various capacities at AWP, including Acting Executive Director. He was instrumental in the development of the AWP Conference, which is now the largest literary conference in North America. He also served as Executive Director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, which bestows the largest peer-juried prize for fiction in the United States.

Sarah Gorham is the author of four collections of poetry: Bad Daughter, The Cure, The Tension Zone, and Don’t Go Back to Sleep. In 2013 she won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction for her collection of essays, Study in Perfect. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Kentucky, Connecticut, and Delaware Arts Councils, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, Yaddo, and MacDowell. In March 1994, she founded Sarabande Books, Inc., dedicated to the publication of poetry, short fiction, and essay. The press won AWP’s inaugural Small Press Publisher Award in 2013, and she now serves as President and Editor-in-Chief. 

Kirsten Kaschock is the author of three books of poetry: Unfathoms, A Beautiful Name for a Girl, and The Dottery, winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from AWP, as well as a chapbook, WindowBoxing. Her debut novel, Sleight, is a work of speculative fiction. She has earned PhDs in English and Dance from the University of Georgia and Temple University, respectively. She is the editor-in-chief of thINKing DANCE (an online consortium of Philadelphia dance writers) and is on faculty at Drexel University.

Carla Panciera is the author of the short story collection, Bewildered, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction from AWP. She is also the author of the books of poetry, One of the Cimalores, and No Day, No Dusk, No Love. She received the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Center and was the James Kilgore Tuition Scholar in nonfiction at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and she teaches high school English in Rowley, MA.