Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of God. Her essays have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Partisan Review, A Public Space, and the Wilson Quarterly. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago and is a contributing editor at A Public Space.

Colleen Kinder has written essays and articles for the New Republic, Salon, National Geographic Traveler, the New York Times, the Atlantic.com, the WSJ, Ninth Letter, A Public Space, the New York Times Magazine, and Creative Nonfiction. The author of Delaying the Real World, she teaches at Yale.

Curtis Bauer is a poet, translator, letterpress printer, chapbook publisher, and teacher. He teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University, runs Q Avenue Press, and translates for the Fishouse and Vaso Roto Editions.

Jennifer Acker is editor in chief of The Common, based at Amherst College. Her MFA is from the Bennington Writing Seminars; fiction and essays have appeared in magazines such as Slate, n+1, Guernica, the Millions, and Ploughshares. She teaches creative writing and editing at Amherst and NYU Abu Dhabi.