Michelle Brafman is the author of the novels Washing the Dead and Bertrand Court. She teaches fiction writing at the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program.

Melanie S. Hatter won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Prize for her debut novel, The Color of My Soul. She has a bachelor’s degree in mass media arts from Hampton University and a master’s in writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Suzanne Stroh's retro-radical fiction imagines gay family trees stretching back generations and even centuries. Her epic novel cycle, set in Washington and the Virginia countryside, plumbs a line from Proust through Durrell and Merrick to explore the legacies of privilege, sex, love, and loss.

Morowa Yejidé’s novel Time of the Locust was a 2012 finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, longlisted for the 2015 PEN/Bingham award, and a 2015 NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literary Work. She is currently a PEN/Faulkner Writers in Schools author.

Hananah Zaheer teaches in Dubai. She earned an MFA from the University of Maryland and is an associate fiction editor for the Potomac Review. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2014, she was a finalist for the Doris Betts Fiction Prize.