Joanna Eleftheriou teaches creative wriing at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, which offers a masters degre in literature to incarcerated men in a Texas state prison. Her translations, fiction, essays, and poetry appear in journals including Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, and Crab Orchard Review.

Kimberly Meyer’s memoir, The Book of Wanderings, recalls the journey she and her daughter made by retracing a medieval pilgrimage route to the Holy Land and St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert in the days after the Arab Spring. She teaches at the University of Houston's Honors College.

Beth Peterson is a nonfiction writer and assistant professor of writing at Grand Valley State University. A wilderness guide before she began writing, Beth is finishing her first book of lyric essays, set in a disappearing glacial landscape in Norway.

Brit Bennett earned her MFA in fiction at the Helen Zell Writers' Program. Her essays appear at the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, and Jezebel. She recently published her debut novel, The Mothers.

Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of The Green Shore. Her work has appeared in Tin House, VQR, Salon, The New York Times, Granta, O. Henry Prize Stories, and other publications. She has received fellowships from the Camargo and Macdowell foundations and was a 2015 Fulbright Scholar in Athens, Greece.