Gary Jackson

Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collections origin story (University of New Mexico Press, 2021) and Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf Press, 2010), which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He’s also the co-editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Publishing, 2021). His poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Sun, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Copper Nickel. The recipient of Cave Canem and Bread Loaf fellowships, he’s also been published in Shattered: The Asian American Comics Anthology and was featured in the 2013 New American Poetry Series by the Poetry Society of America. He’s an associate professor in English and creative writing at the College of Charleston where he’s currently the Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing and teaches in the MFA program and serves as the associate poetry editor at Crazyhorse.

Bret Lott

Bret Lott is the bestselling author of fourteen books, most recently the nonfiction collection Letters and Life: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian (Crossway 2013) and the novel Dead Low Tide (Random House 2012). Other books include the story collection The Difference Between Women and Men, the nonfiction book Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer’s Life, and the novels Jewel, an Oprah Book Club pick, and A Song I Knew by Heart. His work has appeared in, among other places, The Yale Review, The New York Times, The Georgia Review, Vanity Fair Online and in dozens of anthologies.

Born in Los Angeles, he received his BA in English from Cal State Long Beach in 1981, and his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1984, where he studied under James Baldwin. From 1986 to 2004 he was writer-in-residence and professor of English at The College of Charleston, leaving to take the position of editor and director of the journal The Southern Review at Louisiana State University. Three years later, in the fall of 2007, he returned to The College of Charleston and the job he most loves: teaching.

His honors include being named Fulbright Senior American Scholar and writer-in-residence to Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, speaking on Flannery O’Connor at The White House, and having served as a member of the National Council on the Arts from 2006 to 2012.

Malinda McCollum

Malinda McCollum is the author of The Surprising Place, winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review –– which awarded her the Plimpton Prize –– McSweeney’s, ZYZZYVA, Epoch, and elsewhere. Her stories have also been anthologized in The Paris Review Book of People with Problems and The Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, Deeply Misunderstood Adolescent in All of Us.

McCollum has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught at the University of Iowa, Johns Hopkins University, and Stanford University. She is an Assistant Professor and an editor at Crazyhorse.

https://malindamccollum.com

Emily Rosko

Emily Rosko's newest poetry collection is Weather Inventions (University of Akron Press, 2018). She is the author of two previous award-winning poetry collections: Prop Rockery, winner of the 2011 Akron Poetry Prize, and Raw Goods Inventory, winner of the 2005 Iowa Poetry Prize. Raw Goods Inventory also received the 2007 Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers from Shenandoah. Her other honors include: the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine, and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri and a M.F.A. from Cornell University. Her poems have been included in a variety of literary journals, such as Antioch Review, AGNI, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, Pleiades, and West Branch. Her pedagogical essays on poetic craft have been anthologized in Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook and The Working Poet II. She is the editor of A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (University of Iowa Press 2011) and is poetry editor for Crazyhorse.

https://www.erosko.com

Anthony Varallo

Anthony Varallo is the author of a novel, The Lines (University of Iowa Press), as well as four short story collections: This Day in History, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award; Out Loud, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize; Think of Me and I’ll Know (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books); and Everyone Was There, winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker “Daily Shouts,” One Story, The Sun, STORY, Gulf Coast, New England Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, and elsewhere. He earned his MFA from the University of Iowa/Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He has received an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Currently he is a professor of English at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and serves as the fiction editor of Crazyhorse.

Jonathan Bohr Heinen

Jonathan Bohr Heinen began working on literary magazines as an assistant for Cimarron Review. He has since served as managing editor for Blue Mesa Review, senior managing editor for Iron Horse Literary Review, associate fiction editor for Q Avenue Press, and has worked as a publishing consultant for the Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop’s Lit Fest and the Tomales Bay Workshops Writers Conference. Currently, he is the managing editor for Crazyhorse at the College of Charleston. His writing has appeared in The Florida Review, Arroyo, Cimarron Review, The Boiler, among others, and has received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. Beyond his writing and editing, he is a staff member at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.