Rachel Brittain is an alumna of Vanderbilt University, but currently lives and writes in Arkansas. Her short film, "The Delivery Girl," has been screened at film festivals in Los Angeles and New York, and her novelette, "End of the World Talk Show," is forthcoming in Hyperion and Theia.
Margaret Patton Chapman is the author of the novella Bell and Bargain from Rose Metal Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Diagram, The Collagist, and Prick of the Spindle, among others. She lives in Durham, NC and teaches at Elon University.
Michael Czyzniejewski's most recent collection of stories is I Will Love You For the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories (Curbside Splendor, 2015). He is an associate professor of English at Missouri State University, where he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Review and Managing and Literary Editor for Moon City Press.
Tony Eprile's novel, The Persistence of Memory, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Koret Jewish Book prize. His stories—several of which are literary homages—have appeared in Ploughshares, Agni, Story Quarterly, GlimmerTrain, Post Road, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction in Lesley University's low-residency graduate program.
Kelcey Parker Ervick spent many summers visiting her grandparents in Barnegat, NJ, gazing out at Old Barney, the distinctive red and white lighthouse across the bay. Some of the details and journal entries in her story are taken from Women Who Kept the Lights: An Illustrated History of Female Lighthouse Keepers by Mary Louise Clifford and J. Candace Clifford, which she found at her grandparents' house and "borrowed" with a promise to write a story one day. She lives in South Bend, Indiana, an hour away from Michigan City Lighthouse, where Harriet Colfax kept the light for 43 years. She is pretty sure women lighthouse keepers are the most adventurous of us all.
Kathleen Founds has worked at a nursing home, a phone bank, a South Texas middle school, and a Midwestern technical college specializing in truck-driving certificates. She got her undergraduate degree at Stanford and her MFA at Syracuse. She teaches social justice themed English classes at Cabrillo College in Watsonville, CA, and writes while her toddler is napping. Her work has been published in The Sun, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker Online, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Salon and Booth Journal. Her novel-in-stories, When Mystical Creatures Attack! won the 2014 University of Iowa Press John Simmons Short Fiction Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book.
Bryan Furuness is the author of The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson, a novel. With Michael Martone, he co-edited the anthology, Winesburg, Indiana. His stories can be found in New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. He lives in Indianapolis, where he teaches at Butler University.
Molly Gutman is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Nevada, Reno. You can find her stories and poems in Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review, Hayden's Ferry review Online, Psychopomp Magazine, The Pinch, and elsewhere.
Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat. Her stories have been selected for the 1999 volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and she is a regular contributor to O, the Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, Bark, More, and many other periodicals. A collection of autobiographical essays, A Little More About Me (W.W. Norton), was published in 1999, and a novel, Sight Hound (W.W. Norton) in 2005. Houston has edited a collection of fiction, nonfiction and poetry for Ecco Press called Women on Hunting, and written the text for a book of photographs called Men Before Ten A.M. (Beyond Words, 1996). Her novel, Contents May Have Shifted, was released in 2012 by W.W. Norton.
Kirsty Logan is the author of short story collection The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales, awarded the Polari First Book Prize and the Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection, and debut novel The Gracekeepers, awarded a Lambda Literary Award. Her most recent book, A Portable Shelter, is a collection of linked short stories inspired by Scottish folktales and was published in a limited edition with custom woodblock illustrations. Her next novel, The Gloaming, is out in May 2018. She is currently working on a collection of short horror stories, a TV pilot script, and a musical collaboration project.
Gregory Maguire is the New York Times bestselling author of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister; Lost; Mirror Mirror; and the Wicked Years, a series that includes Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. Now a beloved classic, Wicked is the basis for a blockbuster Tony Award–winning Broadway musical. Maguire has lectured on art, literature, and culture both at home and abroad. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and Esquire/Narrative. He has published 9 novels, 4 short story collections, and 5 full-length poetry collections, and a dozen chapbooks. His novel, Memphis Movie, attracted kind words from Ann Beattie, Peter Coyote, and William Hjorstberg, among others. He's been nominated for the Pushcart many times, and 2 of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. With his wife he runs a 142 year-old bookstore in Memphis. He can be found at https://coreymesler.wordpress.com.
Michael Poore is the author of the novels Reincarnation Blues (Del Rey, 2017) and Up Jumps the Devil (Ecco, 2012). His short work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Year's Best Science Fiction and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012. He lives with his wife, poet Janine Harrison, and daughter Jianna, in Highland, IN.
Edward Porter's short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, Booth, Barrelhouse, Catamaran, Best New American Voices, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD from the University of Houston. He has been a Madison, Macdowell, and Stegner Fellow, and taught creative writing at Milllsaps College. Currently he is a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University.
