Mehdi Tavana Okasi’s work has appeared in Granta, Glimmer Train, The Iowa Review, Catapult, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and anthologies like My Shadow Is My Skin, Best New American Voices 2009, & Tremors: New Fiction from Iranian-American Writers, among others. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the National Society of Arts & Letters, & The Joyce Horton Jonson Fellowship at the Key West Literary Seminars. He was the 2011-12 Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was named a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fiction Fellow. 

Robert Wood Lynn's debut collection Mothman Apologia was selected as the winner of the 2021 Yale Younger Poets Award, and is out now from Yale University Press. A graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, he is an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University, where he taught creative writing in the undergraduate writing program. His writing has appeared in Blackbird, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, The Yale Review and other journals. His work has been recognized with awards and scholarships from the Academy of American Poets, the University of Mary Washington, the Leopardi Writers Conference and Button Poetry Press among other institutions.

Lauren Sandler is a journalist and author investigating inequality, with a focus on gender. Her most recent book is This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, a 2020 New York Times Notable Book. Sandler’s journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including Time, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and New York. She has been on staff at Salon and NPR, a columnist at HuffPost, and has held a Poynter Journalism Fellowship at Yale and a Calderwood Journalism Fellowship at MacDowell.

Eduardo C. Corral was born in Arizona, the son of Mexican immigrants. He is the author of Guillotine, published by Graywolf Press, and Slow Lightning, which won the 2011 Yale Younger Poets Prize. In addition, he's received a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Laura Kolbe is a poet, physician, and medical ethicist. Author of the poetry collection Little Pharma (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) she is writing a nonfiction book that blends memoir with the history of medicine and the arts. She studied English and American literature at Harvard and University of Cambridge before receiving her MD from University of Virginia. She practices in New York City.

Christopher Spaide is a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His book project, Lyric Togetherness, examines plural pronouns and collective voices of American poetry from 1945 to today. He earned his BA from Amherst College and Master of Studies from Oxford University. His essays, reviews, and poems have appeared in Contemporary Literature, Ploughshares, Poetry, The New Yorker (online), and The Yale Review.

 PEMI AGUDA is from Lagos, Nigeria. Her novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at University of Michigan, and was a 2021 fiction fellow with the Miami Book Fair, and a 2022 MacDowell fellow. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Granta, Zyzzyva, Tor.com, American Short Fiction, and One Story, among others.

Rob Schlegel is the author of three award-winning poetry collections. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation and The Yale Review and elsewhere. His fourth collection, Childcare, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2023. Born in Portland, Oregon, he has most recently taught at Whitman College, and in the MFA Program at Portland State University.

Maureen N. McLane  is the author of seven books of poetry, two critical monographs on British romantic poetics, and numerous essays on literature and culture. Her memoir, My Poets (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award in autobiography. Professor of English at NYU, she has taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, MIT, and the East Harlem Poetry Project.