Anita Felicelli is the author of Chimerica: A Novel and the award-winning short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent. Most recently, her short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Alta Journal, Midnight Breakfast, Air/Light, and The Normal School. She has been a regular contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Review
of Books, and her nonfiction has also appeared in the Washington Post
and New York Times (Modern Love), among other places. Anita is on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle where she serves as Fiction Chair for 2022-2023. She is editor of Alta Journal‘s California Book Club. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her spouse and three children.
Henry Hoke is the author of five books, including The Groundhog Forever.
Open Throat, a novel, is forthcoming in 2023 from MCD/FSG and Picador.
His work appears in No Tokens, Electric Literature, Triangle House, Carve,
and the flash noir anthology Tiny Crimes. He edits humor at The Offing,
and lives in New York City. Born to Alabamians, he grew up in Charlottesville,
Virginia. His play At Sundown premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
and his short film Taking Shape screened on HBO. He co-created the
performance series Enter>text in Los Angeles, and has taught at CalArts
and the UVA Young Writers Workshop. He is represented by Jim Rutman
at Sterling Lord.
Louise Marburg is the author of The Truth About Me: Stories. This debut received the Independent Publishing Book Award for Short Story, short list finalist for the Foreword Indies Short Stories Book of the Year, and short list finalist for the William Saroyan International Fiction Award. Her stories have appeared in Narrative, Ploughshares, The Louisville Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Pinch, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Post Road, among other publications, and she has published two more books of stories. Louise studied design at the Kansas City Art Institute, is a graduate of New York University’s Gallatin Division, and holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. A native of Baltimore, she lives in New York City with her husband, the artist Charles Marburg.
Kevin "Mc" McIlvoy published six novels, One Kind Favor, A Waltz (Lynx House Press), The Fifth Station (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; paperback, Collier/Macmillan), Little Peg (Atheneum/Macmillan; paperback, Harper Perennial), Hyssop (TriQuarterly Books; paperback, Avon), and At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo Press); a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf Press); and a collection of prose poems and short fictions, 57 Octaves Below Middle C (Four Way Books). His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and other literary magazines. His short-short stories, poems, and prose poems have appeared in Scoundrel Time, The Collagist, Pif, Kenyon Review Online, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Prime Number, r.k.v.r.y, Willow Springs, Waxwing, and numerous other literary magazines. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction. For twenty-seven years he was fiction editor and editor in chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1987 to 2019; he taught as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008. He served as a faculty member at national conferences, including the Ropewalk Writing Conference, the Rising Stars Writing Conference, the Writers at Work Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writing Conference. He was a manuscript consultant for several university presses and other publishers. He served on the Board of Directors of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. He died September 30, 2022.
Angela Mitchell is the author of Unnatural Habitats & Other Stories. Her fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, New South, Carve, Midwestern Gothic, storySouth, and other journals. Her story, “Animal Lovers,” was awarded Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction; more recently, her work has been featured in The Best Small Fictions 2018 (Braddock Avenue Books). She was honored as a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and currently serves as fiction editor at NELLE. An eighth generation native of the Ozarks of southern Missouri,
she now lives in St. Louis with her family.
Mike Smith is the author of And There Was Evening and There Was Morning. He’s published three collections of poetry, including two from BlazeVox Books, Byron and Baghdad and Multiverse, a collection of two anagrammatic cycles. His translation of the first part of Goethe’s Faust was published by Shearsman Books in 2012. He is co-editor of the anthology Contemporary Chinese Short-Short Stories: A Parallel Test, published by Columbia University Press (October 2017). Together with software engineer Brandon Nelson, Mike created and curates The Zombie Poetry Project. He lives deep in the Mississippi Delta and directs the Honors Program at Delta State University.
Sarah Stone is the author of the novels The True Sources of the Nile (Doubleday) and Hungry Ghost Theater, a finalist for the 38th Annual
Northern California Book Awards. She is also the co-author, with Ron Nyren, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. Her work has appeared in Image, Ploughshares, StoryQuarterly, The Millions, Scoundrel Time, The Believer, and A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their
Craft, and was included in the list of distinguished stories of 2020 in The Best American Short Stories 2021, Jesmyn Ward, editor. She has written for and taught on Korean television, reported on human rights in Burundi, and looked after orphan chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute. She teaches creative writing online for Stanford Continuing Studies.
Olga Zilberbourg is the author of Like Water and Other Stories, her English-language debut that explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. Like Water was a finalist for the 2019 Foreword INDIES Book Award. She has published four books of stories in Russia, and her writing has appeared in World Literature Today, The Believer, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Together with
Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literature from the former Soviet Union. Born in Leningrad, USSR, she grew
up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and makes her home in San Francisco.
