Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, and co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins 2024). She is the recipient of a 2024 Pushcart. She was a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently she is a critic-at-large for Poetry Northwest, and she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.
Ben Purkert is the author of the debut novel The Men Can’t Be Saved, named one of Vanity Fair‘s Top 20 Books of 2023, and the poetry collection For the Love of Endings. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and he’s been featured by NPR, Esquire, and The Boston Globe. He holds degrees from Harvard and NYU, where he was a New York Times Fellow. He teaches in the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program.
Tessa Fontaine is the author of THE ELECTRIC WOMAN: A MEMOIR IN DEATH-DEFYING ACTS (FSG 2018), a New York Times Editors’ Choice; Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and best book of the year by Southern Living, Refinery29, Amazon Editors’, and The New York Post.
THE RED GROVE (FSG 2024), her debut novel, was named a best book by Amazon Editors’ and People Magazine, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
Other writing can be found in Outside, The New York Times, Glamour, AGNI, The Believer, People, LitHub, Creative Nonfiction, and more. Raised outside San Francisco, Tessa has an MFA from the University of Alabama and founded Salt Lake City’s Writers in the Schools program. She has taught at Warren Wilson College and in jails and prisons around the country. She has received awards and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Writing by Writers, and more. Along with writer and pal Annie Hartnett, she co-founded and runs the Accountability Workshops, and lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her daughter, silly dog and sassy cat.
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He is the author of a new, critically acclaimed novel, The Road to the Salt Sea, a finalist for the International Book awards, and currently longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize. His work has appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, Image Journal, and other literary publications. He has received numerous residencies and fellowships and has been a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing, Graywolf Press Africa Prize, and UK’s The First Novel Prize. He won an Editor-Writer Mentorship Program Award for Diverse Writers. He studied at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa; is graduate of the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts; and earned his PhD in English and Creative Writing from Georgia State University. He has taught creative writing in Africa, Sweden, and the United States and was visiting faculty at Vermont College of Fine Art’s MFA in Creative Writing. He currently teaches fiction writing as an Assistant Professor of English and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University and as Fiction Faculty in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels (Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award; and Blue-Skinned Gods, which was an Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), two graphic novels (Shakti and Tall Water), one collection of short stories (The Goth House Experiment, which won The Story Prize Spotlight Award), and two award-winning hybrid chapbooks (I Once Met You But You Were Dead and Dominant Genes). Sindu’s work has been featured in Electric Literature, Best American Experimental Fiction, and Brevity, among others. Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University and is a co-editor for Zero Street, a literary fiction series featuring LGBTQ+ books published by the University of Nebraska Press. Sindu is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Dan Chaon’s most recent book is Sleepwalk (2022.) He is the author of six previous books, including Ill Will, a national bestseller, named one of the ten best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize; the national bestseller Await Your Reply; and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and the O.Henry Collection. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction and the Shirley Jackson Award, and he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland.
Deepa Anappara’s first novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time and NPR. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature. It has been translated into over twenty languages. Anappara is the co-editor of Letters to a Writer of Colour, a collection of personal essays on fiction, race, and culture, published in March 2023. Her second novel, The Last of Earth, will be published in 2025. Anappara has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative-Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She previously worked as a journalist in India, where she lived until moving to the UK. She now teaches creative writing in London.
Tim Horvath is the author of Understories (Bellevue Literary Press), which won the New Hampshire Literary Award, and Circulation (sunnyoutside). His fiction appears in or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, AGNI, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Best Small Fictions 2021, and elsewhere; his reviews appear in Georgia Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and American Book Review. He teaches at Phillips Exeter and in the Stony Brook MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literature, as well as GrubStreet. He is a Senior Editor at Conjunctions and a co-founder of One Book, One Manchester. He is currently working on a novel called The Spinal Descent, an excerpt of which can be found in Ten Piscataqua Writers 2023.
Edie Meidav is the author of novels such as Lola,California (FSG) and Crawl Space (FSG), story collections, and the recent hybrid lyric novel, Another Love Discourse (MIT Press/2022), which won the Big Other Fiction prize. Her work has received the Bard Fiction Prize for writers under 40, the Kafka Award for best novel by an American women, the Howard Fellowship, support from Lannan, Whiting, and Fulbright organizations (Sri Lanka, Cyprus), and elsewhere, and has been called an editorial pick by the New York Times, the L.A. Times and elsewhere. She directs the MFA for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst where she is provost professor.
Fernanda Eberstadt has published five novels and two books of non-fiction. Her most recent book, BITE YOUR FRIENDS: STORIES OF THE BODY MILITANT, was published by Europa Editions in the US and the UK in March 2024. She writes for publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Vogue, frieze, Granta, and Literary Hub, and is an editor at large for the European Review of Books. She got a BA and an MA in English Language and Literature from Magdalen College, Oxford, and has taught at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zelle MFA program. She lives in London.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
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