Steven Kleinman is the author of Life Cycle of a Bear, Winner of the 2019 Philip Levine Poetry Prize. His writing has appeared in the journals Copper Nickel, The American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, the Beloit Poetry Review and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in the anthologies Best American Poetry, 2020 and Ensnaring the Moment. He lives in Philadelphia where he is a contributing editor at the American Poetry Review, and co-host of the American Poetry Review Podcast.
Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of the story collection Heads of the Colored People, which won the 2019 PEN Open Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, The Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award. It was also long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review Daily, Dissent, The Root, Buzzfeed Books, The White Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and other publications. She earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and currently serves as the Richards Family Assistant Professor at Cornell University.
Elena Passarello is the recipient of a Whiting Award, the Oregon Book Award, and the Blackwell Prize. Her essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been translated into six languages. She is the author of two collections, the most recent of which, Animals Strike Curious Poses, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. It made the best-of-year lists from several publications including the Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, and the New York Times Book Review. Her reviews and features have appeared in the McSweeney’s, National Geographic, Paris Review, Oxford American, Audubon, and the Best American Science and Nature Writing. In 2019, Outside named her one of the “25 Essential Women Authors Writing about the Wild.”
Elena appears weekly on over 200 radio stations as a part of PRX’s culture and variety program LiveWire! She is on the MFA faculty at Oregon State University, and she also leads nonfiction workshops at the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Kenyon Adult Writing Workshops. Her next book, on Elvis Presley’s motley film career, will be released by Penguin Press in 2027.
Beth Nguyen is the author of the memoirs Owner of a Lonely Heart and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, and the novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Book Award, and her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Essays. Nguyen is a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices Elle, the Prix des Libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. It has been translated into 11 languages and optioned for television. Their essays appear in the 2020 and 2022 editions of Best American Essays as well as in The New York Times, Harper’s, Agni, Yale Review, and many other publications. The recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Black Mountain Institute, and the Camargo Foundation, and a three-time fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo, they live in Vancouver, where they are the Rogers Communications Chair in Creative Nonfiction at the University of British Columbia. Marzano-Lesnevich’s next book is the transgender and trans-genre memoir Both and Neither, forthcoming from Doubleday and publishers internationally.
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.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
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