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.
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.
Rita Banerjee is editor of Disobedient Futures (University Press of Kentucky, forthcoming) and the author of the poetry collections Echo in Four Beats, which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018,” and Cracklers at Night. She is also editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, and author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and has taught creative writing, pedagogy, publishing, foreign language, and literature courses at Harvard, UC Berkeley, LMU Munich, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and elsewhere. She received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University and is a recipient of the Tom and Laurel Nebel Fellowship, South Asia Initiative Grants, and Tata Grants among other awards. She serves as Editor-at-Large of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Her work appears in Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, VIDA, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto Merchants of Cool: How Female Cool Could Not Be Sold, and one of the opening chapters of this new memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays, and another chapter from her new memoir, “The Female Gaze,” was a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Christopher Castellani’s fourth novel, Leading Men — for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the MacDowell Colony — was published by Viking in February 2019. His collection of essays on point of view in fiction, The Art of Perspective, was published by Graywolf in 2016. His three previous novels, a trilogy that follows an immigrant Italian family, were published by Algonquin. Castellani has just finished his two-year term as the Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, and has been a fiction supervisor and frequent member of the academic board at Warren Wilson since 2008. In 2024, he was awarded a Literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives mostly in Provincetown, MA.
Peter Orner is the author of Maggie Brown & Others, a novella and stories, two story collections, Esther Stories and Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, two novels, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love, and a book of essays/ memoir, Am I Alone Here?, a Finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. A new collection of essays, Still No Word From You: Notes in the Margin came out in October, 2022. Peter is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and Fulbright Foundations, and his fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Granta, and Best American Stories. Peter has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Northwestern, the University of Montana, Bard College, Charles University (Prague), the University of Namibia, and San Francisco State University. He currently directs the Creative Writing program at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont.
Hanna Pylväinen is the author of the novel We Sinners, which received the 2012 Whiting Award, and the novel The End of Drum-Time, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and LitHub. She is the recipient of residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Lásságámmi Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others.
Dominic Smith is the author of six novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and published in more than a dozen countries. His latest novel, Return to Valetto—set in the world of abandoned and dwindling Italian towns and villages—was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in June 2023 and received the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for Fiction. Dominic’s short stories, essays and criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Australian. A graduate of the University of Iowa and the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, Dominic is the recipient of the Australian Indie Book of the Year Award, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Australian Council for the Arts. He grew up in Australia and currently lives in Seattle.
Lesley Nneka Arimah is the author of What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, a collection of short stories from Riverhead Books. Her collection was named one of the best books of 2017 by NPR, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, Shelf Awareness, LitHub, and more. Her stories have been honored with a National Magazine Award, the Caine Prize, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and an O. Henry Award. Arimah’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and GRANTA among other publications, and has received support from The Elizabeth George Foundation, MacDowell, Breadloaf and others. What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and won the 2017 Kirkus Prize, the 2018 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club among other honors. Arimah is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Writing. She lives in the Midwest and is working on a novel about you.
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