Noel Alumit was born in Baguio City, the Philippines. He grew up in Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles. He wrote the novels Letters to Montgomery Clift and Talking to the Moon, a Los Angeles Times Bestseller. He is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel. “The Positive Effects of Yoga” is dedicated to Paulette Ruth Katz.
Kathy Anderson is the author of the short story collection, Bull and Other Stories (Autumn House Press, 2016), which won the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, was longlisted for The Story Prize, and was a finalist for Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the Lambda Literary Awards. Her home is in Philadelphia, where she is working on a second collection and a novel.
Sophie Braxton is 20 and lives in Atlanta, Georgia where she writes and works at a grocery store. Her work has been published in Into The Void, The Southampton Review, and other places.
Asher Dark is a writer and VHS collector from New Jersey. He received his MFA from the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in The Baffler.
Nina de Gramont is the author of nine books, including The Christie Affair, which is forthcoming with St. Martin's Press in 2022. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Viet Dinh was born in Vietnam and grew up in Colorado. He attended Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston and currently teaches at the University of Delaware. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Delaware Division of the Arts, as well as two O. Henry Prizes and the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction from Ploughshares. His stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Witness, Fence, Five Points, Threepenny Review, and Best American Non-Required Reading 2017. His debut novel, After Disasters, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize, was released in 2016.
Jim Flanagan is currently a candidate for his MFA in creative writing at UMass Boston. He is a North Carolina transplant to Boston, Massachusetts and has lived in the city’s South End neighborhood for the last twenty-five years. This is his first published short story.
Beatrice Baltuck Garrard holds an MFA from the University of Montana and a history degree from Stanford University. Fresh out of college, she ventured to Mongolia as a Fulbright scholar. Now she reads history for the weird footnotes. Her work has appeared in The Jewish Quarterly and received the International Amy Levy Short Story Prize. She was also a 2020 Summer Fishtrap Fellow.
Garth Greenwell is the author most recently of Cleanness, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, has been longlisted for France’s Prix Sade, and is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he recently received the 2021 Vursell Award for distinguished prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Iowa City.
Michelle Gurule is a queer, biracial writer from Denver, Colorado. She is a third-year MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was Blue Mesa Review’s 2019-2020 nonfiction editor. Her nonfiction has been published or is forthcoming in Homology, Drunk Monkeys, Pangyrus, Alien, and Stirring lit mags. Michelle is currently working on a memoir.
Kathleen Heil is a poet-writer-translator and choreographer-dancer-performer. Her work appears in The New Yorker, Fence, The Threepenny Review, and many other journals.
Rachel Howard is the author of a novel, The Risk of Us, and a memoir, The Lost Night. Her short fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, ZYZZYVA, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast, and other publications. She currently lives, writes, and teaches in Nevada City, California.
Miah Jeffra is author of The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (Sibling Rivalry 2020), The Violence Almanac (Black Lawrence 2021), the chapbook The First Church of What's Happening (Nomadic 2017), and co-editor, with Arisa White and Monique Mero, of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter 2021). Miah is co-founder of Whiting Award-winning queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.
Chaney Kwak is the author of The Passenger: How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship (Godine, 2021). His writing has appeared in ZYZZYVA, The New York Times, Travel + Leisure, and other publications. A recipient of the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award, Chaney lives in San Francisco.
T Kira Mahealani Madden is a writer, amateur magician, and the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a journal of literature and art. She is the author of the 2019 memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, which was a New York Times Editors' Choice, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award John Leonard Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. She builds programming for incarcerated and unhoused individuals and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
James Magruder is the author of three books of fiction (Sugarless, Let Me See It, and Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall) and two Broadway musicals (Triumph of Love and Head Over Heels). His latest novel, Vamp Until Ready, will be published at the end of 2021.
Cassie Mannes Murray is currently a literary agent at Howland Literary, and does graphic interior book design for Ecotone and Lookout Books. Her writing can be found in Passages North, The Rumpus, Fugue and Hobart. She has been supported by Kenyon Writers Workshop, Sundress Academy, the Shannon Morton Fellowship, and the Ralph Brauer Fellowship. Her essay “Love in the Belly of Beginning” is a notable in Best American Essays 2020.
Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016), and four chapbooks. In 2019, she received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She co-curates the Rivertown Reading Series, Exit 7, and two awesome daughters.
J. E. Sills is a former journalist and writing teacher living in New York City. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, McSweeney’s, Auburn Avenue and upstreet. She's the recipient of writing fellowships and residencies including Kimbilio, Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Conference and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is a NEH Fellow, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Ernest J. Gaines and the Southern Experience.
Chris Stuck earned an MFA from George Mason University. He’s twice been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a Callaloo Writer’s Workshop fiction fellow, and a 2019 Oregon Literary Arts fiction fellow. He is a Pushcart Prize winner, and his stories have been published in various literary journals. His debut short story collection, Give My Love to the Savages, will be published by Amistad/HarperCollins in July 2021.
Anthony Tognazzini's recent work has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, Crazyhorse, and TriQuarterly, among other journals, as well as on NPR's Selected Shorts and in Norton's 2018 anthology New Micro. His fiction collection, I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket for Occasions Such As These, was published by BOA Editions. He's received fellowships from Yaddo, VCCA, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and an Individual Excellence grant from the Ohio Arts Council. He lives in Ohio with his wife, the poet Robin Beth Schaer, and their son Faro.
Rachel Toliver’s work has appeared in Speculative Nonfiction, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Creative Nonfiction, West Branch, The New Republic, Brevity, and other journals. Her essay, “Catharsis, Diagnosis,” won the Chattahoochee Review’s 2019 Lamar York Prize. A winner of the 2017 AWP Intro Journals Project, she holds an MFA in nonfiction from Ohio State University. She was the 2018-2019 Milton Fellow with Image journal.
Kathy Anderson is the author of the short story collection, Bull and Other Stories (Autumn House Press, 2016), which won the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, was longlisted for The Story Prize, and was a finalist for Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the Lambda Literary Awards. Her home is in Philadelphia, where she is working on a second collection and a novel.
Sophie Braxton is 20 and lives in Atlanta, Georgia where she writes and works at a grocery store. Her work has been published in Into The Void, The Southampton Review, and other places.
Asher Dark is a writer and VHS collector from New Jersey. He received his MFA from the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in The Baffler.
Nina de Gramont is the author of nine books, including The Christie Affair, which is forthcoming with St. Martin's Press in 2022. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Viet Dinh was born in Vietnam and grew up in Colorado. He attended Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston and currently teaches at the University of Delaware. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Delaware Division of the Arts, as well as two O. Henry Prizes and the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction from Ploughshares. His stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Witness, Fence, Five Points, Threepenny Review, and Best American Non-Required Reading 2017. His debut novel, After Disasters, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize, was released in 2016.
Jim Flanagan is currently a candidate for his MFA in creative writing at UMass Boston. He is a North Carolina transplant to Boston, Massachusetts and has lived in the city’s South End neighborhood for the last twenty-five years. This is his first published short story.
Beatrice Baltuck Garrard holds an MFA from the University of Montana and a history degree from Stanford University. Fresh out of college, she ventured to Mongolia as a Fulbright scholar. Now she reads history for the weird footnotes. Her work has appeared in The Jewish Quarterly and received the International Amy Levy Short Story Prize. She was also a 2020 Summer Fishtrap Fellow.
Garth Greenwell is the author most recently of Cleanness, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, has been longlisted for France’s Prix Sade, and is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he recently received the 2021 Vursell Award for distinguished prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Iowa City.
Michelle Gurule is a queer, biracial writer from Denver, Colorado. She is a third-year MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was Blue Mesa Review’s 2019-2020 nonfiction editor. Her nonfiction has been published or is forthcoming in Homology, Drunk Monkeys, Pangyrus, Alien, and Stirring lit mags. Michelle is currently working on a memoir.
Kathleen Heil is a poet-writer-translator and choreographer-dancer-performer. Her work appears in The New Yorker, Fence, The Threepenny Review, and many other journals.
Rachel Howard is the author of a novel, The Risk of Us, and a memoir, The Lost Night. Her short fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, ZYZZYVA, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast, and other publications. She currently lives, writes, and teaches in Nevada City, California.
Miah Jeffra is author of The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (Sibling Rivalry 2020), The Violence Almanac (Black Lawrence 2021), the chapbook The First Church of What's Happening (Nomadic 2017), and co-editor, with Arisa White and Monique Mero, of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter 2021). Miah is co-founder of Whiting Award-winning queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.
Chaney Kwak is the author of The Passenger: How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship (Godine, 2021). His writing has appeared in ZYZZYVA, The New York Times, Travel + Leisure, and other publications. A recipient of the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award, Chaney lives in San Francisco.
T Kira Mahealani Madden is a writer, amateur magician, and the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a journal of literature and art. She is the author of the 2019 memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, which was a New York Times Editors' Choice, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award John Leonard Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. She builds programming for incarcerated and unhoused individuals and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
James Magruder is the author of three books of fiction (Sugarless, Let Me See It, and Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall) and two Broadway musicals (Triumph of Love and Head Over Heels). His latest novel, Vamp Until Ready, will be published at the end of 2021.
Cassie Mannes Murray is currently a literary agent at Howland Literary, and does graphic interior book design for Ecotone and Lookout Books. Her writing can be found in Passages North, The Rumpus, Fugue and Hobart. She has been supported by Kenyon Writers Workshop, Sundress Academy, the Shannon Morton Fellowship, and the Ralph Brauer Fellowship. Her essay “Love in the Belly of Beginning” is a notable in Best American Essays 2020.
Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016), and four chapbooks. In 2019, she received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She co-curates the Rivertown Reading Series, Exit 7, and two awesome daughters.
J. E. Sills is a former journalist and writing teacher living in New York City. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, McSweeney’s, Auburn Avenue and upstreet. She's the recipient of writing fellowships and residencies including Kimbilio, Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Conference and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is a NEH Fellow, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Ernest J. Gaines and the Southern Experience.
Chris Stuck earned an MFA from George Mason University. He’s twice been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a Callaloo Writer’s Workshop fiction fellow, and a 2019 Oregon Literary Arts fiction fellow. He is a Pushcart Prize winner, and his stories have been published in various literary journals. His debut short story collection, Give My Love to the Savages, will be published by Amistad/HarperCollins in July 2021.
Anthony Tognazzini's recent work has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, Crazyhorse, and TriQuarterly, among other journals, as well as on NPR's Selected Shorts and in Norton's 2018 anthology New Micro. His fiction collection, I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket for Occasions Such As These, was published by BOA Editions. He's received fellowships from Yaddo, VCCA, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and an Individual Excellence grant from the Ohio Arts Council. He lives in Ohio with his wife, the poet Robin Beth Schaer, and their son Faro.
Rachel Toliver’s work has appeared in Speculative Nonfiction, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Creative Nonfiction, West Branch, The New Republic, Brevity, and other journals. Her essay, “Catharsis, Diagnosis,” won the Chattahoochee Review’s 2019 Lamar York Prize. A winner of the 2017 AWP Intro Journals Project, she holds an MFA in nonfiction from Ohio State University. She was the 2018-2019 Milton Fellow with Image journal.