Jessica Barksdale’s latest novel What the Moon Did is forthcoming February 2023. Her short story collection Trick of the Porch Light will come out Fall 2023. Recently retired, she taught composition, literature, and creative writing at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California for thirty-two years and continues to teach novel writing online for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.
Edward Carey is the author of the novels Observatory Mansions, Alva and Irvin: The Twins Who Saved a City, and the YA Iremonger Trilogy, all of which he also illustrated. His novel Little has been published in 20 countries. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and at the Michener Center and the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest novel is The Swallowed Man.
Melanie Faranello’s fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and short-listed for Sarabande Books’ Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction, The Dana Awards for the Novel, and the William Faulkner Wisdom Competition and won the Marianne Russo Award for Novel-in-Progress. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Huffington Post Personal, Vestal Review, and StorySouth, among others. Recipient of a CT Artist Fellowship Award in Fiction, she is also the founder of Poetry on the Streets, LLC.
Willie Fitzgerald’s fiction has appeared in Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, Joyland Magazine, The Stranger and elsewhere. He is a 2022-2023 Writing Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, and was the inaugural Mari Sabusawa Editorial Fellow at American Short Fiction, where he is now a contributing editor.
Larry Flynn is an MFA candidate and teaching associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conferences, Columbia University’s Klingenstein Institute, and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in West Branch, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, The Normal School, and others. He is writing a collection of stories and a novel.
Summer Hammond grew up in a yellow double-wide trailer in an eastern Iowa farm town of 300. She worked alongside her dad in his carpet cleaning business. Summer earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Broad River Review, Sonora Review, and Texas Review. She was named a semifinalist for the 2022 Katherine Anne Porter Prize. “Carpet Cleaner’s Daughter” is for her father, Alan Woodford.
Rebecca Hannigan is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a fiction editor for Ecotone. Her work can be found in The Rumpus, 303 Magazine, Cosmonauts Avenue, wigleaf, and elsewhere.
Beth Uznis Johnson’s short fiction and essays have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Broad Street, Cincinnati Review, StoryQuarterly, Mississippi Review, Southwest Review, Gargoyle, The Rumpus, and Best American Essays 2018. She was the recipient of the 2017 McGinnis-Ritchie Award from Southwest Review and a finalist in the 2019 Mississippi Review fiction contest. She has an MFA in fiction from Queens University of Charlotte and writes from suburban Detroit. Her novel, Coming Clean, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing.
Elaine H. Kim is a queer Korean American fiction writer born and raised in the Midwest. She has won fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and NY Foundation for the Arts and was the Justin Chin Fellow at Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for LGBTQ Voices in 2021. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Joyland, upstreet, and elsewhere, and she has been supported by Hedgebrook, the Millay Colony and VCCA, among others. Elaine lives with her partner and their twins in Brooklyn, NY.
A. Loudermilk’s Strange Valentine won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. His poems can be found in publications like Cream City Review, Gargoyle, Smartish Pace, Tampa Review, and Tin House, and his essays in Packingtown Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, PopMatters, and the Journal of International Women’s Studies. He now works at a tea shop in Champaign-Urbana.
Bruce McKay was born in Los Angeles and grew up in LA and St. Louis. His fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, The Missouri Review, Southwest Review and other journals and magazines. He lives in Southern California with his family and teaches at the University of California, Irvine.
Chris Stuck is the author of Give My Love to the Savages: Stories, published in July 2021 by Amistad/HarperCollins. He has twice been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a Callaloo Writer’s Workshop fiction fellow, and an Oregon Literary Arts fiction fellow. He was recently a finalist for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the 2022 Oregon Book Award. A Pushcart Prize winner, he has published work in various literary journals.
Melissa Wiley is the author of Skull Cathedral, a book interweaving thoughts on the body’s vestigial organs with autobiographical fragments, which won the 2019 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Contest. Melissa passed away in 2022.
Greg Youmans is a writer and film scholar based in Washington State. This is his first published story.
Vincent Yu is the National Sales Coordinator at W.W. Norton. His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Able Muse, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. His story, “You Just Make Me So Happy,” received the Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for fiction from Ploughshares. He is working on a novel.
Edward Carey is the author of the novels Observatory Mansions, Alva and Irvin: The Twins Who Saved a City, and the YA Iremonger Trilogy, all of which he also illustrated. His novel Little has been published in 20 countries. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and at the Michener Center and the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest novel is The Swallowed Man.
Melanie Faranello’s fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and short-listed for Sarabande Books’ Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction, The Dana Awards for the Novel, and the William Faulkner Wisdom Competition and won the Marianne Russo Award for Novel-in-Progress. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Huffington Post Personal, Vestal Review, and StorySouth, among others. Recipient of a CT Artist Fellowship Award in Fiction, she is also the founder of Poetry on the Streets, LLC.
Willie Fitzgerald’s fiction has appeared in Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, Joyland Magazine, The Stranger and elsewhere. He is a 2022-2023 Writing Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, and was the inaugural Mari Sabusawa Editorial Fellow at American Short Fiction, where he is now a contributing editor.
Larry Flynn is an MFA candidate and teaching associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conferences, Columbia University’s Klingenstein Institute, and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in West Branch, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, The Normal School, and others. He is writing a collection of stories and a novel.
Summer Hammond grew up in a yellow double-wide trailer in an eastern Iowa farm town of 300. She worked alongside her dad in his carpet cleaning business. Summer earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Broad River Review, Sonora Review, and Texas Review. She was named a semifinalist for the 2022 Katherine Anne Porter Prize. “Carpet Cleaner’s Daughter” is for her father, Alan Woodford.
Rebecca Hannigan is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a fiction editor for Ecotone. Her work can be found in The Rumpus, 303 Magazine, Cosmonauts Avenue, wigleaf, and elsewhere.
Beth Uznis Johnson’s short fiction and essays have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Broad Street, Cincinnati Review, StoryQuarterly, Mississippi Review, Southwest Review, Gargoyle, The Rumpus, and Best American Essays 2018. She was the recipient of the 2017 McGinnis-Ritchie Award from Southwest Review and a finalist in the 2019 Mississippi Review fiction contest. She has an MFA in fiction from Queens University of Charlotte and writes from suburban Detroit. Her novel, Coming Clean, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing.
Elaine H. Kim is a queer Korean American fiction writer born and raised in the Midwest. She has won fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and NY Foundation for the Arts and was the Justin Chin Fellow at Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for LGBTQ Voices in 2021. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Joyland, upstreet, and elsewhere, and she has been supported by Hedgebrook, the Millay Colony and VCCA, among others. Elaine lives with her partner and their twins in Brooklyn, NY.
A. Loudermilk’s Strange Valentine won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. His poems can be found in publications like Cream City Review, Gargoyle, Smartish Pace, Tampa Review, and Tin House, and his essays in Packingtown Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, PopMatters, and the Journal of International Women’s Studies. He now works at a tea shop in Champaign-Urbana.
Bruce McKay was born in Los Angeles and grew up in LA and St. Louis. His fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, The Missouri Review, Southwest Review and other journals and magazines. He lives in Southern California with his family and teaches at the University of California, Irvine.
Chris Stuck is the author of Give My Love to the Savages: Stories, published in July 2021 by Amistad/HarperCollins. He has twice been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a Callaloo Writer’s Workshop fiction fellow, and an Oregon Literary Arts fiction fellow. He was recently a finalist for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the 2022 Oregon Book Award. A Pushcart Prize winner, he has published work in various literary journals.
Melissa Wiley is the author of Skull Cathedral, a book interweaving thoughts on the body’s vestigial organs with autobiographical fragments, which won the 2019 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Contest. Melissa passed away in 2022.
Greg Youmans is a writer and film scholar based in Washington State. This is his first published story.
Vincent Yu is the National Sales Coordinator at W.W. Norton. His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Able Muse, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. His story, “You Just Make Me So Happy,” received the Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for fiction from Ploughshares. He is working on a novel.