ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Marilyn Abildskov is the author of The Men in My Country. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Georgia Review, Mississippi Review, Story, The Southern Review, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She lives in the Bay Area and teaches in the MFA Program at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Andrew Altschul is the author of the novels The Gringa, Deus Ex Machina, and Lady Lazarus. His work has appeared in Esquire, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Fence, and anthologies including Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and O. Henry Prize Stories. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he is the Literature Advisor to the DAG Foundation and Professor of English at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins with his wife, Vauhini Vara, and their son.
Born in France, Cécile Barlier has lived in the United States for over two decades, raising her family and working as an entrepreneur. Her short story collection A Gypsy’s Book of Revelations won the 2019 Grace Paley Prize for short fiction. Her work is featured in many literary journals including Bellevue Literary Review, The Emerson Review, Gone Lawn, Little Patuxent Review, New Delta Review, Penmen Review, Summerset Review, Sweet Tree Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Willow Springs and Whistling Shade.
Nancy Bell is a writer and theatre artist living in St. Louis. She is a professor of theatre at St. Louis University and an MFA candidate in creative writing at Mississippi University for Women. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in North American Review, Shenandoah, Terrain, Flyway, The Disappointed Housewife, and Passengers Journal.
Brett Berk is a journalist who writes regularly for Architectural Digest, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair. His short stories have appeared in Fiction, The Mississippi Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Midwest Review, and Eleventh Hour, and have earned him residencies at The MacDowell Colony and The Bread Loaf Writers Conference. He lives in New York City.
Mayuri Chandra lives in New Jersey, where she works as an arts nonprofit manager. She is currently at work on a novel. “Open Heart” is her first published story.
Héctor Chávez is a writer from northern México, currently based in the Netherlands. Their fiction has appeared in Queen Mob’s Tea House (now defunct). They are a 2024 alum of the Tin House Summer Workshop and the DISQUIET International Literary Program. Héctor holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University.
Acamea Deadwiler is the author of the memoir Daddy’s Little Stranger, which has been featured by Literary Hub, The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, and deemed “arresting” by The BookLife Prize. Her prose has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. Acamea holds an MFA from Randolph College, where she was selected as a Blackburn Fellow. She teaches creative writing at East-West University in Chicago.
Stanley Delgado is a graduate of New York University’s MFA program, and he is currently a Literary Arts Fellow at Montalvo’s Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program. His work has appeared in One Story, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Kelle Groom is the author of two nonfiction books: How to Live: a memoir-in-essays (Tupelo Press) and I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster). Her fifth poetry collection, Book of Miracles, will be published in the Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, Spring 2027. An NEA Fellow, Groom’s nonfiction has appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Orion, Ploughshares, River Teeth, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others.
Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of The Wonder Paradox (FSG, 2023), Doubt (Harper) and Stay (Yale). She holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Her most recent poetry book is Who Said (Copper Canyon). Hecht’s poetry appears in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, Poetry, Tin House, and The Kenyon Review. She has fiction forthcoming in Five Points.
Darren Huang is a writer of fiction and criticism based in New York. His work has been published in Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Cream City Review, Solstice, and other publications. He holds an MFA in Fiction from NYU. He is currently working on a story collection and a novel. He is also a Clinical Associate Professor in Orthodontics at NYU.
Adam Klein is the author of the Lambda Book Award-nominee The Medicine Burns; the novel Tiny Ladies; and the artist’s monograph Jerome: After the Pageant. He edited The Gifts of the State: New Writing from Afghanistan. His work has appeared in BOMB; Subtropics; Evergreen Review; the New York Times At War and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Ashoka University in Delhi.
Libby Maeve is a speculative fiction writer from the UK. She writes about pleasure, strange futures, and bodily weirdness. She is an MFA candidate at the New Writers Project, UT Austin.
Elizabeth McCracken’s nine books are Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, The Souvenir Museum, The Hero of This Book, and A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in five editions of The Best American Short Stories, and she has received three Pushcart Prizes and two National Magazine Awards.
A writer from West Virginia, Matthew Neill Null is author of Allegheny Front, Honey from the Lion, and the forthcoming novel Floodgate (Blair, August 2026). His fiction has received the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
Pathikrit grew up in Kolkata, India, and earned his MFA in fiction from the New Writers Project in Austin, TX. His work has appeared in Kweli, the New York Times and elsewhere, and has received support from the Hambidge Center and Tin House, where he was a First Book Resident in 2023. He won the 2026 Elmer Kelton Prize for Fiction and is a finalist in the Black Warrior Review’s 2026 Experimental Forms Contest.
Jean-Marie Saporito’s prose appears in Under The Gum Tree, River Teeth, Blue Mesa Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of the AWP Kurt Brown Prize, the Taos Resident Award, and has been nominated for a Pushcart. She’s currently writing a memoir that spirals around her brother’s suicide. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Heather Struck lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She teaches writing at Kingsborough Community College. Her writing has appeared in Forbes, Reuters.com, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Rutgers University–Camden.
Janet Thielke’s short stories have appeared in New England Review, Bat City Review, Fiction, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, and Ninth Letter, among others. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Vanderbilt University, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Nashville Review, and has held the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Fiction. Her collection of short stories BIG GIRLS is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins Press in fall 2026. She currently lives in LA.
Robin Tung is a Taiwanese American writer and mother who enjoys loafing around museums and bakeries in Los Angeles. Her writing has been featured in The Baltimore Review, Black Warrior Review, Third Coast Magazine, The Florida Review, and Literary Matters among others. She received an MFA from the Johns Hopkins University and works in public relations.
Julie Marie Wade’s recent collections include The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone for the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla for the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry, Fisk, By Analogy (CutBank Prose Chapbook Series, 2025), and The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her newest memoir, Other People’s Mothers, was published in September 2025 by University Press of Florida.
Jason Zencka is an author and playwright living in Syracuse, NY. His fiction and essays have been featured in One Story, StoryQuarterly, EPOCH, Five Points, Image Journal, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Marilyn Abildskov is the author of The Men in My Country. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Georgia Review, Mississippi Review, Story, The Southern Review, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She lives in the Bay Area and teaches in the MFA Program at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Andrew Altschul is the author of the novels The Gringa, Deus Ex Machina, and Lady Lazarus. His work has appeared in Esquire, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Fence, and anthologies including Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and O. Henry Prize Stories. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he is the Literature Advisor to the DAG Foundation and Professor of English at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins with his wife, Vauhini Vara, and their son.
Born in France, Cécile Barlier has lived in the United States for over two decades, raising her family and working as an entrepreneur. Her short story collection A Gypsy’s Book of Revelations won the 2019 Grace Paley Prize for short fiction. Her work is featured in many literary journals including Bellevue Literary Review, The Emerson Review, Gone Lawn, Little Patuxent Review, New Delta Review, Penmen Review, Summerset Review, Sweet Tree Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Willow Springs and Whistling Shade.
Nancy Bell is a writer and theatre artist living in St. Louis. She is a professor of theatre at St. Louis University and an MFA candidate in creative writing at Mississippi University for Women. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in North American Review, Shenandoah, Terrain, Flyway, The Disappointed Housewife, and Passengers Journal.
Brett Berk is a journalist who writes regularly for Architectural Digest, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair. His short stories have appeared in Fiction, The Mississippi Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Midwest Review, and Eleventh Hour, and have earned him residencies at The MacDowell Colony and The Bread Loaf Writers Conference. He lives in New York City.
Mayuri Chandra lives in New Jersey, where she works as an arts nonprofit manager. She is currently at work on a novel. “Open Heart” is her first published story.
Héctor Chávez is a writer from northern México, currently based in the Netherlands. Their fiction has appeared in Queen Mob’s Tea House (now defunct). They are a 2024 alum of the Tin House Summer Workshop and the DISQUIET International Literary Program. Héctor holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University.
Acamea Deadwiler is the author of the memoir Daddy’s Little Stranger, which has been featured by Literary Hub, The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, and deemed “arresting” by The BookLife Prize. Her prose has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. Acamea holds an MFA from Randolph College, where she was selected as a Blackburn Fellow. She teaches creative writing at East-West University in Chicago.
Stanley Delgado is a graduate of New York University’s MFA program, and he is currently a Literary Arts Fellow at Montalvo’s Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program. His work has appeared in One Story, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Kelle Groom is the author of two nonfiction books: How to Live: a memoir-in-essays (Tupelo Press) and I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster). Her fifth poetry collection, Book of Miracles, will be published in the Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, Spring 2027. An NEA Fellow, Groom’s nonfiction has appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Orion, Ploughshares, River Teeth, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others.
Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of The Wonder Paradox (FSG, 2023), Doubt (Harper) and Stay (Yale). She holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Her most recent poetry book is Who Said (Copper Canyon). Hecht’s poetry appears in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, Poetry, Tin House, and The Kenyon Review. She has fiction forthcoming in Five Points.
Darren Huang is a writer of fiction and criticism based in New York. His work has been published in Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Cream City Review, Solstice, and other publications. He holds an MFA in Fiction from NYU. He is currently working on a story collection and a novel. He is also a Clinical Associate Professor in Orthodontics at NYU.
Adam Klein is the author of the Lambda Book Award-nominee The Medicine Burns; the novel Tiny Ladies; and the artist’s monograph Jerome: After the Pageant. He edited The Gifts of the State: New Writing from Afghanistan. His work has appeared in BOMB; Subtropics; Evergreen Review; the New York Times At War and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Ashoka University in Delhi.
Libby Maeve is a speculative fiction writer from the UK. She writes about pleasure, strange futures, and bodily weirdness. She is an MFA candidate at the New Writers Project, UT Austin.
Elizabeth McCracken’s nine books are Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, The Souvenir Museum, The Hero of This Book, and A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in five editions of The Best American Short Stories, and she has received three Pushcart Prizes and two National Magazine Awards.
A writer from West Virginia, Matthew Neill Null is author of Allegheny Front, Honey from the Lion, and the forthcoming novel Floodgate (Blair, August 2026). His fiction has received the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
Pathikrit grew up in Kolkata, India, and earned his MFA in fiction from the New Writers Project in Austin, TX. His work has appeared in Kweli, the New York Times and elsewhere, and has received support from the Hambidge Center and Tin House, where he was a First Book Resident in 2023. He won the 2026 Elmer Kelton Prize for Fiction and is a finalist in the Black Warrior Review’s 2026 Experimental Forms Contest.
Jean-Marie Saporito’s prose appears in Under The Gum Tree, River Teeth, Blue Mesa Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of the AWP Kurt Brown Prize, the Taos Resident Award, and has been nominated for a Pushcart. She’s currently writing a memoir that spirals around her brother’s suicide. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Heather Struck lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She teaches writing at Kingsborough Community College. Her writing has appeared in Forbes, Reuters.com, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Rutgers University–Camden.
Janet Thielke’s short stories have appeared in New England Review, Bat City Review, Fiction, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, and Ninth Letter, among others. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Vanderbilt University, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Nashville Review, and has held the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Fiction. Her collection of short stories BIG GIRLS is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins Press in fall 2026. She currently lives in LA.
Robin Tung is a Taiwanese American writer and mother who enjoys loafing around museums and bakeries in Los Angeles. Her writing has been featured in The Baltimore Review, Black Warrior Review, Third Coast Magazine, The Florida Review, and Literary Matters among others. She received an MFA from the Johns Hopkins University and works in public relations.
Julie Marie Wade’s recent collections include The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone for the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla for the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry, Fisk, By Analogy (CutBank Prose Chapbook Series, 2025), and The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her newest memoir, Other People’s Mothers, was published in September 2025 by University Press of Florida.
Jason Zencka is an author and playwright living in Syracuse, NY. His fiction and essays have been featured in One Story, StoryQuarterly, EPOCH, Five Points, Image Journal, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.