Jenny Offill is an American novelist and editor. Her novel Dept. of Speculation was named one of "The 10 Best Books of 2014" by The New York Times Book Review.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Lan Samantha Chang is an American writer of novels and short stories. She is the author of The Family Chao and Hunger. For her fiction, which explores Chinese American experiences, she is a recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Berlin Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
Sigrid Nunez is an American writer, best known for her novels. Her seventh novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. She is on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Hunter College (CUNY).
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic and teacher. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Meghan O'Rourke is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic.
Chavisa Woods is a New York City-based author, and winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.
Wells Tower is an American writer of short stories, non-fiction, feature films and television. In 2009 he published his first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned to much critical acclaim. His short fiction has also been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Vice, Harper's Magazine, A Public Space, Fence and other periodicals. In 2022, he wrote the screenplay for the feature film "Pain Hustlers", starring Emily Blunt and directed by David Yates, which was bought by Netflix for $50 million.
Sharon Mesmer is a Polish-American poet, fiction writer, essayist and professor of creative writing. Her poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Vertigo Seeks Affinities, Half Angel, Half Lunch and Crossing Second Avenue. Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago, In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter. She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1988 and is a distant relative of Franz Anton Mesmer, proponent of animal magnetism and Otto Messmer, the American animator best known for creating Felix the Cat.
Idra Novey is an American novelist, poet, and translator. She translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Persian and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Danielle Evans is an American fiction writer. She is a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Iowa. In 2011, she was honored by the National Book Foundation as one of its "5 Under 35" fiction writers. Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, her first short story collection, won the 2011 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize. The collection's title echoes a line from "The Bridge Poem," from Kate Rushin's collection The Black Back-Ups. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Lydia Peelle observed that the stories "evoke the thrill of an all-night conversation with your hip, frank, funny college roommate."
Lenore Malen is an American artist who creates video installations, photography, and performance. Malen was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and a NYFA Grant in Interdisciplinary Art in 2009.
Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year,The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.
Roberta Allen is a conceptual artist and fiction writer. Her interest in language is the bridge that connects these separate pursuits. As a conceptual artist who combines images and text, she explores how language changes or informs our perception of images. Her works included drawings, artist books, photo/text works, installations, digital prints, and sculpture. Her works in the early 1970s were inspired by Kierkegaard’s belief that our deepest experiences occur in the form of contradictions and wherever there is contradiction humor is present. Through the 1970s, she exhibited alongside Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman and Carl Andre, among others, at John Weber Gallery in New York. In her writing, which includes, among other books, three micro and short story collections, a novel, a novella and a travel memoir, Allen questions the way we perceive the world and the self. Truths are relative and may change in a flash. The way our minds work and specifically the act of relating is her main subject. She presents disturbing views of the human scene which are often relieved by humor.
Brigid Hughes is a New York City-based literary editor. Hughes is best known for succeeding George Plimpton as the editor of the literary magazine The Paris Review after his death in 2003 and for founding the literary magazine A Public Space in 2006.
Kaya Press is an independent non-profit publisher of writers of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. Founded in 1994 by the postmodern Korean writer Soo Kyung Kim, Kaya Press is currently housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Patricia Engel is a Colombian-American writer and author of Vida, which was a PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award Finalist and winner of the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana, Colombia's national prize in literature. She was the first woman, and Vida the first book in translation, to receive the prize. She is also the author of It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, and the novel The Veins of the Ocean, which won the 2017 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The San Francisco Chronicle called Engel "a unique and necessary voice for the Americas."
Fatima Farheen Mirza is an American novelist best known for her novel A Place for Us (2018), which was a New York Times Best Seller. She was also honored by the National Book Award Foundation as a "5 Under 35" Honoree in 2020.
