Susan Orlean is an American journalist, television writer, and bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, and has contributed articles to many magazines including Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Outside. In 2021, Orlean joined the writing team of HBO comedy series How To with John Wilson.
Francesca Lia Block is an American writer of adult and young-adult literature. She wrote the Weetzie Bat series, which she began while a student at UC Berkeley.
Aimee Bender is an American novelist and short story writer, known for her surreal stories and characters. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards.
Dennis Lehane is an American author. He has published more than a dozen novels; the first several were a series of mysteries featuring recurring characters, including A Drink Before the War. Four of his novels have been adapted into films of the same names: Clint Eastwood's Mystic River (2003), Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010), and Gone Baby Gone (2007) and Live by Night (2016), both directed by Ben Affleck. His short story "Animal Rescue" was also adapted into the film The Drop, noted for being the final film role for actor James Gandolfini.
Tananarive Priscilla Due is an American author and educator. Due won the American Book Award for her novel The Living Blood (2001), and both the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel and Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel for her novel The Reformatory (2023). She is also known as a film historian with expertise in Black horror. Due teaches a course at UCLA called "The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and the Black Horror Aesthetic", which focuses on the Jordan Peele film Get Out.
Dan Chaon is an American writer. Formerly a creative writing professor, he is the author of three short story collections and four novels.
Andy Duncan is an American science fiction and fantasy writer whose work frequently deals with Southern U.S. themes.
Christine Schutt, an American novelist and short story writer, has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She received her BA and MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and her MFA from Columbia University. She is also a senior editor at NOON, the literary annual published by Diane Williams.
C. Dale Young is an American poet and writer, physician, editor and educator of Asian and Latino descent.
Karen Russell is an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2009 the National Book Foundation named Russell a 5 under 35 honoree. She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 2013.
Adam Johnson is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master's Son, and the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection Fortune Smiles. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing.
Will Ludwigsen is an American writer of horror, mystery, and science fiction. His work has appeared in a number of magazines including Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales, and Strange Horizons. He has also published three collections, including the highly praised In Search Of and Others.
Christopher Buehlman is an American novelist, comedian, playwright, and poet from St. Petersburg, Florida.
Frank Giampietro is an American poet. He is interim director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, visiting assistant professor of poetry at Cleveland State University, and the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program (NEOMFA) program. He is author of Begin Anywhere. He was the 2010-2012 resident scholar at The Southern Review and has had poems, book reviews, and nonfiction published in many literary journals and magazines including 32 Poems, Cimarron ReviewColumbia Poetry Review, CutBank, Exquisite Corpse, Fence, Hayden's Ferry Review, Ploughshares, Cimarron Review and Rain Taxi. His honors include a 2008 Florida Book Award, a fellowship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Kingsbury Fellowship from Florida State University. He is creator and editor of two literary websites, La Fovea and Poems by Heart. Giampietro earned an MA from Washington College, an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a PhD in English from Florida State University. He lives in Farmington, Maine with his wife, the potter, Cherie Giampietro and two children.
The Shirley Jackson Awards are literary awards named after Shirley Jackson in recognition of her legacy in writing. These awards for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror and dark fantasy are presented at Readercon, an annual conference on imaginative literature.
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth is the debut short story collection of Kevin Wilson, published in April 2009 by Ecco/HarperCollins.
Susan Scarf Merrell is an American author who has published novels, short stories, and essays. Her second novel, Shirley, about a young woman who goes to live with novelist Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman in their Bennington home in 1964, was published June 12, 2014 by Blue Rider/Penguin Books.
Amelia Gray is an American writer. She is the author of the short story collections AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, and Gutshot, and the novels THREATS, and Isadora. Gray has been shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and her television writing has been nominated for a WGA Award.
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, 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.
Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for The Atlantic, Time (magazine), The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, and other places. She was an editor at theKenyon Reviewand a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University's MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has taught creative writing at Colorado State University's MFA program, Randolph College's low-residency MFA program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kenyon College. Díaz lives in New York with her spouse, British writer Lars Horn, and is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.
