Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.
Vincent Patrick Deighan, better known by the pen name Frank Quitely, is a Scottish comic book artist. He is best known for his frequent collaborations with Grant Morrison on titles such as New X-Men, We3, All-Star Superman, and Batman and Robin, as well as his work with Mark Millar on The Authority and Jupiter's Legacy.
Hiram Frederick Moody III is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought him widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into the film The Ice Storm. Many of his works have been praised by fellow writers and critics alike.
Jonathan Daniel Hamm is an American actor and comedian. He is best known for his role as Don Draper in the period drama AMC series Mad Men (2007–2015), for which he won numerous accolades including a Primetime Emmy Award and two Golden Globe Awards.
Owen Philip King is an American author of novels and graphic novels, and a television film producer. He published his first book, We're All in This Together, in 2005 to generally positive reviews, but his first full-length novel, Double Feature, had a less enthusiastic reception. King collaborated with his father, writer Stephen King, in the writing of the women's prison novel, Sleeping Beauties and the graphic novel of the same name.
Anna Leahy is an American poet and nonfiction writer. The author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and creative writing pedagogy, Leahy directs the Tabula Poetica Center for Poetry and MFA in Creative Writing program at Chapman University in Orange, California. In 2013, she was named editor of TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics.
Greg Olear is an American novelist, journalist, and author whose work often touches on political subjects. His novels are noted for their dark humor and frequent references to pop culture. He is the LA Times best-selling author of the novels Totally Killer (2009), Fathermucker (2011), and Empress: The Secret History of Anna K (2022), as well as 2018’s non-fiction; Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia, which Salon called “required reading for all Americans.” The first two of his novels have been translated into other languages and have also been optioned for screen.
Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), Dictionary Poems, the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change, Self Storage (Ballantine) and Delta Girls (Ballantine), and her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns (Holt). She has two books forthcoming in 2017, a collection of poetry, The Selfless Bliss of the Body, and a memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis
Canteen is an English-language literary and arts magazine published twice a year. Founded in 2007 by publisher Stephen Pierson, editor-in-chief Sean Finney, executive editor Mia Lipman, and former art director Sai Sriskandarajah, the magazine asks its contributors to reveal their creative process to the reader. As described by Finney, "Canteen is the literary magazine that comes with instructions." "Canteen was born at the restaurant of the same name in San Francisco, where chef Dennis Leary hosted literary salons." The magazine has offices in Brooklyn, NY, and San Francisco, CA.
Justin Torres is an American novelist and an Assistant Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles. He won the First Novelist Award for his semi-autobiographical novel We the Animals which was also a Publishing Triangle Award finalist and a NAACP Image Award nominee. We the Animals has been adapted into a film and awarded the Next Innovator Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Torres' second novel, Blackouts, won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction.
Chris Campanioni is a first-generation American writer and the son of exiles from Cuba and Poland. He was born in Manhattan and raised in New Jersey, studied English literature and journalism at Lehigh University, and graduated from the MA program at Fordham University. He is the editor and publisher of PANK and PANK Books, and a lecturer of Latinx literature, journalism, media studies, and creative writing at Baruch College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Pace University, while serving on faculty at Yale University's Yale Writers' Workshop and the Hudson Valley Writers' Center. He is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize (2013) and the International Latino Book Award (2014). From 2014–2016, along with Puerto Rican novelist Jonathan Marcantoni, he ran the YouNiversity, a non-profit digital workshop that provided students access to and experience with the publishing industry through media professionals in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Unlike the curriculum and objectives of many MFA programs across the United States, the YouNiversity focused on several different facets of a writer's literary development, including real-time interaction with editors, literary agents, graphic artists, publishers, and other readers and writers.
Tara Ison is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
Jeanne Thornton is an American writer and copublisher of Instar Books and Rocksalt Magazine. She has received the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers. Anthologies to which she has contributed to have won a Lambda Literary Award and a Barbara Gittings Literature Award. Works she has written and edited have been finalists for Lambda Literary Awards for Debut Fiction, Transgender Fiction, and Graphic Novel. Her 2021 novel Summer Fun is a one-sided epistolary novel consisting of letters from a transgender woman in New Mexico to a fictional musician based on Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys; it won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction.
Joshua Harmon is an American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He has authored six books, including The Soft Path, The Annotated Mixtape, History of Cold Seasons, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, Scape, and Quinnehtukqut.
Steven Church is an American essayist and writer of memoir and literary nonfiction. Winner of the Glenna Luschei Prize from Prairie Schooner, Recipient of Colorado Book Award in Creative Nonfiction for The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record, "Auscultation" chosen by Edwidge Danticat for inclusion in the 2011 Best American Essays. Church is the author of The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record (2005), Theoretical Killings: Essays & Accidents (2009), The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst (2010),Ultrasonic: Essays.(2014), One with the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters between Humans and Animals (2016)
Wendy C. Ortiz is an American essayist, creative nonfiction writer, fiction writer, psychotherapist, and poet.
Kristopher Jansma is an American fiction writer and essayist. Born in the Lincroft section of Middletown Township, New Jersey, he attended Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University.
Tommy Pico is an indigenous writer, poet, and podcast host.
Elissa Washuta is a Native American author from the Cowlitz people of Washington State. She has written two memoirs about her young adulthood, Starvation Mode: a Memoir of Food, Consumption and Control and My Body is a Book of Rules, about her personal history with eating disorders and body dysmorphia. She writes about sexual assault, mental health issues as a young adult, and struggling with her identity within the Indigenous community of the Pacific Northwest Coast.
John Domini is an Italian-American author, translator and critic who has been widely published in literary and news magazines, including The Paris Review, The New York Times, Ploughshares, The Washington Post, and Literary Hub. He is the author of three short story collections, four novels, and a 2021 memoir. Domini has also published one book of criticism, one book of poetry, and a memoir translated from Italian. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Domini lives in Des Moines with his wife, the science fiction writer Lettie Prell.
