Barry Hannah was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi. Hannah was born in Meridian, Mississippi, on April 23, 1942, and grew up in Clinton, Mississippi. He wrote eight novels and five short story collections.
Rob Roberge is an American writer, guitarist, singer, and writing and narrative theory professor researcher and developer.
John Fulton is an American author based in Boston, Massachusetts, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He grew up in Utah and Montana, studied at Whitman College, and lived in Europe for five years. He is a 1997 graduate of the University of Michigan Creative Writing MFA Program. His story collection, The Animal Girl, was published in 2007 by Louisiana State University Press. He is the author of Retribution, which won the 2001 Southern Review Short Fiction Award for the best first collection of short stories. His novel, More Than Enough, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a finalist for the Midland Society of Authors Award. His work has appeared in Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The Southern Review. His short story “Hunters” won a 2006 Pushcart Prize. John was the recipient of a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing.
Don Lee is an American novelist, fiction writer, literary journal editor, and creative writing professor.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Tod Goldberg is an American author and journalist best known for his novels Gangsters Don't Die (Counterpoint), Gangster Nation (Counterpoint), Gangsterland (Counterpoint) and Living Dead Girl, the popular Burn Notice series (Penguin/NAL) and the short story collection The Low Desert: Gangster Stories (Counterpoint).
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.
Peter Orner is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, two story collections and a book of essays. Orner holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He spent 2016 and 2017 on a Fulbright in Namibia teaching at the University of Namibia.
Pinckney Benedict is an American short-story writer and novelist whose work often reflects his Appalachian background.
Andrew Foster Altschul is an American fiction writer. He is the author of the novels Deus Ex Machina, Lady Lazarus, and The Gringa and his short fiction and essays have been published in Esquire, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Fence, and One Story. His short story "Embarazada" was selected for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 and his short story "A New Kind of Gravity" was anthologized in both Best New American Voices 2006 and the O.Henry Prize Stories 2007.
Jake Adam York was an American poet. He published three books of poetry before his death: Murder Ballads, which won the 2005 Elixir Prize in Poetry; A Murmuration of Starlings, which won the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry; and Persons Unknown, an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. A fourth book, Abide, was released posthumously, in 2014. That same year he was also named a posthumous recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship by the U.S. Poet Laureate.
Leslie Pietrzyk is an American author who has published three novels, Pears on a Willow Tree, A Year and a Day, and Silver Girl, as well as two books of short stories, This Angel on My Chest and Admit This To No One. An additional historical novel, Reversing the River, set in Chicago on the first day of 1900, was serialized on the literary app, Great Jones Street.
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.
William Roorbach is an American novelist, short story and nature writer, memoirist, journalist, blogger and critic. He has authored fiction and nonfiction works including Big Bend, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the O. Henry Prize. Roorbach's memoir in nature, Temple Stream, won the Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction, 2005. His novel, Life Among Giants, won the 2013 Maine Literary Award for Fiction.[18] And The Remedy for Love, also a novel, was one of six finalists for the 2014 Kirkus Fiction Prize. His book, The Girl of the Lake, is a short story collection published in June 2017. His most recent novel is Lucky Turtle, published in 2022.
Daniel Chacón is a Chicano short story writer, novelist, essayist, editor, professor, and radio host based in El Paso, Texas. He chairs the University of Texas, El Paso's creative writing graduate program, the country's only bilingual MFA program. He founded the Chicano Writers and Artists Association with Fresno State classmate and close friend Andrés Montoya in 1985.
Tara Ison is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
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.
B.J. Hollars is an American author of literary essays and nonfiction novels. He is the author of several books, most recently Go West Young Man: A Father and Son Rediscover America on the Oregon Trail, Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians and the Weird in Flyover Country, The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders, Flock Together: A Love Affair With Extinct Birds,From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us About Life, Death, and Being Human, as well as a collection of essays, This Is Only A Test. Additionally, he has also written Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America, Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa, Dispatches from the Drownings, and Sightings.
Phil Klay is an American writer. He won the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his first book-length publication, a collection of short stories, Redeployment. In 2014 the National Book Foundation named him a 5 under 35 honoree. His 2020 novel, Missionaries, was named as one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year as well as one of The Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year.
Matthew Salesses is a Korean American fiction writer and essayist and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA/PhD program at Oklahoma State University.