Karen E. Bender is the author of the story collection Refund, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction, shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Story Prize, and longlisted for the Story Prize, and The New Order, which was longlisted for the Story Prize. A new collection, The Words of Dr. L, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press. Her novels are Like Normal People, a Los Angeles Times bestseller and Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Story, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, Guernica, and others. Her work has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, and have won three Pushcart prizes. Her work has been read by Joanne Woodward on Symphony Space's “Selected Shorts” series, and by Levar Burton on “Levar Burton Reads.” She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She is Fiction Editor of the literary journal Scoundrel Time. Visit her at www.karenebender.com. May-lee Chai is the author of eleven books, including her new short story collection Tomorrow in Shanghai; the memoir Hapa Girl, a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book; her original translation from Chinese to English of the 1934 Autobiography of Ba Jin; and Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories, winner of a 2019 American Book Award. Her prize-winning short prose has been published widely, including in the New England Review, Paris Review Online, Missouri Review, Seventeen, Crab Orchard Review, The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times. The recipient of an NEA fellowship in prose, Chai is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. Elizabeth Crane is the author of two novels and four collections of short stories, most recently the novel The History of Great Things and the story collection Turf. She is a recipient of the Chicago Public Library 21st Century Award. Her work has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and adapted for the stage by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater. Her debut novel, We Only Know So Much, has been adapted for film. She teaches in the UCR-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program. A memoir, This Story Will Change , will be out in 2022 from Counterpoint Press. Rebecca Entel’s novel, Fingerprints of Previous Owners, was published by Unnamed Press in 2017. Her short stories and essays have been published in such journals as Catapult, Guernica, Hobart, Cleaver, Jellyfish Review, Joyland, Literary Hub, and Electric Literature. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College, where she teaches courses in creative writing, 19th-century U.S. literature, African-American literature, Caribbean literature, and the literature of social justice, and is the Robert P. Dana Director of the Center for the Literary Arts. She mentors in PEN America's Prison Writing Program and has taught fiction workshops for Catapult. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Wisconsin, she currently lives in Iowa City. Gina Frangello’s fifth book, the memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint), has been selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice and received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and BookPage. She is also the author of four books of fiction, including A Life in Men (Algonquin), which is currently under development by Charlize Theron’s production company, Denver & Delilah, and Every Kind of Wanting (Counterpoint), which was included on several “best of” lists for 2016, including Chicago Magazine’s and The Chicago Review of Books’. Now the Creative Nonfiction Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Gina brings more than two decades of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, and as the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, the LA Times, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, Dame, and in many other magazines and anthologies, as well as having a column on the Psychology Today blog. She runs Circe Consulting, a full-service company for writers, with the writer Emily Rapp Black, and can be found at www.ginafrangello.org. Joan Frank's most recent novel is The Outlook for Earthlings. Other recent books are Where You're All Going: Four Novellas (Gold Medal, 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards; Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction), published by Sarabande Books, and Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place (River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize). Joan's 2017 novel, All the News I Need, won the Juniper Prize for the Novel. Her essay collection, Because You Have To: A Writing Life, won the ForeWord Reviews Silver Book of the Year Award. Her Past honors include the Richard Sullivan Prize, Dana Award, Iowa Writing Award, and notable others. Joan has received grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and Sonoma Arts Council and has been nominated twice for the Northern California Book Award in Fiction. She has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University and reviews literary fiction and nonfiction for The Washington Post and Boston Globe. She lives in Northern California. Melissa Fraterrigo is the author of two books, Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which was named one of “The Best Fiction Books of 2017” by the Chicago Review of Books, as well as the short story collection The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press, 2006). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in more than forty literary journals and anthologies, among them storySouth, Shenandoah, Notre Dame Review, and The Millions. She is the founder of the Lafayette Writers’ Studio in Lafayette, Indiana, where she teaches classes on the art and craft of writing. Lynn Freed’s books include seven novels, a collection of stories and two collections of essays. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, among numerous others. She is the recipient of the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two O. Henry Awards for fiction, and has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Having grown up in South Africa, she came to the U.S. as a graduate student at Columbia University, where she received an MA and PhD in English Literature. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Northern California. Amina Gautier is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. At-Risk was awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award; Now We Will Be Happy was awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction; The Loss of All Lost Things was awarded the Elixir Press Award in Fiction. Gautier has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the American Antiquarian Society, the Camargo Foundation, the Chateau de Lavigny, Dora Maar House/Brown Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. More than one hundred and thirty of her stories have been published, appearing in Agni, Boston Review, Callaloo, Cincinnati Review, Glimmer Train, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, Joyland, Kenyon Review, Latino Book Review, Mississippi Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Quarterly West, Southern Review, and Triquarterly among other places. She is the recipient of the Blackwell Prize, Eric Hoffer Legacy Fiction Award, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Fiction, the International Latino Book Award, and the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award. For her body of work she has received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Miami where she is an Associate Professor of English and the Gabelli Senior Scholar. Cris Mazza’s most recent novel is Yet to Come (BlazeVox Books). Mazza has eighteen other titles of fiction and literary nonfiction including Charlatan: New and Selected Stories, chronicling twenty years of short-fiction publications; Something Wrong With Her, a real-time memoir; her first novel How to Leave a Country, which won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction; and the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? In the mid-90s Mazza edited the groundbreaking ChickLit anthologies. She is a native of Southern California and is a professor in and director of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Roberta Montgomery is a former editor at The Atlantic and wrote and produced many television game shows including Liars, Family Feud, and The Legends of the Hidden Temple. Her short fiction has appeared in small magazines including Chicago Quarterly Review. She was a finalist for the Bakeless Prize for her novel, A Romantic Husband. Victoria Patterson’s latest story collection, The Secret Habit of Sorrow, was published in 2018. The critic Michael Schaub wrote: “There’s not a story in the book that’s less than great; it’s a stunningly beautiful collection by a writer working at the top of her game.” Her novel The Little Brother, which Vanity Fair called “a brutal, deeply empathetic, and emotionally wrenching examination of American male privilege and rape culture,” was published in 2015. She is also the author of the novels The Peerless Four and This Vacant Paradise, a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her story collection, Drift, was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Story Prize and was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in South Pasadena, California with her family. She is an affiliate faculty member at Antioch University Los Angeles. Jenny Shank's short story collection, Mixed Company, won the George Garrett Fiction Prize, and her novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award and was a finalist for the MPIBA Reading the West award. Her stories, essays, satire, and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals, Dear McSweeney's: Two Decades of Letters to the Editor from Writers, Readers, and the Occasional Bewildered Consumer, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, The Toast, Poets & Writers Magazine and The Onion A.V. Club. Her stories have been listed among the “Notable Essays of the Year” in the Best American Essays and have received “Special Mention” in the Pushcart Prize anthology. She has been a Mullin Scholar in Writing at the University of Southern California and is on the faculty of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Mile High MFA at Regis University in Denver. She has also published over a thousand book reviews and author interviews in such places as the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Dallas Morning News. Christine Sneed’s books are the novels Paris, He Said and Little Known Facts, and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men. Her fifth book, Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, is forthcoming from 7.13 Books. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, the New York Times , O Magazine, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, New Stories from the Midwest, Glimmer Train, and many other periodicals. She has received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, among other honors. She teaches for the MFA programs at Northwestern University and Regis University. Rachel Swearingen is the author of How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, winner of the New American Press Fiction Prize and a New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy" selection. Her stories and essays have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review,Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction, she lives in Chicago and teaches in Cornell College’s low-residency MFA program. Alison Umminger is the author of the internationally published novel American Girls, and teaches English and creative writing at the University of West Georgia. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Gawker, among others, and she has won the Lawrence Foundation Prize for short fiction from Prairie Schooner. She was the fourth female president of The Harvard Lampoon, and is now (also) a retreat leader who recently completed her spiritual director studies at Loyola University-Chicago. While the distance between monastery and Lampoon may seem vast—there are more similarities than one might think.
