TAMIKO BEYER IS THE AUTHOR OF THE AWARD-WINNING POETRY COLLECTION WE COME ELEMENTAL (ALICE JAMES BOOKS), AND CHAPBOOK BOUGH BREAKS (MERITAGE PRESS). Her poetry has appeared in journals including The Volta, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Progressive and several anthologies. She is a founding member of Agent 409: a queer, multi-racial writing collective in New York City that performed across the east coast and led workshops at conferences such as the U.S. Social Forum and Split this Rock Poetry Festival. She has received several fellowships and grants, including a Kundiman fellowship, a grant from the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and an Olin and Chancellor’s Fellowships from Washington University in St. Louis. She was a longtime workshop leader for the New York Writers Coalition. With a background in communications writing and grassroots organizing, Tamiko has worked for a variety of nonprofit organizations, including the news program Democracy Now!, feminist film distributor Women Make Movies, and San Francisco Women Against Rape. Today, she is the Deputy Communications Director at Corporate Accountability International. Raised in Tokyo, Japan, Tamiko has lived on both the East and West coasts. She received her B.A. from Fairhaven College at Western Washington University and her M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. She lives in Boston in a former chocolate factory next to the Neponset River.

Victoria Lancelotta’s Ways To Disappear: Stories was the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Contest winner. She is also the author of Here in the World: 13 Stories, and the novels Far and Coeurs Blesses. Her short fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and magazines including Agni, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and others. She has been a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, and is the recipient of a Tennessee Individual Artist Fellowship, multiple Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grants, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Shira Dentz is the author of five books, black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman) door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press), how do i net thee (Salmon Poetry), the sun a blazing zero (Lavender Ink/Diálogos, forthcoming), and SISYPHUSINA (PANK Books), as well as two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Tilt/Shearsman) and FLOUNDERS (Essay Press). Interviews with her about her books have appeared in many venues including Rain Taxi, Ploughshares, and The Rumpus. Her writing has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Idaho Review, Plume, Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, Lana Turner, and Western Humanities Review, and featured in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series (Poets.org), NPR, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. She's the recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem Award and Cecil Hemley Memorial Award. A graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Shira has a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Utah, and was Drunken Boat's Reviews Editor from 2011–2016. She's currently Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky, and lives and teaches in Upstate New York. Find out more about her writing at www.shiradentz.com.

Rick Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston, the son of a geologist. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University and while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, began writing short stories on his lunch breaks. In 1987, he moved with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, to Montana’s remote Yaak Valley and became an active environmentalist, working to protect his adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging. He serves on the board of both the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies and continues to live with his family on a ranch in Montana, actively engaged in saving the American wilderness. Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.

Amy Stuber’s writing has appeared in The New England Review, Flash Fiction America, Ploughshares, The Idaho Review, Witness, The Common, Cincinnati Review, Triquarterly, American Short Fiction, Joyland, Copper Nickel, West Branch, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the Missouri Review’s 2023 William Peden Prize in fiction, winner of the 2021 Northwest Review Fiction Prize, and runner-up for the 2022 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. Her work received a special mention in Pushcart Prize XLIV, appeared on the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2021, has been nominated for Best of the Net, and appears in Best Small Fictions 2020 and 2023. She’s an editor at Split Lip Magazine. Her short story collection, SAD GROWNUPS (Stillhouse Press) will be published in October 2024.

BA Harvard University, 1990 MFA University of Montana, 2000 Assistant Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University