Meghan Daum is the author of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, a personal chronicle of real estate addiction and obsessive fascination with houses, as well as the novel The Quality of Life Report and the essay collection My Misspent Youth. Since 2005 she has written a weekly column for The Los Angeles Times, which appears on the op-ed page every Thursday. She has contributed to public radio's Morning Edition, Marketplace and This American Life and has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, Vogue, Self, New York, Travel & Leisure, BlackBook, Harper's Bazaar, The Village Voice, and The New York Times Book Review. Equal parts reporter, storyteller, and satirist, Meghan has inspired controversy over a range of topics, including social politics, class warfare and the semiotics of shag carpet. She has been widely praised in the press and elicits particular enthusiasm from Amazon.com customer reviewers, who have hailed her work as everything from "brilliant and outrageously funny" to "obnoxious, arrogant, rambling dribble," (sic). Meghan's work is included in dozens of college textbooks and anthologies, including The KGB Bar Reader, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, and The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence. Born in California in 1970, Meghan was raised primarily on the east coast and is a graduate of Vassar College and the MFA writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. She spent several years in New York City before making her now-infamous move to Nebraska in 1999, where she continued to work as an essayist and journalist and wrote The Quality of Life Report. Meghan has taught at various institutions, including California Institute for the Arts, where she was a visiting artist in 2004 and taught graduate nonfiction writing. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Alan Zarembo, and their sheepdog, Rex

Sarah Valentine always wanted to be a writer. She began writing poetry in high school in Western Pennsylvania, where she also discovered Russian literature. She continued writing and translating poetry while her studies in Russian literature took her all over the world, including on a spectacular two-week journey on the Trans-Siberian railroad from Moscow to Beijing. After obtaining her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2007 she attended a Callaloo summer writing workshop for African American writers and realized she needed to write about something much closer to home: her struggle with racial identity and the troubling family secrets that surrounded it. This led to her award-winning essay, "When I Was White," which was anthologized in Waveform: 21st-Century Essays by Women, and her memoir by the same title. Sarah has received numerous awards for her writing and scholarship, most notably a prestigious Lannan Foundation Writer's Fellowship in 2013. She has taught literature and creative writing at Princeton, University of California-Los Angeles, University of California-Riverside, and Northwestern University. Sarah enjoys writing about topics related to black and mixed-race and African American identity, especially in historical settings. She loves murder mysteries, ghost stories, fairytales, folklore, and myth (and, of course, Russian literature) - anything that gives us a glimpse into another world. Sarah is endlessly curious, loves to travel, and believes the world is full of surprising, wonderful things to be discovered.

Brenda Miller is the author of Season of the Body and co-author of Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction Her newest collection of essays, Blessing of the Animals, is forthcoming from Eastern Washington University Press. Her work has received five Pushcart Prizes and has been published in many journals, including Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, The Sun, Utne Reader, The Georgia Review, and The Missouri Review. She currently lives in Bellingham, WA, with her dog Abbe and her cat Madrona, both of whom are acting as muses for her next book, where she is an Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Bellingham Review.

Chelsea Biondolillo is the author of The Skinned Bird (KERNPUNKT Press, 2019), and two prose chapbooks, Ologies and #Lovesong. Her work has been collected in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016, Waveform: Twenty-first Century Essays by Women, and How We Speak To One Another: An Essay Daily Reader, among others. She is a former Oregon Literary Arts fellow and Olive B. O'Connor fellow at Colgate University, and her work has been supported by Wyoming Arts Council and the Consortium for Science and Policy Outcomes/NSF. She has a BFA in photography from Pacific NW College of Art and an MFA in creative writing/environmental studies from the University of Wyoming. She lives and works outside of Portland, Oregon.

Laurie's short story collection, Anything You Say Can And Will Be Used Against You (HarperCollins 2004) was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and won the Jesse James Award in Fiction for Best Book from the Texas Institute of Letters, as well as the Violet Crown Award in Fiction from the Writers' League of Texas. A story from the collection, "Something About a Scar," won an Edgar Award for Best Short Story. Laurie's stories and essays have been published in Story, Southern Review, Fiction, Black Warrior Review, New Virginia Review, Louisiana Cultural Vistas, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Brevity, and River Teeth, among others. She is working on a novel, Memories of the Living, also for HarperCollins, and a book-length memoir, Losing My Gun.