Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wilton Barnhardt is the author of four novels: Emma Who Saved My Life, Gospel, Show World, and Lookaway, Lookaway.

Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel is the author of the novels Good News from Outer Space and Corrupting Dr. Nice, The Moon And The Other and, in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, Freedom Beach. His short story collections are Meeting in Infinity (a New York Times Notable Book), The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence. Kessel's stories have twice received the Nebula Award given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, in addition to the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Locus Poll, the James Tiptree Jr. Award. His play “Faustfeathers'” won the Paul Green Playwright's Prize, and his story “A Clean Escape''”was adapted as an episode of the ABC TV series Masters of Science Fiction. In 2009 his story “Pride and Prometheus” received both the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award.

Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection, The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women.  She is the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry.  

Jill McCorkle is the author of the novels The Cheer Leader, July 7th, Tending to Virginia, Ferris Beach, and Life After Life, as well as four collections of short stories. Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books. McCorkle has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Four of her stories have been tabbed for Best American Short Stories and several have been collected in New Stories from the South. Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine and The American Scholar among others. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Best American Essays, The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, Southern Living, Our State, Allure and Real Simple. McCorkle has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Tufts, and Brandeis, where she was the Fannie Hurst Visiting Writer. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard for five years where she also chaired Creative Writing. 

Belle Boggs is the author of Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, and The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, a nonfiction book that will be published in September 2016 by Graywolf Press. Mattaponi Queen won the Bakeless Prize, the Library of Virginia Literary Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Belle’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, Glimmer Train, the Oxford American, Slate, Orion, Ecotone, and other publications.

Eduardo C. Corral's debut collection of poetry, Slow Lightning, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2011. His work has appeared in Ambit, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine and in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He's the recipient of the "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from Poetry Magazine, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship,  and the Holmes National Poetry Award and Hodder Fellowship, both from Princeton University. He's currently working on his second book of poems, tentatively titled Guillotine.

Joseph Millar's first collection, Overtime, was a finalist for the 2001 Oregon Book Award. His second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007, followed by a third, Blue Rust, in 2012. His latest collection, Kingdom, was released in early 2017. He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares.