FARAH ALI is from Pakistan. Her work has been anthologized in the 2020 Pushcart Prize as well as received special mention in the 2018 Pushcart anthol- ogy. Her stories have appeared in Shenandoah, The Arkansas International, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review online, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Her debut collection of short stories, People Want to Live, is forthcoming from McSweeney’s in October 2021.
FELIPE BOMENY was born in São Paulo and grew up in South Florida. He is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is working on a collection of stories.
DOUNIA CHOUKRI holds an MA in American Literature. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Southwest Review, Southern Humanities Review, Colorado Review, The Threepenny Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018, and Chicago Quarterly Review.
SUSAN MUADDI DARRAJ’s short story collection, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, was named the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, judged by Jaime Manrique. It also won the 2016 Arab American Book Award and a 2016 American Book Award and was shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award. In 2018, she was named a Ford Fellow by USA Artists. In 2019, she launched the viral #TweetYourThobe social media campaign to promote Palestinian culture. Later that year, she was named winner of the Rose Nader Award, by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), an award given by the Nader family to a person who “demonstrates an unwav- ering dedication and commitment to values of equality and justice.” Recently, Capstone Books launched her debut children’s chapter book series, Farah Rocks, about a smart, brave Palestinian American girl named Farah Hajjar; it is the first chapter book series to feature an Arab American protagonist.
RU FREEMAN is an award-winning Sri Lankan and American writer and activist whose work appears internationally in English and in translation. She is the author of several books, including the short story collection Sleeping Alone and the novel On Sal Mal Lane, and editor of the anthologies Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine and Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security. She teaches creative writing worldwide and directs the Artists Network at Narrative 4.
WAYNE LEE GAY lives in Arlington, Texas. His poems, creative essays, and short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. He is a past winner of the Saints and Sinners Prize for Short Fiction, the Frank O’Connor Award for Fiction (descant), and the David B. Saunders Award for Creative Nonfiction. In a parallel career as a classical music critic, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1990.
LAUREN GROFF is a two-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Times–bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize and the PEN/O. Henry Award and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.
ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN is the author of seven books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, and The Souvenir Museum. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Thunderstruck & Other Stories won the 2015 Story Prize. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places.
ALIX OHLIN writes novels and short stories. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and many other places. Her latest book, We Want What We Want, is out from Knopf in July 2021. She lives in Vancouver, where she is the director of the University of British Columbia School of Creative Writing.
KAREN PARKMAN earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received fellowships from the Sozopol Fiction Seminars and MacDowell. Her short fiction has appeared previously in Joyland and Witness. She currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is at work on a novel.
KRISTEN ROUPENIAN holds a PhD in English from Harvard, an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and a BA from Barnard College. She is the author of the short story “Cat Person,” which was published in The New Yorker and selected by Sheila Heti for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018. You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories was published in 2019.
DIANA SPECHLER is the author of the novels Who by Fire and Skinny. Her writing appears in The New York Times, Ploughshares, The Guardian, Electric Literature, The Washington Post, Harper’s, GQ, Esquire, Glimmer Train Stories, Playboy, The Paris Review’s The Daily, Tin House’s The Open Bar, and many other publications. Her awards include a Yaddo Fellowship, the Steinbeck Fellowship, the Orlando Prize from the A Room of Her Own Foundation, and the 2021 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize.
YE CHUN is a bilingual Chinese American writer and literary translator. She has published two books of poetry, a novel in Chinese, and three volumes of translations. Her collection of stories, Hao, is forthcoming from Catapult later this year. A recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and three Pushcart Prizes, she teaches at Providence College and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
