Chris Adrian is the author of three novels: Gob’s Grief, The Children’s Hospital and The Great Night. In 2008, he published A Better Angel, a collection of short stories. His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories and Story. He was one of 11 fiction writers to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Adrian also received his M.D. from Eastern Virginia Medical School in 2001 and attended Harvard Divinity School. He is currently in the pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco.
Ayana Mathis received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the recipient of the 2011-2012 Michener Copernicus Fellowship and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s Teaching Writing Fellowship. Her novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie was named to Oprah's Book Club 2.0 in December 2012. She lives in Brooklyn.
Sapphire is the author of two New York Times best-selling novels, The Kid and Push, the latter of which inspired the film Precious, which won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress in 2009. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Spin, Bomb and the New York Times Book Review. In 2009, she was awarded a United States Artist Fellowship. She lives in New York City.
Jackson Taylor is the author of the novel The Blue Orchard. His poetry has appeared in Sleeping Fish, Barrow Street, LIT, Witness and the anthology, “What’s Your Exit?: A Literary Detour Through New Jersey.” For more than twenty years he has directed the Prison Writing Program at PEN American Center. In 1996 he co-founded the graduate writing program at The New School, and he has also taught at Mediabistro, The Fortune Society, Friends of Island Academy and The Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen.
Justin Torres grew up in upstate New York and is the author of the novel We the Animals. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Glimmer Train and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is a recipient of the Rolón United States Artist Fellowship in Literature, and is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has worked as a farmhand, a dog-walker, a creative writing teacher and a bookseller.
