Two-time Pushcart Prize winner Michael Kardos is the author of the novels Bluff, Before He Finds Her, and The Three-Day Affair, an Esquire best book of the year. His short stories have appeared in One Story, The Southern Review, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and elsewhere, and were collected in the book One Last Good Time, which won the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award for fiction. Michael is also the author of The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer’s Guide. He has degrees from Princeton University, Ohio State, and the University of Missouri, and co-directed the creative writing program at Mississippi State University for 16 years. He currently lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Fatima Kola was published in One Story in 2015. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, and from 2019 to 2021 was a Stegner Fellow. She was a 2015 shortlistee for the Caine Prize for African Writing, a Miles Morland Foundation Grant holder in 2017, and a resident at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in 2023. She served as the editorial assistant for the O. Henry Prize for three years, and along with One Story, her short fiction has been published by Granta, New Contrast, The Guardian, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Fatima is currently a writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches writing about illness, and is completing her first novel about haunted bodies, loneliness, and the river Thames.

Anya Johanna DeNiro is a writer living in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. Her most recent book is the novel OKPsyche from Small Beer Press. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Catapult, Santa Monica Review, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Her work has been on the Honor Roll for the Otherwise Award (for explorations of gender in speculative fiction), a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and shortlisted for the O. Henry Award.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy (OS 276, “Extinction”) was awarded a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in 2014. She is the winner of the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, and her story “Sledding” is a 2023 Narrative Story of the Week. Her work has been recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts, and her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. Her reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Harvard Review, Star Tribune, The Millions, and on the Ploughshares blog. She has been a MacDowell fellow twice and is the recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, Ucross, and Saltonstall. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University School of the Arts. Her debut novel, The Thirteenth Wife, will be published by Putnam in spring 2025.

Gina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in New York City. She is the author of the novel Sea Change, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a 2023 B&N Discover Pick, and a New York Times Most Anticipated Book, and the short story collection Green Frog (out March 12, 2024 from Vintage in the U.S. and June 6, 2024 from Picador in the U.K.). A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. Her work appears or is forthcoming in One Story, BOMB, The Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, and Gulf Coast, among others.

Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC.