Ayşe Papatya Bucak is the author of the collection The Trojan War Museum which was awarded the Spotlight Award by the Story Prize. Her stories have been reprinted in the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and she has received support from Yaddo, MacDowell, and other institutions. She lives in South Florida, where she teaches at Florida Atlantic University. Her novel The Anatolian Monster is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Lior Torenberg’s debut fiction novel, Just Watch Me, will be published in January 2026 by Simon & Schuster. Her short writing has been featured in One Story, MAYDAY, december Magazine, and other publications. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and was a member of the Lighthouse Book Project. Learn more at www.liortorenberg.com.

Chris Vanjonack is a writer and educator from Denver, Colorado. His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in One Story, Barrelhouse, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, and elsewhere, and his short story collection, Out of Body, is forthcoming in 2026. He teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and you can find his work online at chrisvanjonack.com.

Jenn Alandy Trahan was born in Houston, Texas to Filipino immigrants and raised in Vallejo, California. A first-generation college graduate, she has a BA in English from the University of California, Irvine and an MA in English and MFA in Fiction from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. A Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction brought Jenn to Stanford, where she’s currently a Jones Lecturer teaching fiction, creative nonfiction, and contemporary American short stories. Published in Permafrost, Blue Mesa Review, Harper’s, One Story, and The Best American Short Stories, Jenn’s work has also been generously supported by the Community of Writers, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Gullkistan, Plympton and The Writer’s Block, The Edith Wharton & Straw Dog Writers Guild Writer-in-Residence Program, Cultivate’s La Baldi Residency, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Write On, Door County.

Puloma Ghosh is the author of the short story collection, Mouth, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her work has appeared in One Story, Cake Zine, No Tokens, Book of the Month’s Volume Ø and elsewhere, and is collected in The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2025. She has received fellowships from Tin House and Bennington College, and lives in Chicago.

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer telling modern animal fables about the climate crisis. Her debut collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore (Tin House 2022), was a finalist for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, among other honors. Her short fiction has been published in Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, The Common, One Story, Orion, and elsewhere. She lives in California’s Central Valley with her husband and two cats.

Stephen Fishbach is a Pushcart Prize–winning writer and author of the novel Escape! A two-time Survivor contestant (voted onto the show the second time by more than ten million fans), he’s also worked on the network side as a vice president at MTV and freelanced for a reality producers’ trade group. He cohosts a weekly Survivor podcast as well as the literary podcast Paraphrase.

Stephen graduated with honors from Yale and received an MFA in fiction from NYU. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and two daughters.

Francesca Lia Block, M.F.A., is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, non-fiction, short stories and poetry, and has written screenplay adaptations of her work. She received the Spectrum Award, the Phoenix Award, the ALA Rainbow Award and the 2005 Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as other citations from the American Library Association and from the New York Times Book Review, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly.

Her work has been translated into many languages. Francesca has also published stories, poems, essays and interviews in The Los Angeles Times, The L.A. Review of Books, Spin, Nylon, Black Clock, The Fairy Tale Review, and Rattle, among others. In addition to writing, Francesca teaches fiction at UCLA Extension, Antioch University, Pocket MFA, and privately in Los Angeles.