Role: Author

Ashley Wurzbacher’s writing has appeared in The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and teaches creative writing at the University of Montevallo.

Bryan Washington has written fiction and nonfiction for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, BBC, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, MUNCHIES, American Short Fiction, GQ, The FADER, The Awl, and Catapult. He is the author of Lot and he lives in Houston.

Johannes Lichtman was born in Stockholm and raised in California. He holds an MFA in fiction from University of North Carolina Wilmington and an MA in literature, culture, and media from Lund University. His work has appeared in The Sun, Tin House, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland. Such Good Work is his first novel.

Isabella Hammad was born in London. She won the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and a 2019 O. Henry Prize. The Parisian is her first novel.

Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press 2017), an experimental novel that blends elements of sportswriting, memoir, and self-help. She hails from Temple City, California, and received a BA in English from University of California Berkeley and an MFA in Fiction from New York University. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, NPR, BOMB Magazine, The New Republic, VICE, Village Voice, and many other publications. She has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. She currently teaches writing at Columbia University and writes a column on mollusks for The Paris Review.

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Grant, he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. 

Julia Phillips is a Fulbright scholar whose writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Moscow Times. She lives in Brooklyn.

Helen Phillips’s fifth book, the novel The Need, was published in 2019 in the US and in the UK. Helen’s short story collection Some Possible Solutions received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Young Lions Award. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable collection by The Story Prize. Her children’s adventure book Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green was published internationally as Upside Down in the Jungle. Helen has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Iowa Review Award in nonfiction, the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Award, and a Ucross Foundation Residency.

Her work has been featured on Selected Shorts, at the Brooklyn Museum, and in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Tin House, among others. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Italian, German, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. A graduate of Yale and the Brooklyn College MFA program, she is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. Born and raised in Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their children.

Kimberly King Parsons was born in Lubbock, Texas and received her MFA from Columbia University. Her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Ninth Letter, and The Kenyon Review, among others.