Ann Pancake’s first novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been (2007), was one of Kirkus Review’s Top Ten Fiction Books of 2007, won the 2007 Weatherford Prize, and was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award and the 2008 Washington State Book Award. Her collection of short stories, Given Ground (2001), won the 2000 Bakeless Prize, and she has also received a Whiting Award, a NEA fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in such journals and anthologies as Orion, The Georgia Review, Poets & Writers, and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best. She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

Lynn Schmeidler’s “Being Stevie” is her third story to appear in The Georgia Review (see also Spring 2013 and Summer 2009). Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Southern Review, Mid-American Review, Opium, Southeast Review, Chelsea and other literary magazines. Her poetry chapbook Curiouser & Curiouser won the 2013 Grayson Books Chapbook Contest. She teaches at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY, and is at work on a story collection and a book of poetry.

Joe Wilkins is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry (Counterpoint, 2013), winner of a 2014 GLCA New Writers Award—an honor that has previously recognized early work by the likes of Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, and Alice Munro. He also has three books of poems, most recently When We Were Birds (University of Arkansas Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Stafford/Hall Prize in Poetry from the Oregon Book Awards. His debut novel, And Ever These Bull Mountains, will be published by Little, Brown in the spring of 2018. Wilkins lives with his family in western Oregon, where he teaches writing at Linfield College.