Mark Jude Poirier has published two novels and two short-story collections. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Southern Review, BOMB, Subtropics, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. He recently won both an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize and was longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. His films have played at the Sundance Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the American Film Festival of Deauville, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and in theaters all over the world.

Laila Stien, a Norwegian novelist, poet, and translator, has published several collections of short stories and poetry. She has an education in ethnology, social anthropology, and Sámi language and has translated a number of Sámi novels, poems, and texts into Norwegian. 

AJ Wells holds an MA in literature and creative writing from Auburn University and earned his BA from the College of the Holy Cross, where he studied English, classics, and rhetoric. He currently lives in his hometown of Buena Vista, Georgia.

Mauricio Kilwein Guevara was born in Boyacá, Colombia, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has published several books of poetry, including POEMA (The University of Arizona Press, 2009). His collection of micro-fictions, Autobiography of So-and-So, was published by New Issues Poetry and Prose in 2001, and his comedy, The Last Bridge/El Último Puente, was performed off-Broadway in 1999 (Urban Stages). The story “Pachakutik” is part of a novel-in-progress that was supported by a Fulbright Award for research and writing in Ecuador. Kilwein Guevara teaches writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and lectures in the Medical Humanities Program at the Medical College of Wisconsin.