News & Events

Gwen E. Kirby is the author of the debut collection Shit Cassandra Saw. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Her stories appear in One Story, Tin House, Guernica, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Currently, she is the associate director of programs and finance for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference at the University of the South, where she also teaches creative writing.

Brenda Peynado's genre-bending short story collection, The Rock Eaters—featuring alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones—garnered starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and was named one of NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature's best books of the year. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, and inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and over forty other short stories have appeared in places such as Tor.com, The Georgia Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, and Epoch. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.

Liv Stratman holds a BA and MA from the University of Cincinnati, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first novel, Cheat Day, was released by Scribner in 2021. She lives in Long Island, New York.

Bess Winter has written on the topics of: dolls, mummies, taxidermy, death, horse tails, stolen eggs, Victorians, primates, private school girls, daguerreotypes, gas leaks, etc. Her work appears in Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, and elsewhere, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and the American Short[er] Fiction Prize. She’s received fellowships and scholarships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She grew up in Toronto, Canada. She has taught creative writing to kids, teens, and adults at StoryStudio Chicago, WordPlay Cincinnati, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Machines of Another Era, was released by Gold Wake Press in 2021. 

Johannes Göransson is the author of nine books of poetry and criticism, most recently Summer (2022), and is the translator of several books of poetry, including works by Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, Helena Boberg and Kim Yideum. His poems, translations and critical writings have appeared in a wide array of journals in the US and abroad, including Fence, Lana Turner, Spoon River Review, Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), Kritiker (Denmark) and Lyrikvännen (Sweden). He is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame and, together with Joyelle McSweeney, edits Action Books.

Erin Harris has worked in publishing for over a decade and serves as a Senior Vice President and literary agent at Folio Literary Management, where she represents authors writing fiction (literary and upmarket), narrative non-fiction, and Young Adult. Her clients include New York Times Bestsellers, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalists, winners of the Lambda Literary and Stonewall Book Awards, Indie Next Pick authors and authors selected for the national book clubs Reese Witherspoon’s “Hello Sunshine,” Good Morning America, The Today Show’s Read with Jenna, Barnes & Noble, and Target. Erin is a member of the AALA (Association of American Literary Agents), Phi Beta Kappa, and received her MFA in Creative Writing from the New School.  She lives in Brooklyn and is a co-curator of  the literary event series HIP Lit.

Allegra Hyde is the author of the novel Eleutheria, as well as the story collection Of This New World, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Her second collection, The Last Catastrophe, will be published by Vintage in 2023. Her work has appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, The Best Small Fictions, The Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Oberlin College.

Brian Teare is the author of six critically acclaimed books, most recently Companion Grasses, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His honors include the Brittingham Prize and Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, as well as Guggenheim, NEA, Pew Foundation, and MacDowell Colony fellowships. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.