Elizabeth Wetmore’s debut novel Valentine (Harper 2020) was named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, The Washington Post, Barnes and Noble, and BuzzFeed. It won the Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize. The French translation was shortlisted for the 2020 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. Named one of the 30 most essential books about Texas by Texas Monthly and a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction, Valentine was also a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A native of West Texas, Wetmore is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council as well as a grant from the Barbara Deming Foundation. Her short fiction has appeared in the Baltimore Review, Epoch Magazine, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Iowa Review.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the poetry collection Machete and the memoir Let Me Count the Ways. His other works included Patient Zero and A Larger Country, winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. He translated Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu and with Mari L’Esperance, he coedited Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine.

Greg Marshall’s first book, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew from It, was named a new and noteworthy memoir by the Washington Post, USA Today, and Esquire. His hilarious and poignant memoir grapples with family, disability, and coming of age in two closets—as a gay man and as a man living with cerebral palsy. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays and he is currently a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Prose.

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. In 2024, Knopf will publish Martyr! , Kaveh's first novel. In 2020 he was named Poetry Editor of The Nation.

Paige Lewis is the author of Space Struck. Their poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2017, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Paige currently lives and teaches in Iowa City.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. A contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewaneee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He teaches as an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.