Desiree Cooper is the author of the flash fiction collection, Know the Mother (2016). A Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, her essays and fiction have appeared in the Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Best Small Fictions. After 30 years in Detroit, she’s now a full-time caregiver for her mother in Virginia Beach.
Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He loves exploring the riverlands with a fly rod and believes that every watershed should have a Poet Laureate. He is the author of two poetry collections—Robbing the Pillars and What I Know [How to Do]. His writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, The Flyfish Journal, and The Hopper Magazine. He was the 2021 Artist in Residence for The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. You can read more at www.mgarrigan.com.
Tiffany Isaacs is a PhD student at the University of North Texas where she writes fiction and essays. She is an assistant fiction editor at Narrative Magazine and a scholarship recipient at Bread Loaf Writers’ and Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conferences. Her work appears in the Santa Monica Review and World Literature Today. She received her MFA from Florida State University where she served as the assistant fiction editor at the South East Review.
Jessica Johnson writes poems, essays, and things in between. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals, and she has newer work in Four Way Review, Entropy, Burning House Press, and Dream Pop. Her chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other was an Oregon Book Award finalist. She lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches at a community college.
Aaron Landsman is a New York City theater artist, writer and teacher. His book No One Is Qualified (about both democracy and performance), co-authored with Mallory Catlett, will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2021. He teaches part time at Princeton.
Sarah Layden is the author of Trip Through Your Wires, a novel, and The Story I Tell Myself About Myself, winner of the Sonder Press Chapbook Competition. Her short fiction appears in Boston Review, Blackbird, Moon City Review, Zone 3, Booth, Best Microfiction 2020, and elsewhere. A two-time Society of Professional Journalists award winner, her recent essays, interviews, and articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Salon, The Millions, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Indianapolis Star, and The Writer’s Chronicle. She is an Assistant Professor of English in the creative writing program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
Brett Lott is the author of fourteen books; “Security” is from the next one, Cherries on the Golan, Olives in Jerusalem, about food and Israel and Palestine and hope. He lives and teaches in Charleston, South Carolina.
A poet and essayist, Tyler Mills’s nonfiction manuscript-in-progress, The Bomb Cloud, recently received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. She is also the author of City Scattered (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (Akron Poetry Prize, University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions Chapbook Prize, Diode Editions 2021). She teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute, edits The Account, and lives in Brooklyn.
Marion Peters Denard is the founder of Writers’ Room, a creative writing studio in Jacksonville, Oregon. She studied writing at Dartmouth College and the University of Puget Sound. Her work appears in Cleaver Literary Magazine, Adanna, Peregrine, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in the Rogue Valley of southern Oregon.
Jan Shoemaker is the author of the essay collection, Flesh and Stones: Field Notes from a Finite World, and the poetry collection, The Reliquary Earth. Her work has appeared in many magazines and journals.
