Poetry

Bill Meissner is the author of twelve books, including Spirits in the Grass, a novel about a small-town ballplayer who discovers a Native American burial ground on a baseball field. and a new carnival themed novel, The Wonders of the Little World. His most recent poetry book is The Mapmaker's Dream. Meissner grew up in Iowa and Wisconsin and was the director of creative writing at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.

Fiction

A former correctional librarian, Blair Austin was born in Michigan and attended the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where the seed novel for Dioramas won a Hopwood Award. Dioramas is his first novel.

Fiction

Darren Defrain is the author of the story collection Inside & Out and the novel The Salt Palace. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, with his wife and daughters, and he directs the Wichita State University writing program.

Farah Ali grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and currently lives in London. Her work has been anthologized in the 2020 Pushcart Prize and received special mention in the 2018 Pushcart anthology. Her debut story collection PEOPLE WANT TO LIVE published with McSweeney's Books on October 26th, and includes new stories and some previously published in VQR, Shenandoah, The Arkansas International, MQR, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, and others.

Fiction and Poetry

Henning Koch was born in Sweden in 1962 but has spent most of his life in England, Spain and Sardinia. He is a writer, screenwriter, and literary translator. In 2011, Dzanc published Love Doesn’t Work, a short story collection. The Maggot People is his first published novel. He lives in Berlin with his partner and their two-year-old son.

Fiction

J. A. Tyler is the author of The Zoo, a Going (Dzanc Books). His fiction has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, and The Brooklyn Rail among others. He has given workshops and readings at universities and writing conferences around the U.S., including AWP, Lake Forest’s &Now series, the National Writing Project at Colorado State University, and the Bankhead Visiting Writers Series at the University of Alabama. He lives in Colorado.

Fiction and Nonfiction

Jason Tougaw is a professor of literature at City University of New York. He is the author of two nonfiction books, Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel and Touching Brains: Literary Experiments in 21st-Century Neuromania. Excerpts from this book have appeared in Boys to Men: Gay Men Write about Growing Up and Electra Street: A Journal of the Arts and Humanities. He blogs about the relationship between art and science at Californica.net.

Fiction and Poetry

Jeff Kass is the author of Knuckleheads, a finalist for Foreword Reviews Best Short Fiction Collection of 2011, and several chapbooks. He currently teaches Creative Writing and Tenth Grade English at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor MI and directs the Literary Arts Program at Ann Arbor’s Teen Center, The Neutral Zone, where he founded and continues to direct many poetry programs. He was the Ann Arbor Grand Slam Poetry Champion in 1999 and 2000 and the runner-up in 2001 as well as the Champion at the inaugural Ann Arbor Book Festival Poetry Slam in 2004. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Ann Arbor Book Festival.

Fiction and Nonfiction

Jen Grow is the fiction editor of Little Patuxent Review. Her writings have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Other Voices, The Sun Magazine, Indiana Review and many others including the anthology City Sages: Baltimore. She’s received two Individual Artist Award from Maryland State Arts. She lives in Baltimore, MD.

Poetry

Jonathan Fink is an Associate Professor and the Director of Creative Writing at the University of West Florida. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Slate, Witness, The Southern Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He has received the Editors’ Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review, the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction/Essay from Southwest Review, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and Emory University, among other institutions. He lives in Pensacola, FL.

Fiction

Julian Tepper is an American author, born in New York City, who has written two novels. For five years, between 2001-2006, he was a member of the music group, the Natural History; their song "Don’t You Ever", was covered and made a hit by the band, Spoon, in 2006. In 2011, he co-founded the Oracle Club, an arts club, in New York City. His first novel, Balls, was published in 2012. Ark is his second novel. He was raised in Manhattan.

Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

Julie Ann Stewart earned an MFA from Spalding University and has published stories in Good River Journal, Litro Magazine, PoemMemoirStory and Punch Drunk Press. In Sophie Speaks (http://julieandsophiespeak.blogspot.com/), Stewart explores the challenge of balancing creative and family life as she recopies Anna Karenina by hand as did Sophia Tolstoy for her husband. Now that their seven kids have flown the coop, she and her husband migrate between Indiana and Michigan.

Fiction

Kirstin Allio's novel, Garner, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award, a PEN/O. Henry prize, and other honors for her short stories and essays. She lives in Providence, RI with her husband and sons.

Poetry & Creative Nonfiction

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-nine books. She is an expert consultant with the United States Fulbright Commission, a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar, and a member of the peer review panel for Fulbright grants. Currently a faculty member at The Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, she has taught at Yale University, the American University in Rome, Stanford University, and the New School. Dr. Darling is Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she now divides her time between the United States, Greece, and the Amalfi Coast.

Fiction (Special Interest in Experimental Fiction)

Lance Olsen is author of more than 25 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novels My Red Heaven (Dzanc, 2020) and Dreamlives of Debris (Dzanc, 2017). His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, such as Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Village Voice, BOMB, McSweeney’s, and Best American Non-Required Reading. A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, two-time N.E.A. Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he taught experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.

Fiction

Lindsey Drager is the author of four Dzanc novels, two of which have been translated into Spanish and Italian. The recipient of a 2020 NEA Fellowship and the 2022 Bard Fiction Prize, she is the fiction editor of West Branch and an assistant professor at the University of Utah.

Nonfiction and Poetry

Madison Davis (she/her) is a writer and editor based in Oakland, California. She is the author of Disaster (Timeless, Infinite Light; Nightboat, 2016) and The Loved Ones (Dzanc Books, forthcoming 2023.) Madison’s work can also be found in a few magazines and anthologies and many more files on her computer. Madison received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2009 where she studied poetry and music. In 2011, she moved from New York to Oakland to attend Mills College where she graduated with an MFA in poetry in 2013. She is currently an associate editor at New Harbinger Publications.

Fiction and Nonfiction

Mark Dunn is the author of twenty published plays and a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction, most recently Texas People’s Court: The Fascinating World of the Texas Justice of the Peace published in 2022 by Texas A&M University Press and the play The Puzzle with the Piazza (Concord Theatricals) which he made available for royalty-free streaming productions for theaters during the pandemic. His plays Belles, Five Tellers Dancing in the Rain, A Delightful Quarantine, and The Glitter Girls have together received over three-hundred productions throughout the world.

Fiction

Michael Hickins is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991; iUniverse 2000). His own subsequent adventures include helping his wife run an American eatery in La Rochelle, France, and becoming an editor at The Wall Street Journal. His writing includes an essay on foot fetishism in Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex [Bloomsbury, 2009] and the novel Blomqvist [iUniverse, 2007]. Excerpts from The What Do You Know Contest have previously been published in semi-obscure literary magazines, MonkeyBicycle, issue eight, and Sententia 3 (fall 2011). An excerpt of Blomqvist has also appeared in New Dead Families. Hickins lives with his family in New York City.

Nonfiction

Nathan Deuel has contributed essays, fiction, and criticism to The New York Times, Financial Times, GQ, The New Republic, Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, Salon, Slate, Bookforum, Los Angeles Review of Books, Columbia Journalism Review, Tin House, The Atlantic, and many others. Previously, he was an editor at Rolling Stone and The Village Voice. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Tampa and a B.A. in Literature from Brown University, and he attended Deep Springs College. He recently moved to Los Angeles from Beirut with his wife and daughter.

Fiction and Nonfiction

Nicholas Bredie is a writer who lived and worked in Istanbul, Turkey from 2010 to 2013. Currently he is a University Fellow at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Nora Lange, and their dog. Not Constantinople is his first novel.

Fiction

Nina Shope is the author of Hangings: Three Novellas, published by Starcherone Books and Asylum. Her fiction has appeared in Quarter After Eight, Fourteen Hills, 3rd Bed, Open City, Sleeping Fish, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. Her stories have been anthologized in PP/FF: An Anthology, New Standards: The First Decade of Fiction at Fourteen Hills, and Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century. She holds an B.A. from Brown University and a MFA from Syracuse University. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado, with her husband, author Christopher Narozny, and their corgi.

Fiction

Peter Stenson received his MFA from Colorado State University in 2012. His first novel, Fiend, was an Amazon Best Book of the Month for July 2013. His stories and essays have been published in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, Confrontation, Blue Mesa Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and family in Denver, Colorado.

Fiction

Sharon Dilworth teaches at Carnegie Mellon University and has been the fiction editor at both CMU Press and August House. She has published two short story collections.

Fiction and Nonfiction

Shya Scanlon is the author of the novels Forecast and Border Run, and of the poetry collection In This Alone Impulse. He received his MFA from Brown University, and lives in Manhattan and Bearsville, New York, with his wife.

Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh was born in Washington, D.C. to an Iranian father and an American mother. She moved to Iran at age 5 and grew up in Tehran under the Shah. She returned to the U.S. to attend Stanford University, and when the Islamic Revolution started brewing shortly after she graduated, she moved back to Iran and plopped herself down in it. She later received an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. A lifelong English teacher, she has taught in schools and universities on three continents, but her permanent home is a 6-acre farm in Woodstock, GA. Her fiction has been published in numerous publications, including The Georgia Review, Gertrude Press, and Fiction International, and she received an honorable mention for The Best American Short Stories 2018.

Tara Isabel Zambrano is a South Asian writer and the author of a full-length flash and short story collection Death, Desire, And Other Destinations by OKAY Donkey Press in 2020. She lives in Texas and is an electrical engineer by profession.