Paula Carter is the author of the flash memoir collection No Relation. Her award-winning essays have appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, The Offing and elsewhere. She was an Administrative Staff Fellow at the Bread Loaf Environmental Conference in 2022 and 2023 and her work has been supported by Ragdale and the Shannaghe Artists Residency. She serves on the organizing committee for the Washington Island Literary Festival and holds an M.F.A. from Indiana University, Bloomington.
https://www.paulaccarter.com
Gioia Diliberto is the author of three novels, four biographies and a play. Her work, which centers on the lives of women, has been praised for combining rich storytelling with deep research to bring alive worlds as varied as Jazz Age Paris, nineteenth century Chicago, Belle Epoque Paris and disco era Manhattan. Gioia’s articles and reviews have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, and Vanity Fair. Her most recent novel, Coco at the Ritz, is inspired by the arrest and interrogation of Coco Chanel during World War II on charges of treason to France. In her eighth book, Firebrands, forthcoming in October, she returns to nonfiction with the story of four extraordinary women who warred over Prohibition.
gioiadiliberto.com
billy lombardo (he/him/his) is a Nelson Algren Award winner and the founder of Polyphony Lit, an international literary magazine devoted to the development of young writers and editors. He is the author of three books of fiction: The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories, The Man with Two Arms, and Morning Will Come. He is also the author of a book of poetry and prose, Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns. His most recent publication is the nonfiction book, The C.A.P.E. Crusade, Your Guide to a Great College Application Personal Essay. billy is also the founder of The Writing Pros/e, a writing and editing business. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College and lives in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood.
Juan Martinez is the author of the collection Best Worst American (2017) and the novel Extended Stay (2023). His work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Ecotone, NIGHTMARE, The Morning Transport, Glimmer Train, Huizache, McSweeney's, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, Small Odysseys, National Public Radio's Selected Shorts, Norton's Sudden Fiction Latino and Flash Fiction America, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor at Northwestern University and lives near Chicago.
fulmerford.com
@fulmerford
Lori Rader-Day is the author of the crime novels The Death of Us, Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things, and The Black Hour. Her books have won the Mary Higgins Clark Award, the Agatha Award, and three Anthony Awards, and have been nominated for several other crime fiction awards, including the Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America. She is also a past recipient of the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Author Award.
Rader-Day is co-chair of the crime fiction readers’ conference Midwest Mystery Conference and a former national president of Sisters in Crime, a 4,500-member writers’ and readers’ association. Rader-Day has previously taught at Ball State University, Roosevelt University, Yale University, Midwest Writers Workshop, and StoryStudio Chicago, among others. She received an MA in creative nonfiction from Ball State University and an MFA in creative writing from Roosevelt University.
Christine Sneed is the faculty director of the MFA program in Northwestern's School of Professional Studies and teaches fiction-writing, a course on the publishing industry, and poetry for prose writers. She is the author of several books, most recently, The Virginity of Famous Men. In October, her novel Please Be Advised will be published, along with a short fiction anthology she edited, Love in the Time of Time's Up. Her short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, New England Review, The Southern Review, and many other publications. She has received AWP's Grace Paley Prize, Chicago Writers' Association Book of the Year Award, Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, Ploughshares Zacharis Award, among other honors, and has been a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize.
christinesneed.com
Facebook
Twitter
Donna Seaman is the Editor for Adult Books at Booklist; a member of the Content Leadership Team and National Advisory Council for the American Writers Museum, and a recipient of the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. Seaman has written for the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications, and contributed biocritical essays to the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature and American Writers. Seaman has been a writer-in-residence for Columbia College Chicago and has taught at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. She created the anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness; her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists
