Jami Attenberg is the New York Times best-selling author of five novels, including The Middlesteins and Saint Mazie. She has contributed essays about sex, urban life, and food to the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and Lenny Letter, among other publications. Her most recent novel is All Grown Up.

Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English at University of Missouri and is director of the Seattle Pacific University MFA program in creative writing. Of his eight poetry collections, Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems, is most recent. His spiritual memoir, Short Trip to the Edge, has also appeared in Greek and Romanian translations.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize) and Rocket Fantastic, which was released by Persea Books in September 2017. She is working on a memoir entitled The Year I Didn't Kill Myself, and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard.

Joshua Clover is author of six books including poetry, cultural history, and political theory; he’s been translated into a dozen languages. His most recent book is Riot.Strike.Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso 2016), a political economy of insurrection and re-narration of capital’s history.

Allison Coffelt lives and writes in Columbia, Missouri. Her work has appeared in and won awards from the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hippocampus, Oxford Public Health Magazine, the Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. Maps Are Lines We Draw: A Road Trip Through Haiti is her first book.

After earning a Ph. D. in English at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, David Collins taught English for forty years at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri (1973-2013). In his years at Westminster he published more than fifteen scholarly essays, most on Shakespeare or other medieval/Renaissance writers, but including several on Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes.

Garrard Conley is the author of BOY ERASED: a memoir (Penguin 2016), soon to be a major motion picture from Focus Films. His nonfiction has been published in TIME, CNN, VICE, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and others, and his debut novel, THE GREAT REVELATION, will be out in 2020.

Michael Czyzniejewski’s most recent collection of stories is I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories (Curbside Splendor, 2015). He is an associate professor of English at Missouri State University, where he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Review and Literary Editor for Moon City Press.

Heather Derr-Smith has published four books of poems, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), The Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008) Tongue Screw (Sparkwheel Press, 2016) and Thrust (Persea Books, 2017).

Amy Dickinson writes the “Ask Amy” advice column, widely syndicated through North America and with a readership estimated at 20 million. Her new memoir, “Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things” (Hachette) covers her decision to move back to her hometown, and her mid-life marriage to a local builder who she first met in 7th grade.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood and History. She has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.

Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010) and a new essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017). Her work has been widely anthologized.

Therese Anne Fowler, is the author of the New York Times bestseller Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Her essays have been published internationally in newspapers and magazines such as The Week, the London Telegraph and Harper's Bazaar, and her fiction is available in numerous languages worldwide.

Gabriel Fried is the author of The Children Are Reading (Four Way Books, 2017), and Making the New Lamb Take (Sarabande, 2007), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and named a top poetry collection of 2007 by Foreword Reviews and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He is also the editor of an anthology, Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems and longtime poetry editor at Persea Books.

Nina Mukerjee Furstenau’s memoir, Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland, “blends foods and childhood, cuisine and family into a story that resonates and lingers like the spices she lovingly describes.” Her memoir won the Grand Prize as well as the 2014 MFK Fisher Book Award, was named a Kansas City Star Top 100 Book and a Kansas Notable Book.

Cathi Hanauer is the New York Times bestselling author of three acclaimed novels (Gone, Sweet Ruin, and My Sister's Bones) and two anthologies: The Bitch in the House (2002), which sold in sixteen countries, and The Bitch is Back, which was an NPR Best Book of 2016.

A two-time Grammy award-winning artist and recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the RI Council for the Humanities, Bill Harley uses song and story to paint a vibrant and hilarious picture of growing up, schooling and family life.

Jennifer Haupt’s work has been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, Psychology Today, The Sun and many other publications. Her debut novel, In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills, published in April 2018.

Susan Henderson is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is the author of two novels, The Flicker of Old Dreams and Up from the Blue, both published by HarperCollins. Susan blogs at the writer support group, LitPark.com.

Antony John is the award-winning author of several books for young adults, including Five Flavors of Dumb and the Elemental trilogy. His debut middle grade novel, Mascot, set in St. Louis, is coming this September from HarperCollins.

Dr. John W. Johnson is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Northern Iowa. He has published seven scholarly books, including Griswold v. Connecticut: Birth Control and the Constitutional Right of Privacy (2005), The Struggle for Student Rights: Tinker v. Des Moines and the 1960s (1997), and Insuring Against Disaster: The Nuclear Industry on Trial (1986).

John Kessel's speculative fiction includes the newly published novel The Moon and the Other, the novels Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and Freedom Beach (with James Patrick Kelly), and the collections Meeting in Infinity, The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories.

Jessica Keener is the author of Strangers in Budapest, Night Swim and a collection of award-winning short stories, Women in Bed. Her work has appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine, Redbook, the Boston Globe, and others.

Christina Baker Kline is the author of five novels. Her most recent novel, Orphan Train, has spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Her other novels include The Way Life Should Be, Sweet Water, Bird in Hand, and Desire Lines. Her new novel, based on the iconic painting Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth, will be published in Winter 2017.

Kate Lebo is the author of Pie School and A Commonplace Book of Pie, and co-editor with Sam Ligon of the anthology Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze. Her writing has been anthologized in Best American Essays, Best New Poets, This is the Place: Women Writing About Home, and Ghosts of Seattle Past. Her first collection of essays, The Book of Difficult Fruit, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Dana Levin’s fourth book is Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Previous collections include In the Surgical Theatre, Wedding Day, and Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.”

Samuel Ligon is the author of two novels—Among the Dead and Dreaming and Safe in Heaven Dead—and two collections of stories, Wonderland, illustrated by Stephen Knezovich, and Drift and Swerve. He’s co-editor, with Kate Lebo, of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze. He edits the journal Willow Springs, teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, and is Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.

Robert Lopez is the author of five books, most recently Good People and All Back Full. He teaches at The New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and the Solstice Low-Res MFA Program of Pine Manor College. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His most recent collection of poems, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

Dave Matter has been the University of Missouri athletics beat writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch since 2013. In 2017 he co-authored “Gary Pinkel: The 100-Yard Journey” and previously co-authored “The Mizzou Fan’s Survival Guide to the SEC” in 2012.

Rosalie Metro is an anthropologist of education who has been researching Burma/Myanmar since 2000. She holds a PhD from Cornell University, and she is currently an assistant teaching professor in the College of Education at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Have Fun in Burma is her first novel.

Lucas Morel has taught at Washington and Lee University since 1999. His teaching and research interests are American government, political theory, Abraham Lincoln, and black American politics. He also serves as a pre-law advisor for the undergraduate university at large. Dr. Morel is a board member of the Abraham Lincoln Institute, trustee of the Supreme Court Historical Society, and board member of the Abraham Lincoln Association. In the 2008-09 academic year, he was the Garwood Visiting Research Fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He also teaches in the Summer Masters Program in American History and Government at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio, where he also serves on the board of advisors. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, and is currently writing a book entitled "Lincoln and the American Founding" for the Concise Lincoln Library Series of Southern University Press.

Phong Nguyen is the author of a novel, The Adventures of Joe Harper (Outpost19, 2016), and two short story collections: Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History (Queen's Ferry Press, 2014) and Memory Sickness and Other Stories (Elixir Press, 2011). His stories have appeared in more than 40 national literary journals, including Agni, Boulevard, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, and North American Review.

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of two poetry collections, The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. Her 2017 essay collection is Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, American Antiquarian Society, and Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life, she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as the director of Pleiades Press.

Michael Nye is the author of the story collection Strategies Against Extinction and the novel All the Castles Burned. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Literary Review, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Crab Orchard Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review, The Millions, New South, and the Normal School, among many others. The former managing editor of the Missouri Review, he currently lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio.

Donna Battle Pierce is an award-winning food journalist. A former test kitchen director and assistant food editor for the Chicago Tribune, her syndicated column and freelance work have appeared in Ebony, NPR, Upscale Magazine, B.E.T and the Chicago Defender. In 2015 she was a Harvard Visiting Nieman Foundation Fellow. Pierce, who grew up in Columbia, graduated from Stephens College with a bachelor’s degree in communications and broadcast media. She lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles before returning to Columbia, where she was the features editor and food editor for the Columbia Tribune, a features editor at the Columbia Missourian and an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Her professional memberships include: the James Beard Foundation, International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP), Association of Food Journalists (AFJ), Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA), Les Dames d’Escoffier and the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).

Gary Pinkel is one of the most successful coaches in college football history. He has been named Coach of the Year in three different conferences, and has the most wins of any coach at two major college football programs (not just Mizzou, but also Toledo.) During his time coaching the University of Missouri Tigers, the team went to nine Bowls, winning six Bowl championships, five Division championships, and they played in four championship games. Pinkel's biography, The 100 Yard Journey, co-written with Dave Matter, tells his personal story, and examines some of the lessons that he has learned over the course of his stellar career.

The author of the acclaimed YA novel Juliet Takes a Breath, Gabby Rivera is also the writer of the new Marvel series America—featuring the first queer, Latinx teen-girl superhero, ever—that’s catching headlines from The New York Times, CNN, Vogue, and beyond. Gabby Rivera is a young, charming speaker dedicated to empowering women and improving our marginalized communities. She’s currently making major waves for her new Marvel series starring America Chavez: a queer, Latinx superhero who’s been written and designed, crucially, by a queer Latinx. And while the series is “definitely going to tackle America’s ancestry and ethnicity,” Rivera tells The Washington Post, it’s also a comic book aimed at wide appeal: committed to snappy one-liners, blowing stuff up, and beating up the bad guys, naturally. Her book, Juliet Takes a Breath, a YA novel listed by Mic as one of the 25 essential books to read for women’s history month. It’s a critically acclaimed coming-of-age story starring a queer puertorriqueña who leaves her native Bronx behind to intern, over one transformative summer, with one of her literary heroes: the feminist author Harlow Brisbane. “I strongly encourage you to read Juliet Takes a Breath,” writes Roxane Gay. “It’s quite dazzling, funny as hell, poignant, all the things.” Witty, authentic, and humming with the full complexities of modern life and radical politics, the book was called the “dopest LGBTQA YA book ever” by Latina magazine. As an activist, Rivera also gives back. She’s the Youth Programs Manager at GLSEN (pronounced “glisten”): a leading national education organization focused on ensuring safe and affirming schools for LGBTQ students. That means fewer incidents of bullying and harassment, and more students treated with respect. She’s also worked with Autostraddle.com for over five years as the QTPOC Speakeasy editor and A-Camp staff. As a film and multi-media teaching artist, she’s worked with social justice organizations like DreamYard Project, Inc. And she’s appeared as a featured panelist and counselor at the annual Autostraddle Queer Women’s Conference, and has presented at the Allied Media and Digital Media and Learning Conferences.

J.T. Rogers’s plays include Oslo (Lincoln Center Theater, then Broadway; National Theatre, London, then West End); Blood and Gifts (Lincoln Center Theater; National Theatre); The Overwhelming (National Theatre, then UK tour with Out of Joint; Roundabout Theatre); White People (Off Broadway with Starry Night Productions); and Madagascar (Theatre 503, London; Melbourne Theatre Company). For Oslo he won the Tony, New York Critics, Outer Critics, Drama Desk, Drama League, Lortel, and Obie awards. As one of the playwrights for the Tricycle Theatre of London’s The Great Game: Afghanistan he was nominated for an Olivier Award. His works have been staged throughout the United States and in Germany, Canada, Australia, and Israel. Rogers’s essays have been published in the New York Times, Guardian, and The New Statesman. He is a Guggenheim fellow and has received three NYFA fellowships in playwriting. Rogers is a member of the Dramatist Guild, where he is a founding board member of the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund. He is an alum of New Dramatists and holds an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

The author of eight books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, as well as a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, Kathleen Rooney is the co-editor, most recently, of Rene Magritte: Selected Writings, and her second novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, was published by St. Martin's Press in January 2017. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Allure and The Nation. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay. Follow her @KathleenMrooney

Gary Scharnhorst is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico, editor of the journal American Literary Realism, published by the University of Illinois Press, editor in alternating years of the research annual American Literary Scholarship, published by Duke University Press, and general editor of the “Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism” monograph series published by the University of Alabama Press. He is also the former chair of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association and former president of the Western Literature Association. In addition, he is the author of over a hundred scholarly articles in such distinguished journals as American Literature, American Quarterly, Arizona Quarterly, Civil War History, Modern Fiction Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, Legacy, Biography, Western American Literature, Resources for American Literary Study, the Mark Twain Journal, and the Mark Twain Annual. He is also the author or editor of nearly fifty books, including biographies of Horatio Alger, Jr., Bret Harte, Kate Field, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Julian Hawthorne, and Owen Wister. His most recent book, published by the University of Missouri Press, is The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years.

Martin Seay's debut novel The Mirror Thief was listed among the best books of 2016 by Publishers Weekly and National Public Radio, and was included among the year’s notable books by the New York Times Book Review. Other writing has appeared in the Believer, MAKE, Joyland, Gargoyle, and the Gettysburg Review. Originally from Texas, Martin currently lives in Chicago with his spouse, the writer Kathleen Rooney.

Robin Sloan grew up near Detroit and went to school at Michigan State, where he studied economics and co-founded a literary magazine called Oats. After college, he worked at the intersection of media and technology, first at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, and then at Current TV and Twitter, both in San Francisco. His first novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, was a New York Times Best Seller, translated into more than twenty languages. George Saunders called the book “a tour-de-force” and Robin kindly requests that no one say anything else about any of his writing, ever. We are done here. With his partner Kathryn Tomajan, Robin manages a leased three-acre grove of olive trees in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their first batch of extra virgin olive oil will be available in 2018.

Zadie Smith is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary writing. She was born in North London in 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She read English at Cambridge, before graduating in 1997. Her acclaimed first novel, White Teeth (2000), is a vibrant portrait of contemporary multicultural London, told through the stories of three ethnically diverse families. The book won a number of awards and prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book), and two BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards (Best Book/Novel and Best Female Media Newcomer). It has been translated into over twenty languages and was adapted for Channel 4 television for broadcast in autumn 2002. Her second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), a story of loss, obsession and the nature of celebrity, won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize for Fiction. In 2003 and 2013 she was named by Granta magazine as one of 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. On Beauty won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and her fourth novel NW was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was named as one of The New York Times ‘10 Best Books of 2012.’ Zadie Smith writes regularly for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. She has published one collection of essays, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009) and a new book of essays entitled Feel Free will be published next February. Her new novel is Swing Time (November 2016). In 2017 she was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of Creative Writing at New York University.

Julija Šukys is the author of three books, including Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning and Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaite. Epistolophilia won the 2013 Canadian Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Literature. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she teaches the writing of creative nonfiction.

Tess Taylor’s chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship. The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning” and it was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Her second book, Work & Days, was called “our moment’s Georgic” by critic Stephen Burt and was named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other places. Taylor has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. Taylor currently chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle and is the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered. She was most recently a Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Born and raised in St. Charles, Missouri, Jo Ann Trogdon is an attorney and author of THE UNKNOWN TRAVELS AND DUBIOUS PURSUITS OF WILLIAM CLARK. She has also written for ARIZONA HIGHWAYS, JOURNAL OF THE MISSOURI BAR, WE PROCEEDED ON (the quarterly publication of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation) and numerous other magazines. As Jo Ann Brown she wrote ST. CHARLES BORROMEO: 200 YEARS OF FAITH, a history of one of the oldest Catholic parishes in the United States. She is a member of the Missouri Humanities Council Speakers Bureau and serves on the board of the Friends of University of Missouri Libraries. She lives in Columbia with her husband William Least Heat-Moon.

Clare Vanderpool is the award-winning author of two novels: Moon Over Manifest and Navigating Early. Moon Over Manifest, her debut novel, was awarded the prestigious 2011 John Newbery Award which is awarded annually by the American Library Association to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. Clare is remarkably the first debut author in thirty years to win the Newbery Medal. Her books have both hit the New York Times best seller list as well as the Book Sense best seller list. The recipient of much critical-acclaim, including seven starred reviews, a top ten Historical Fiction Kid’s Book by Instructor Magazine, a Junior Library Guild selection, and a Golden Spur award, Clare’s writing has connected with readers young and old. Interviews with Clare have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and almost all of the media outlets across the nation have covered her writing career. Most recently, Clare’s second novel Navigating Early was named a Printz Honor Book for Young Adult Fiction by the American Library Association. In her early years of writing, Clare set out to write a historical novel set in the fictional town of Manifest, Kansas, which is based on the real southeastern Kansas town of Frontenac where her maternal grandparents lived. Drawing on stories she heard as a child, along with research in town newspapers, yearbooks, and graveyards, Clare found a rich and colorful history for her unforgettable novel, Moon Over Manifest. She says “having lived most of my life in the same neighborhood, place is very important and for me true places are rooted in the familiar—the neighborhood pool, the sledding hill, the shortcuts, all the places where memories abound. But I wondered, what would a ‘true place’ be for someone who has never lived anywhere for more than a few weeks or months at a time? Someone like a young girl on the road during the Depression. Someone like Abilene Tucker.” Clare has been making appearances at schools, libraries, and conferences around the country and abroad. She enjoys meeting children, educators, librarians, and parents who have embraced her and her writing. She lives in Wichita, Kansas with her husband and four children.

David Von Drehle is a staff columnist for The Washington Post, where he writes about national affairs and politics from a home base in the Midwest. He joined The Post in 2017 after a decade at Time magazine, where he wrote more than 60 cover stories as editor-at-large. During a previous stint at The Post, Von Drehle served in senior roles as a writer and editor on the National staff, in Style, and at the Magazine. He is the author of a number of books, including the award-winning bestseller “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.” He lives in Kansas City with his wife, journalist Karen Ball, and their four children.

Steven Watts is Professor of History at the University of Missouri, where he has won several prizes, including the Kemper Teaching Award, the Faculty-Alumni Award, and the system-wide Thomas Jefferson Award for research, teaching, and Creativity. He also served two terms as chair of the Department of History. Watts has published seven books: The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (1987); The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture (1994); The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (1997); The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (2005); Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream (2008); Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America (2013); and JFK and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier (2016). He has published many articles and essays in venues such as The Journal of American History, American Quarterly, Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsweek, The Nation, National Review, and Salon. Watts has made numerous media appearances on NPR, C-SPAN, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox, Bloomberg News, Telemundo, the BBC, and dozens of radio stations around the United States and in western Europe. He has contributed to documentary films made in the United States, Germany, and Brazil on the subjects of his biographies. Most recently, he has been a consultant and on-screen commentator for the History Channel’s “The Men Who Built America” (2012) and two PBS films: “American Experience: Henry Ford” (2013) and “American Experience: Walt Disney” (2015).

Steve Yarbrough is the widely-acclaimed author of ten previous books for which he’s received numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright and the Robert Penn Warren Awards, etc. He has also been a PEN/Faulkner finalist. His work has been published in several foreign languages, including Dutch, Japanese and Polish, and in a number of other countries. Yarbrough currently teaches at Emerson College and lives in Stoneham, MA with his wife Ewa. The son of Mississippi Delta cotton farmers, Steve is an aficionado of jazz and bluegrass music, which he plays on guitar, mandolin and banjo, often after midnight.

Melissa Scholes Young is an award-winning author from Hannibal, Missouri, which she proudly claims as her hometown. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Washington Post, Narrative, Ploughshares, and Poets & Writers. She’s a Contributing Editor for Fiction Writers Review and Editor of the anthology Grace in Darkness. She teaches at American University in Washington, D.C. and lives in Maryland with her family. FLOOD is her first novel.

Salina Yoon is the award-winning author and illustrator of over 160 books for children. As the Kohl’s Cares featured author for summer 2016, seven of her books (nearly 1 million units), and four plush animals based on her characters, were sold nationwide in Kohl’s stores that year. She is the author and illustrator of the six-book Penguin picture book series that begins with PENGUIN AND PINECONE, the creator of the picture book series featuring Bear, that includes FOUND, STORMY NIGHT, and BEAR’S BIG DAY (Bloomsbury), and the early reader series beginning with DUCK DUCK PORCUPINE (Bloomsbury).