Donyae Coles

Donyae Coles is an artist and a writer whose work is speculative in nature. Her writing is lyrical and haunting and focuses on blending real life anxieties and issues with genre elements found in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. She is represented by Lane Heymont of Tobias Literary for written works.

Deepa Rajagopalan

Deepa Rajagopalan won the 2021 PEN Canada New Voices Award for her short story “Peacocks of Instagram.” Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in literary magazines such as Rhe New Quarterly, Room Magazine, The Malahat Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, EVENT magazine, The Quarantine Review, and the anthologies Bristol Short Story Prize 2023, The Unpublished City Vol. II. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, and a certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.

Born in Saudi Arabia, Deepa moved to India as an adolescent, and later to the United States and Canada in her twenties. She works in the tech industry in Toronto.

Her first book of short fiction, Peacocks of Instagram, is forthcoming from Astoria/House of Anansi in 2024. She is now working on her first novel, We Have Come Empty Handed, about a disparate group of Indian workers in Saudi Arabia, whose lives become entangled, caught in the exigencies of war, deception, and intolerance.

Ruben Reyes, Jr.

He is a graduate of Harvard College where he studied History and Literature and Latinx Studies. His writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, AGNI, BOMB Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, LitHub, and other publications.

His debut story collection, There is a Rio Grande in Heaven, was a finalist for The Story Prize, and longlisted for the the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the New American Voices Award. Archive of Unknown Universes is his first novel. Originally from Southern California, he lives in Queens.

Lynn Schmeidler

Lynn Schmeidler's fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Georgia Review, KR Online, the Southern Review, and other publications, and she won the 2023 BOMB Fiction Contest for her short story "InventEd." She has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is the author of the poetry book History of Gone and two poetry chapbooks, Wrack Lines and Curiouser & Curiouser. She lives in the Hudson Valley. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

Marguerite Sheffer

Marguerite (Maggie) Sheffer is a writer who lives in New Orleans. She is a Professor of Practice at Tulane University, where she teaches courses in design thinking and speculative fiction as tools for social change. Formerly, she taught English at the East Oakland School of the Arts, Castlemont High School, Life Academy, and GW Carver High School.

Her debut short story collection, The Man in the Banana Trees, was selected by judge Jamil Jan Kochai for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and was published in 2024.

Maggie is a founding member of Third Lantern Lit, a local writing collective, and the Nautilus and Wildcat Writing Groups. She received her MFA from Randolph College. She was a 2023 Veasna So Scholar in Fiction at The Adroit Journal, and was selected as a top-twenty-five finalist for Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers. Her story “Tiger on My Roof” was a finalist for the 2024 Chautauqua Janus Prize, which awards emerging writers’ short fiction with “daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder readers’ imaginations.”

Jeff Somers

Jeff Somers has published nine novels and dozens of short stories; his short story “Ringing the Changes” was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories. He’s a full-time freelance writer whose work has appeared on Bookbub, Lifehacker, and the Barnes and Noble Book Blog, and is a Contributing Editor at Writer’s Digest, which published his book on the craft of writing "Writing Without Rules." He lives in Hoboken with his wife, The Duchess, and their cats. He considers pants to always be optional.

Sally Wen Mao

Sally Wen Mao is the author of the poetry collection The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, August 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Prize. Her debut fiction collection, Ninetails, was released from Penguin Books in May 2024. She is the author of two previous poetry collections, Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2013 and 2021, The Paris Review, Granta, Poetry, A Public Space, Harpers Bazaar, The Washington Post, and others. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was recently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. She has taught writing at NYU, Cornell, and Sarah Lawrence College, and will be an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Baruch College in 2024.