Marlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1970. His second novel, The Book Of Night Women was a National Book Critics Circle Award fiction finalist, a NAACP Image Award Finalist, and winner of the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2010 Minnesota Book Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His short fiction has appeared in Iron Balloons, Bronx Noir, and Silent Voices, and his essays have been published in New Orleans: What Can’t Be Lost, and Publishers Weekly. Marlon James teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Macalester College, St.Paul Minnesota and is working on his third novel.

Daniel Nester most recent book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction called “hilarious” and “actually funny.” His first two books, God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and God Save My Queen II (2004), are collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His third book, The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVOX, 2006), is a collection of poems. His work has appeared in such places as Poets & Writers, Salon, The Morning News, McSweeney’s, The Daily Beast, The Rumpus, the Poetry Foundation website and Bookslut, and anthologized in The Best American Poetry, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll. He is associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. He is managing editor of the group culture-slash-literature blog We Who Are About To Die. Find him online at danielnester.com and on Twitter.

When she is not writing fiction, Kio Stark writes about relational technology and teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, a graduate program for geeks, hackers, and artists. Her fiction has been published in Joyland and Swink. She has written about feminism, NYC night court, the history of documentary, graphic novels, failure and her favorite saints for The Nation, Killing the Buddha, Feed, Lime Tea and other publications and wrote the introduction to Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots, a collection of vernacular police photography. She spent a racetrack season in Miami interviewing old thugs for her doctoral work in American Studies at Yale. She’s currently working on a handbook for independent learning called Don’t Go Back to School and a new novel. Follow Me Down is her first novel. www.kiostark.com.

Sunil Yapa is a graduate of the Hunter College MFA program in Fiction, where he was selected for two Hertog Fellowships and the Alumni Scholarship awarded to one fiction student every three years. He has received scholarships to the Norman Mailer Writers’ Center, The New York State Summer Writer’s Institute and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Interviews, reviews and fiction have appeared in The Tottenville Review, The Multicultural Review, Pindeldyboz, and Hyphen Magazine. He was the 2010 winner of the Asian American Short Story Award, and is currently finishing a novel set during one day of anti-corporate protests in Seattle, November 1999.

Josh Rolnick’s debut short story collection, Pulp and Paper, won the 2011 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, selected by Yiyun Li. His stories have won the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editor’s Choice Prize. They have also been published in Harvard Review, Western Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, and Storyville, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. Rolnick holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. He is publisher of Sh’ma, a journal of Jewish ideas, and editor of Unstuck, an independent literary annual. Rolnick has previously worked as a reporter or editor for publications including the Associated Press, Congressional Quarterly, Moment, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. He is a frequent day-guest lecturer in fiction writing classes at the University of Akron, and a proud inductee of the Akron Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. He currently divides his time between Akron, OH and Brooklyn, NY, where he lives with his wife and three sons. His website is www.joshrolnick.com.