Kio Stark
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 …
Daniel Nester
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 …
Suzzy Roche
Suzzy Roche is a singer/songwriter/performer/ and founding member of the singing group The Roches. She has recorded over fifteen albums, written music for TV and Film, and toured extensively for thirty years all across the U.S. and Europe. Zero Church: an unusual collection of prayers (a collaboration with Maggie Roche) which was developed at Harvard’s Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue was originally staged at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, and has been staged around the country. Suzzy has been an associate member of The Wooster Group; the experimental theater company based in New York City, and performed with them off and on for years throughout Europe. Her children’s …
Marlon James
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 …
Josh Rolnick
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 …
Sunil Yapa
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.
Leora Skolkin-Smith
Leora Skolkin-Smith’s first published novel, Edges was edited and published by the late Grace Paley for Ms. Paley’s own imprint at Glad Day books. Edges was nominated for the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award by Grace Paley. The Fragile Mistress, a feature film based on Edges, is currently in pre-production, scheduled to begin shooting on location in Jerusalem, Jordan, and New York, produced by Triboro Pictures, directed by Michael Gunther, http://www.thefragilemistress.com. Articles by Leora Skolkin-Smith have appeared in The Washington Post, Psychology Today, The National Book Critic’s Circle, “Critical Mass”, “Readysteadybook.com”, the Quarterly Review. Excerpts from Hystera were first published by Persea Books, and recently appeared in The Hamilton Stone Review. …
David Unger
David Unger was born in Guatemala City in 1950 and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Price of Escape (Akashic Books, 2011), Para mi, eres divina (Random House Mondadori, Mexico, 2011), Ni chicha, ni limonada (F & G Editores, Guatemala, 2009; Recorded Books, 2010), and Life in the Damn Tropics (Wisconsin University Press; Plaza y Janes, Mexico, 2004; Locus Press, Taiwan, 2007). He has translated sixteen books into English, including works by Nicanor Parra, Silvia Molina, Elena Garro, Barbara Jacobs, Mario Benedetti, and Rigoberta Menchu. He is considered one of Guatemala’s major living writers even though he writes exclusively in English.
Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born in Carmel, California to a Japanese mother and American father. Marie’s essay “Letter from a Japanese Crematorium” was published in Agni 65, cited as distinguished in the 2008 Best American Essays, and anthologized in Creative Nonfiction 3. Additional poems, stories and essays appear in The North Dakota Quarterly, Phoebe, Fugue, LIT and other journals. Marie’s debut novel, Picking Bones from Ash, was published by Graywolf Press on October 1st, 2009. The LA Times said of Picking Bones from Ash: “Some fiction makes the world a little smaller; illuminates the dark corners, puts the taste of, say, breakfast in a small mountain village of Japan in …
Reese Okyong Kwon
Reese Okyong Kwon’s stories are published or forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Sun Magazine, Missouri Review, and elsewhere; her nonfiction is published in the Believer, More Intelligent Life, and Rumpus. She has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony, and Ledig House International. In addition, she has been named one of Narrative’s “30 Below 30” writers.





