Ethan Laughman has worked in both the editorial and marketing departments of the University of Georgia Press. Among the few who have read every Flannery O'Connor Award-winning volume, he has collaborated closely with the series' authors in compiling these new anthologies.
Ed Allen, an associate professor of English at the University of South Dakota, has also worked as a taxi driver, butcher, and salesman. Allen's novel Mustang Sally has been adapted into a film, Easy Six.
Wendy Brenner is the author of two books of short fiction, Large Animals in Everyday Life, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award, and Phone Calls From the Dead. Her stories and essays have appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Magazine Writing, New Stories From the South, Oxford American, The Sun, Allure, Travel & Leisure, Seventeen, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and teaches writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
David Crouse lives in Haverhill, Massachusetts. His stories have appeared in such publications as the Massachusetts Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Chelsea, and Quarterly West.
Philip F. Deaver held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Bread Loaf. His short fiction has appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1988 and has been recognized in Best American Short Stories 1995 and The Pushcart Prize XX. Deaver taught in the English Department at Rollins College and was permanent writer in residence there. He was also on the fiction faculty in the Spalding University brief residency MFA program.
Toni Graham, a native of San Francisco, teaches creative writing at Oklahoma State University, where she serves as editor in chief and fiction editor for the Cimarron Review. She is the author of two story collections: Waiting for Elvis, winner of the John Gardner Book Award, and The Daiquiri Girls, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction.
Mary Hood is also the author of Familiar Heat and How Far She Went (Georgia), a winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her work has been published in the Georgia Review, North American Review, and Yankee, among other publications.
Karin Lin-Greenberg's fiction has appeared in literary journals including the Antioch Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review Online, and North American Review. She lives and teaches creative writing in upstate New York.
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of two collections of short fiction: This Life She's Chosen and Swimming with Strangers. Her short fiction and essays have appeared widely in journals, including One Story, the American Scholar, Willow Springs, and Southern Humanities Review. She is also a recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize and teaches high school English near Seattle, Washington.
Becky Mandelbaum is the author of Bad Kansas, winner of the 2016 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the 2018 High Plains Book Award for First Book. Her work has appeared in the Missouri Review, the Georgia Review, the Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, Hobart, Electric Literature, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and has been featured on Medium. Originally from Kansas, she currently lives in Washington's Skagit Valley and teaches at Seattle's Hugo House.
C. M. Mayo is a native of Texas who now lives in Mexico City. She has published stories in the Paris Review, the Southwest Review, the Northwest Review, and the Quarterly.
Christopher "Kit" McIlroy lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he is an author-in-residence for the Tucson Unified School District. His story collection All My Relations won the Flannery O'Connor Award in 1992. Between 1987 and 2010 he developed and implemented writing programs for the non-profit ArtsReach, which served Native American communities in southern Arizona. Some of those experiences were distilled into the nonfiction book Here I Am a Writer, which was published in 2011.
Peter Meinke has published stories and poems in the Atlantic, Redbook, Yankee, the New Yorker, New Republic, and Virginia Quarterly Review. His stories have twice been included in the O'Henry Award volumes and once in Best American Short Stories. In 1975 he studied in Africa and in 1978-79 he was a Fulbright lecturer in Poland. He is director of the writing workshop at Eckerd College.
Paul Rawlins' fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Southeast Review, Sycamore Review,Tampa Review, and Prism. He lives in Salt Lake City.
Monica McFawn lives in Michigan and teaches writing at Grand Valley State University. Her fiction has appeared in the Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Web Conjunctions, Missouri Review and others. She is also the author of a hybrid chapbook, "A Catalogue of Rare Movements" and her plays and screenplays have had readings in Chicago and New York.
Hugh Sheehy's stories have appeared in such publications as Five Points, Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, and Copper Nickel. He teaches creative writing and literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
Siamak Vossoughi is an Iranian-American writer whose collection Better Than War came out in 2015. The collection was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. He has received a fiction fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He lives in San Francisco.
Leigh Allison Wilson is a professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Oswego State University, Oswego, New York. Her second book, Wind, was published in 1989. Her work has appeared in Harper's, Grand Street, and the Southern Review.
