BONNIE ANTOSH is a playwright & screenwriter from both Carolinas & NYC. She’s a staff member at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Samuel French OOB Festival winner, and an alum of The Road's Under Construction Cohort. Recently, her plays have been nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and developed by Denver Center, Ensemble Studio Theatre, PlayPenn, Threshold Theater in Minneapolis, and City Theatre Miami. Her EST/Sloan commission LEMURIA is the 2025 winner of the NC New Play Project’s Mark Gilbert Award; it's also been a finalist for Seven Devils, New Roots, and SETC's Getchell New Play Contest. BA: Yale. BonnieAAntosh.com

PRITHA BHATTACHARYYA is a fiction writer whose work appears in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics. She lives in Houston, Texas.

KATE BUSATTO lives in coastal California. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama with an emphasis on Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. She earned her Master of Divinity from Yale University. Her short fiction has been featured in The Threepenny Review and is forthcoming in Kenyon Review. In the UK, her work has been published in Moth Magazine and Five Dials. Kate has received support to attend the 2025 Sewanee Writers’ Conference as a Tennessee Williams Scholar in Fiction. She is a current 2025-26 John Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. She is also the recipient of the 2025 Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship in Fiction for her debut novel. She has worked as a chaplain, undertaker, and bookseller. Visit her at katebusatto.com.

MICHAEL CARLSON is a writer from Janesville, WI. His work has been published in The Rumpus, New Ohio Review, Either/Or, and has received support from the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop. He has an MFA from Vanderbilt University and is the Creative Writing Fellow at The Curb Center in Nashville, TN.

ROBERT ALAN GRAND (he/him) is a writer and photographer based in Asheville, NC, primarily covering Appalachian art and culture. His writings have appeared in publications such as Art in America, The Bitter Southerner, and Garden & Gun, among many others. He currently serves as the Carolinas Editor-at-Large for Burnaway and American Craft Council's Regional Correspondent for the Southeast. Grand is a 2025 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

LAURA GROTHAUS is a writer and artist living in Baltimore, the land of the Susquehannock and the Piscataway-Conoy. Her writing has been featured by 32 Poems, Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, The Cincinnati Review, BUST, Strange Horizons, and Fairytale Review. Kelly Link selected her as the winner of the 2024 Halifax Ranch Prize from American Short Fiction. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her poetry has also garnered awards internationally, from Poetry in Pubs in Bath, England to the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition in Cary, North Carolina. Her collaborations have spawned theatre about desire, workshops about memory maps, and more.

SAKINAH HOFLER is a fiction writer, poet, and playwright. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, among other literary journals, and her plays have been produced by Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park and the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music. Her work has received support from the Albert C. Yates Foundation, the Kingsbury Foundation, the de Groot Foundation, the Taft Research Center, and the P.E.O. Scholar Award. She currently teaches in the Writing Program at Princeton University. Her debut novel, STABLE, is forthcoming from Holt in Spring 2027.

ANESSA IBRAHIM holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in fiction from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction and The Southern Review. She lives in Minneapolis, where she works at Milkweed Editions and is writing a novel.

CIANON JONES (she/they) is a recent MFA graduate from the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop who writes humorously distorted plays that venture through the repercussions of capitalism on our bodies, minds, nature, and communities. Recent achievements include: 2026 Iowa Economic Development Artist Grant; 2026 Cody Renard Richard Scholarship; 2024-2026 Norman Felton Playwright Fellow, UIowa; 2025 Performing Arts Summer Research Award, UIowa; 2025 Alexander Clark play commission, Muscatine Art Center, UIowa Arts Share, and Global Education at the Stanley Center; 2023-2024 Iowa Arts Fellowship, UIowa; 2022 Tennessee Williams Scholar, Sewanee Writers' Conference; 2021 Hustle Award, UArts.

KANAK KAPUR is currently a Stegner fellow in fiction at Stanford University. Her short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Sewanee Review, and more. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in 2027.

CAROLINE KIM is the author of a collection of short stories, THE PRINCE OF MOURNFUL THOUGHTS AND OTHER STORIES, which won the 2020 Drue Heinz Prize in Literature. In 2024, her story, “Hiding Spot” was selected for inclusion in The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize winners. She watches a lot of dog videos and loves reading tarot cards at Sewanee.

SHELBY KNAUSS is a poet from Council Bluffs, Iowa. She was the 2018-2019 Post-Baccalaureate Fellow for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and works at a book bindery, fabricating and restoring books. When she’s not writing, she enjoys painting and finding new ways to keep her hands busy.

CAROLENE KURIEN is a Malayali-American poet whose work has garnered support and recognition from MacDowell, Key West Literary Seminar, and Sewanee Writers' Conference. Her poems have been published in Poetry London, Bennington Review, Sixth Finch, The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, RHINO, and elsewhere. You can learn more at carolenekurien.com.

BEA TROXEL is an essayist and musician from Nashville, TN. They're an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona. You can find her work in Quarternotes Magazine and Essay Daily, and her albums "Gettin' Where" and "The Way That it Feels" on all streaming platforms.

BRIANA WHEELER is a writer currently living in Knoxville, TN. For the last three years, she's worked as a high school English teacher, but has recently decided to leave the field and prioritize international travel like she's always wanted to.