photo courtesy of Gregg Segal
Dana Johnson is the author of In the Not Quite Dark. She is also the author of Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and of the novel Elsewhere, California. Both books were nominees for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is the Florence R. Scott Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Lou Mathews is a two-time Pushcart winner and the author of three novels. His stories have been published widely including in the New England Review and Zyzzyva. Mathews' latest novel Hollywoodski has been selected as Kirkus' Indie Book of the Month for March 2026.
Suzanne Rivecca's first book, Death is Not an Option, was a finalist for The Story Prize, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She is the recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her short stories have received two Pushcart Prizes and inclusion in Best American Short Stories.
Alison Turner is a prize-winning poet. She received a JD from the UCLA School of Law and, during the years of a busy appellate practice, reserved the hours of 5-7am for reading and writing poems. Her poems have been published in Nimrod, Mid-American Review, Hudson Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Catamaran and other journals and analogies. She is the author of the chapbook, What To Do In An Emergency. She was the 2025 winner of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry.