Anya Yurchyshyn

Anya Yurchyshyn is the author of the memoir My Dead Parents and numerous works of short fiction. Her writing has appeared in Esquire, Granta, Oprah Magazine, N+1, BuzzFeed, Lenny, Bustle, Refinery29, Mod Art, Guernica, and elimae, and she is a frequent contributor to NOON. Her story from NOON 2014, “The Director,” was included in Best Small Fictions of 2015. She received her MFA in Fiction from Columbia and has received fellowships from the university as well as The MacDowell Colony.

Annie Dewitt

DeWitt it a novelist, short story writer and essayist. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Tin House, The Believer, Guernica, Esquire, BOMB, Electric Literature, Bookforum, NOON, The LA Review of Books, The Iowa Review, The American Reader, art+culture, Poets and Writers, and The Faster Times, amongst others. DeWitt holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia School of the Arts. Her story “Influence” was recently anthologized in Short: An International Anthology distributed by Norton. DeWitt was a Co-Founding Editor of Gigantic, a literary journal of short prose and art carried throughout the U.S. and abroad. Her debut novel White Nights In Split Town City, out from Tyrant Books in Summer 2016, made The New York Times Book Review’s “Short List” and has received accolades from BookForum, Interview Magazine, Publishers Weekly, amongst many others. Her debut story collection – Closest Without Going Over – was shortlisted for the Mary McCarthy Prize. Stories in the collection have been translated into Latvian and Swedish and have appeared widely in the U.S. The title story was the the Iowa Review’s winter 2017 feature. DeWitt pens an occasional nonfiction column about art, literature, film and criticism for The Believer, called “Various Paradigms.” She was recently recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship. DeWitt has taught at Columbia University, Barnard, Bard, and The New School. She is a visiting faculty member at Bennington for the 2017-2018 academic year.

 

Rick Moody

Rick Moody was born in New York City. He is the author of six novels (Garden State, The Ice Storm, Purple America, The Diviners, The Four Fingers of Death, and Hotels of North America), three collections of stories (The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, Demonology, and Right Livelihoods), a memoir (The Black Veil), and a collection of essays, On Celestial Music. With Darcey Steinke, he edited Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, and with Rob Spillman, he edited Fantastic Women, a collection of innovative writing by women writers. His novel, The Ice Storm, was adapted for film by director Ang Lee, and won the award for best screenplay at the Cannes International Film Festival. His short fiction and essays have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, etc. He has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Spiritual Writing, and elsewhere. He is a contributing editor at Tin House and Conjunctions, and serves on the board of Archipelago Books and The Corporation Yaddo. His awards including the Aga Khan Award from The Paris Review, the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Officier de L’Ordre des Arts a des Lettres, from the Republique Francaise, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for excellence in the memoir, and others. He regularly reviews music at The Rumpus, Salon, and elsewhere, and is a columnist at LitHub. He has also released six albums of songs with various collaborators, the most recent of which was The Unspeakable Practices, with Kid Millions of Oneida.

Mia Gallagher

Mia Gallagher’s debut novel HellFire (Penguin, 2006) was internationally acclaimed and received the Irish Tatler Literature Award 2007. Her prize-winning short fiction has been published in Ireland and abroad and her theatre work has been performed across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Excerpts from her second novel have been published by Oxford University Press, Spolia (US), Colony and by New Island in two recent anthologies (Young Irelanders edited by Dave Lordan, and Lost Between, a dual-language publication in English and Italian). Mia was Writer in Residence with dlr/IADT from 2009-2010 and has received several Arts Council Bursaries for Literature (2008-2014). She has worked as a professional manuscript editor and pitch-writer in film, broadcast TV, print and digital media since the early 1990s and has been facilitating workshops in writing and drama since the late 1990s. Mia has been mentoring and editing prose writers since 2010 and is currently on the Stinging Fly mentoring panel.