Benjamin Samuel has worked in the non-profit and independent literary community for over ten years. Previously, he was the Managing Editor of Restless Books, the Director of Programs of the National Book Foundation, and an editor at Electric Literature, where he co-founded Recommended Reading. Samuel also teaches writing in the Narrative Medicine graduate program at Columbia University and serves on committees for the National Book Foundation and the Brooklyn Book Festival. He has an MFA from Brooklyn College, and his writing has been published by McSweeney's, Lit Hub, Crime Reads, Publishers Weekly, Men's Journal, InsideHook, and Guernica.
Photo via Benjamin Samuel
Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her poems and essays appear in American Poetry Review, BOMB Magazine, The Georgia Review, and The New York Times. Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a NEA Fellowship. Her work has been supported by the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Before teaching at the university level, she taught middle and high school English in San Francisco. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.
Photo by Brooke Wyatt
Muriel Leung is the author of the forthcoming novel-in-stories How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnamable Disaster (W.W. Norton & Company) and several collections that include Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books), Bone Confetti (Noemi Press), and Images Seen to Images Felt (Antenna) in collaboration with artist Kristine Thompson. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop, Community of Writers, Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, among others. She is on the Board of Directors for Apogee Journal. She received her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Southern California. Currently, she serves as faculty at the California Institute of the Arts.
Photo via Muriel Leung
