Larry Wormington is a Dallas-based fiction writer who grew up in the piney woods of East Texas. He received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his BA from the University of North Texas. His stories have appeared in Redivider, Elm Leaves Journal, Harpur Palate, and the fiction anthology Monday Nights, among others. He is a Marine veteran and a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance. Professionally, he works as a technical writer and runs several small businesses in the greater Dallas area – the rest he saves for his Khaleesi and their four incredible children.

April Blevins Pejic teaches writing and literature at Nicholls State University. Her work has appeared in Arcadia Magazine, The Green Briar Review, Furious Season, Ellipsis, and the fiction anthology Monday Nights. Her essay, “A History We Can Live With” was chosen as a notable essay in the Best American Essays 2015 edited by Ariel Levy. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Orleans and a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance.

Emily Choate’s fiction appears in Mississippi Review, Shenandoah, The Florida Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She writes regularly for Chapter 16, and her nonfiction also appears in Atticus Review, Late Night Library, Bayou Magazine Online, Yemassee, and Nashville Scene, among others. Emily holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writers Conference. She lives near Nashville, where she’s working on a novel.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, which was published by One World Random House in August 2021. It was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and longlisted for the Story Prize. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. It was longlisted for the 2021 DUBLIN Literary Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. The novel was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Award for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Kenyon Review, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Ruffin is the 2022 Grand Marshal of the Mardi Gras Krewe of House Floats.

Susan R. Kagan is a writer by compulsion and an IT professional by pragmatism. She was born and raised in a Podunk in Indiana, from which she fled for more cosmopolitan environments in adulthood. Her degree in Film/Video from Roger Williams University helps her write in a cinematic style. She has published a novel, Ruxandra: Granddaughter of Vlad the Impaler, and a nonfiction book, Basic Wiccan Ethics: Avoiding a Perilous Path. Kagan lurks the suburbs of New Orleans before returning to her lair with her husband and cats.

Ben Saxton is a New Orleans-based writer whose essays and nonfiction have appeared in The Big Roundtable, Academic Medicine, The Health Humanities Reader, the Flannery O’Connor Review, and Tolkien Studies. He is currently writing a book about about New Orleans poker players.

James A. Jordan is pursuing his PhD at Southern Mississippi. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fiction Southeast, The Greensboro Review, and The Saturday Evening Post, among others. A member of the Peauxdunque Literary Alliance, he serves as a Festival Associate for the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival and Saints and Sinners LGBT Festival. He received his MFA from the University of New Orleans.

Cassie Pruyn is a New Orleans-based poet born and raised in Portland, Maine. Her poems have appeared in AGNI Online, The Normal School, The Los Angeles Review, The Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, Salt Hill Journal, and others. She is the author of a narrative history of New Orleans’ Bayou St. John (History Press), and of Lena (Texas Tech University Press), winner of the 2017 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry.

Andrew Kooy grew up in the podunk George, WA, and wandered the Pacific Northwest for years before realizing he was allowed to write his own stories. He received his MFA in Fiction from the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop where he taught freshman composition and interned with Bayou magazine while managing to keep his newborn daughter alive. His fiction and creative nonfiction has been published in Apex, Barely South Review, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Blood and Thunder, among others.