Kimberly Dixon-Mays is a Ragdale and Cave Canem fellow whose publications include Reverie, Anthology of Chicago, Uproot, Consequence and Rhino magazines, the anthologies Trigger Warning and Just Like a Girl: A Manifesta! and her own collections SenseMemory, and More Than...  read

Elizabeth Gomez is a Chicago-based comedian, storyteller, writer, and experienced napper. She is a founder of the Windy City Rollers, Chicago's original all female roller derby league; a founding writer at Drinkers with Writing Problems; an associate producer of Story...  read

Sara Ross Witt is a former co-host of Tuesday Funk and a graduate of The New School MFA in Creative Writing program. Her writing has appeared in Arch City Chronicle, Parent to Parent, Black Market Lit, and Best of Ohio...  read

Martha Bayne is a freelance writer and editor, and the editor-in-chief of Belt Magazine, an independent online magazine covering the postindustrial midwest. Her features and essays have appeared in the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune, Crain's, Occupy.com, Belt, the Baffler,...  read

Joe Meno is a fiction writer who lives in Chicago. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and a finalist for the Story Prize. The bestselling author of seven novels...  read

Jessi DiBartolomeo hails from the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, which is just as bad as it sounds. She packed her car with her belongings and cat and made the drive to Chicago in the miserably humid summer of 2011 and...  read

Lily Be is a momma, a nanny, and storyteller. She's a wise Mexican badass from Humboldt Park, Chicago. You can hear her tells stories everywhere and anywhere. Lily is a Moth GrandSLAM champion and the host and producer of her...  read

Robert Loerzel is a freelance journalist and photographer in Chicago. His historical nonfiction book Alchemy of Bones: Chicago's Luetgert Murder Case of 1897 was published in 2003 by the University of Illinois Press. His reporting and writing have appeared in...  read

James Finn Garner is the author of the award-winning clown noir mystery series, Rex Koko, Private Clown, as well as the Politically Correct Bedtime Stories trilogy. A former columnist for Chicago Magazine, he has also read extensively at Chicago's "live...  read

Originally from the suburbs of Detroit, Matthew Fogarty currently lives and writes in Urbana, Illinois and is co-publisher at Jellyfish Highway Press. He has an MFA from the University of South Carolina, where he was editor of Yemassee. His fiction...  read