Ethan Laughman has worked in both the editorial and marketing departments of the University of Georgia Press. Among the few who have read every Flannery O'Connor Award-winning volume, he has collaborated closely with the series' authors in compiling these new anthologies.

Gail Galloway Adams is professor emeritus at West Virginia University, where she taught creative writing for over twenty years. Adams served as fiction editor for Arts and Letters: A Literary Journal and for the Potomac Review. She has been a reader/judge for several short fiction awards series. She has recently taught at Kenyon College, West Virginia Wesleyan College, and the Wild Acres Writers Workshop. She also works privately as a short story and novel editorial consultant and lives on a small family ranch in central Texas.

David Crouse lives in Haverhill, Massachusetts. His stories have appeared in such publications as the Massachusetts Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Chelsea, and Quarterly West.

Molly Giles is a lecturer in the creative writing department at San Francisco State University. Her stories have appeared in Playgirl, Redbook, North American Review, New England Review, and Ascent, among other publications. She lives in Woodacre, California, with her three daughters.

Carole L. Glickfeld grew up in New York City, the setting of Useful Gifts, her award-winning collection of stories about a family with deaf parents and hearing children, and Swimming Toward the Ocean, a novel that won the Washington State Book Award. She was the recipient of a Literary Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Governor's Arts Award (Washington State) and was a fellow of both the MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Now living in Seattle where she has taught creative writing, she works on a consulting basis with aspiring writers on their manuscripts when she is not indulging her passion for travel.

Jacquelin Gorman is the author of The Seeing Glass, a memoir. She grew up in a family of physicians in the shadow of Johns Hopkins Hospital and spent a great deal of time in Maryland's hospitals as a girl. She has practiced as a health-care lawyer in Los Angeles and as a hospital chaplain, and she is currently the program director at the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her stories have appeared in Slake Magazine, Kenyon Review, ScreamOnline, The Journal, and Reader's Digest.

Peter LaSalle is the author of two previous short story collections and a novel. His fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Paris Review, Tin House, Southern Review, Best American Short Stories, Best of the West, Sports Best Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. He has taught at universities in this country and in France and, in 2005, received the Award for Distinguished Prose from the Antioch Review.

Karin Lin-Greenberg's fiction has appeared in literary journals including the Antioch Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review Online, and North American Review. She lives and teaches creative writing in upstate New York.

Becky Mandelbaum is the author of Bad Kansas, winner of the 2016 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the 2018 High Plains Book Award for First Book. Her work has appeared in the Missouri Review, Georgia Review, the Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, Hobart, Electric Literature, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and has been featured on Medium. Originally from Kansas, she currently lives in Washington's Skagit Valley and teaches at Seattle's Hugo House.

Dianne Nelson Oberhansly is the coauthor of the novel Downwinders: An Atomic Tale and her fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and the New England Review.

Peter Selgin's stories and essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including the Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, and Best American Essays. He is the author of the forthcoming novel Life Goes to the Movies, as well as By Cunning and Craft: Sound Advice and Practical Wisdom for Fiction Writers.

Hugh Sheehy's stories have appeared in such publications as Five Points, Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, and Copper Nickel. He teaches creative writing and literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

Sandra Thompson has published a novel, Wild Bananas. She was a columnist, writer, and editor at the St. Petersburg Times, where she directed and edited a series that won the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Tampa, Florida, and New York.

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