DIONNE IRVING is the author of the novel Quint and the story collection The Islands. Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, Literary Hub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. Irving teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience at the University of Notre Dame.

BRENDA PEYNADO is the author of the The Rock Eaters. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Literary Award, selection for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Best Small Fictions, a Dana Award, and a Fulbright grant to the Dominican Republic. Her fiction appears in The Georgia Review, The Sun (London), The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, and more than forty other journals.