Miriam Gershow is the author of Survival Tips: Stories (Propeller Books) and the forthcoming novel, Closer (Regal House, 2025). Her debut novel, The Local News (Spiegel & Grau), was hailed as “unusually credible and precise” and “deftly heartbreaking” by The New York Times. Miriam’s stories appear in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. Her flash fiction appears in anthologies from Alan Squire Books and Alternating Currents, as well as in Pithead Chapel, Had, and Variant Lit, where she is the inaugural winner of the Pizza Prize. Her creative nonfiction is featured in Salon and Craft Literary among other journals. She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and an Oregon Literary Fellowship, as well as writing residencies at Playa, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Wildacres. Find more from here at her website, Miriamgershow.com.

Anne Gudger is the author of The Fifth Chamber, a memoir Lidia Yuknavitch called “A shivering triumph. A brilliant heartsong.” She’s been published in Newsweek, The Rumpus, Real Simple Magazine, Cutbank, Cutthroat, Columbia Journal, Atticus Review, the Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. With her daughter, she created Coffee Talks, a monthly reading series focused on grief, and the podcast Coffee, Grief, and Gratitude. She lives in Portland with her beloved husband. More at Annegudger.com