Fiction 2024

Lauren Simkin Berke is a Brooklyn-based artist, illustrator, and educator whose clients include the New York Times and Smithsonian magazine. Berke teaches in the MFA Illustration program at the Fashion Institute of Technology and in the BFA Illustration programs at Parsons and the School of Visual Arts.

A. J. Bermudez is the author of Stories No One Hopes Are About Them (Iowa UP, 2022), winner of the 2022 Iowa Short Fiction Award and a 2023 Lambda Award Finalist. She is a recipient of the PAGE Award, the Pushcart Prize, the WeScreenplay Diverse Voices Award, and the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize. Her writing has received support from the Steinbeck Fellowship, the Bethany Arts Community, the Watermill Center, and the Nawat Fes Residency in Morocco. Bermudez currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami.

Adam Ekberg is a photographer with exhibitions at museums around the world, including the George Eastman Museum in Rochester and CLAMP in New York. Ekberg has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Monson Arts, Monhegan Artists’ Residency, and PLAYA, and is the recipient of the Society for Photographic Education’s Imagemaker Award and the Tanne Foundation Award.

Bret Anthony Johnston’s most recent novel is We Burn Daylight (Penguin Random House, 2024). His work appears in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the New Yorker, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the Director of the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.

Koye Oyedeji’s work has appeared in a number of publications including Ploughshares, the Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, Wasafiri magazine, the Believer, and elsewhere.