Gina DeLuca earned her MFA from the Nonfiction Writing program at Washington University in St. Louis and her B.A. in Education & Child Development from Smith College. She has read her essays at the Satire and Humor Festival in Chicago, Tuesday Funk, Tartle at the Duke (her monthly live lit show), and other events around town. The Chicago Reader called her work “brilliant,” and she was the featured artist in the 2020 winter arts issue. First Days, her most recent solo essay-reading show, sold out at the world renowned Steppenwolf Theater. You can find her writing in Slate, The Rumpus, Points in Case and other publications. Gina has been a comedian, artist and performer in Chicago for twelve years. She has taught college level creative writing classes and was a freelance writing coach before joining Gilliam Writers Group in 2021.

Michael Kaplan holds an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he taught undergraduate creative writing and English literature classes. His fiction appears in The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Florida Review, and The Beloit Fiction Journal, while his essays can be found in The New England Review, Nature, and Kill Your Darlings. He is the recipient of the Iowa Writers’ Room Fellowship, and is currently developing a pair of feature screenplays. Before receiving his MFA, he worked for years as a video editor, his projects ranging from narrative short films and hard-hitting documentaries to lipstick commercials and Kevin Hart’s Instagram stories.

Eva Warrick is a fiction writer and artist based in Washington State and Amsterdam. She earned an MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers Program, and has worked with a variety of clients in professional and corporate capacities on projects including internal communications, reports, web content and skills refreshers. As an editor, she has broad genre experience, from literary fiction manuscripts to architecture, graphic novel, fantasy, and memoir. She enjoys working with writers and projects at all stages of development, and her coaching emphasizes creative permission, technical fluency, and knowing one’s audience.

Jonathan Zelinger is a writer, work-shopper, and gatherer of people. He is a former high school English teacher, essay retreat leader, and a strong advocate for letter writing. Currently, he works for StoryCorps as a writer and facilitator. He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and writes essays, many of which can be found at jonathanzelinger.com. He is also the organizer for the Commonwealth Running Club, which meets at Grand Army Plaza at 6:30 PM every Monday.

Veronica is an experienced educator, writer, comics-artist, and horticulturist. She has worked with students of all ages, from first graders to Ph.D. candidates, and is passionate about helping her students communicate clearly and effectively through writing.

Veronica’s teaching experience began with AmeriCorps’ City Year program, where she served sixth graders in a low-income literacy classroom. Following this experience, Veronica continued to serve students often left behind in traditional educational settings. She taught both academic and creative writing with the Boys and Girls Club, the Writer’s Exchange, and Stratford Academy. In each of these roles, Veronica honed her skills for building strong relationships with students and teaching effectively.

Josh Boardman is from Michigan. A tutor specializing in elite New York City programs for over a decade, he is also the author of the chapbook Plantain (West Vine Press, 2018) and conducted the Latin translation project We, Romans (2015). His stories have appeared in journals such as New York Tyrant, Catapult, and Dandruff Magazine. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is working on his second novel and a collection of stories about his hometown.

Caroline Harper New is a writer and visual artist from southwestern Georgia. She received her BA in Anthropology from Davidson College and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, where she taught first-year composition and creative writing. Prior to this, she has taught English and creative writing in New Orleans, Madagascar, and Morocco. She is a recipient of the 2023-2024 Creative Careers Residency, as well as the Dzanc Press Writer-in-Residence in Ann Arbor, MI.

Heidi Katter is a writer and historian from the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University with a BA in History and completed her MPhil with distinction from the University of Cambridge. She studies the intersection of Indigenous histories, settler colonialism, environmental history, and cartography in the American West. Heidi refined her skills in research and writing with the support of fellowships and prizes during her undergraduate and graduate programs.

Sebastien Butler is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Virginia. His work has been featured in The Michigan Daily, and is forthcoming from Southern Indiana Review and The Journal. He was the recipient of the 2021 Hopwood Award in Undergraduate Poetry from the University of Michigan, as well as the Paul and Sonia Handelman Award for Romantic Poetry. At UMich, he studied English, creative writing, and political science, completing a thesis in poetry under the acclaimed poet and memoirist Sarah Messer.

Zahid Rafiq is a writer from Kashmir. He recently finished his MFA at Cornell University and is at present a Visiting Fellow in the Humanities at Bard College. He is currently working on a collection of short stories. Before turning to fiction, Rafiq was a journalist for several years, writing for various international publications including The New York Times, Foreign Policy, BBC, Vice Magazine, Al Jazeera, TRTWorld, and others. He completed his BA at Kashmir University and studied journalism as a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. His interests include short fiction, novels, novellas, personal essays, memoirs, and narrative essays.

Ashleigh is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Chicago. There they research changing conceptions of the human and her relationship to the environments that construct her, and they do this via an interdisciplinary mix of media studies, artificial intelligence, black studies, and gothic horror. A native of New York, they hold a B.A. in Creative Writing and Studio Art from Hunter College, and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from the Graduate Center of CUNY.

Elie Piha is a writer and teacher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Elie graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in English and from Cornell University with an MFA in Fiction. He won the 2016 David Nathan Meyerson Short Fiction Award from Southwest Review and came in third place in CRAFT Magazine's 2020 Fiction Contest. Elie's fiction can also be found or is forthcoming in War, Literature and the Arts and The Sun Magazine. You can find him at eliepiha.com. 

Julie Cadman-Kim is a writer and educator from the Pacific Northwest. She’s a graduate of Bennington College (BA), Pace University (MS), and the University of Michigan where she earned her MFA in 2022.

Julie has worked for many years with writers of all ages and backgrounds. She especially enjoys helping people to hone their unique voices while working with them to demystify the process of drafting, revising, and editing.

Damian Johansson is from the apex of the United States, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He earned his MFA from the University of Minnesota, specializing in Creative Nonfiction. Before pursuing graduate work, he tutored Big 10 athletes, students from more than 40 countries and home languages, a high-profile felon writing her memoirs, high school students taking their first shaky steps into the stanzas of poetry, retirees parsing sentences in their life stories - and so many more.

Mace Dent Johnson is a Staff Writer at Wirecutter (The New York Times). Before that, they were the Senior Poetry Fellow in the Creative Writing program at Washington University in Saint Louis, where they completed an MFA in poetry. Mace is a Cave Canem Poetry Fellow, and they have published prose and poetry online and in print, appearing in the Nepantla Anthology, The New Republic, them. magazine and more.

K Ho is a writer and photographer from Vancouver BC, unceded Coast Salish territories. Their lyric essay “Dispatches” won The Fiddlehead’s 2021 Creative Nonfiction Contest, and their work has appeared in Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing, PRISM International, THEM lit, the Canadian National Arts Centre, and elsewhere. They are a 2018 VONA/Voices Fellow, an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Minnesota, and an upcoming Tin House 2023 Fellow. They currently live in Minneapolis, MN, Dakota territory.

Ally Sass is a screenwriter, playwright and educator based in Brooklyn and Boston, MA. She received her MFA in Playwriting from Boston University in 2021. There, she taught screenwriting and playwriting to undergraduates, along with general dialogue writing. Her plays have been produced in New York, Boston, and internationally. She was a semifinalist for the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and a two-time finalist for the Kennedy Center's John Cauble Short Play award. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Playwrights' Center, and Actors' Equity Association. She was born and raised in Cambridge, MA.

Ally is currently teaching at Beaver Country Day School in Boston, Massachusetts, and developing a new script.

K. Henderson is a Cave Canem fellow and the author of the poetry chapbook Cruel Maths or Kind Proof (Black Warrior Review 47.1). Their poems appear in AGNI, ANMLY, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. K. has a BA from Bennington College and is in the third and final year of an MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, where they were a 2020 Artist-in-Residence at the Department of Physics and Astronomy. K. writes poetry, fiction, and literary/film criticism.

Kathryn Diaz is a writer and instructor from Houston, Texas. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from Cornell University, a BFA in English with a concentration in creative writing from the University of Houston, and has additional education in the craft of writing and teaching from Writespace, Inprint, and the Knight Institute. Over the past several years, she has mentored students in crafting academic essays, research papers, fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and personal essays. She is the 2022 recipient of Cornell's Martin Sampson Teaching award. Her writing has been featured in The Cincinnati Review, Anathema: Spec from the Margins, and Glass Mountain.

Madeline McFarland is a writer and data analyst based in Brooklyn, NY. She is an MFA candidate at NYU in the Creative Writing program in Fiction and graduated magna cum laude from Williams College in 2018 with degrees in History and Economics.

Madeline worked at The Demex Group as a Communications Associate until 2023, and is currently working on a short story collection.