Mushfig Babayev is an Azerbaijani scholar and translator living in the United States. He holds a Ph.D. in Philology/American Literature from Azerbaijan University of Languages. His publications include translations of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Winter of Our Discontent and numerous scholarly articles on Steinbeck and other authors. He plans to use his Steinbeck Fellowship to produce translations of two more Steinbeck works: The Pearl (Mirvari) and Tortilla Flat (Tortilla məhəlləsi).

 

 

Gabriela Garcia is a fiction writer and poet. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Tin House, Zyzzyva, Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, and many other journals. She is the winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and has received fellowships and residencies from Lighthouse Works, the Keller Estate, Sarabande Books, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Gabriela received an MFA in fiction from Purdue University and is at work on a novel.

 

 

Meron Hadero was born in Ethiopia and came to the U.S. in her childhood via East and West Germany. Her short stories have been published in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Zyzzyva, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, among others, and her writing also appears in The New York Times Book Review and the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. She's been a fellow at Yaddo, Ragdale, and The MacDowell Colony, and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, a JD from Yale Law School (Washington State Bar), and an AB from Princeton in history with a certificate in American studies.

 

Carrie R. Moore is a Southern writer whose work examines African American ancestral histories and contemporary experiences. A graduate of the University of Southern California and Stanford University, she has published her fiction in The Normal School and received the Erica Landis Memorial and Tennessee Williams Scholarships. She is currently at work on a short story collection and novel. 

 

 

Shabnam Nadiya is a Bangladeshi writer and translator, based in California. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her work has been published in Joyland, Asymptote, Flash Fiction International, Al Jazeera Online,Pank, Amazon’s Day One, Chicago Quarterly Review,  Wasafiri, Words Without Borders, and Gulf Coast. She has also translated Moinul Ahsan Saber’s novel The Mercenary (Bengal Lights Books, 2016; Seagull Books, 2018); and Shaheen Akhtar's novel Beloved Rongomala (Bengal Lights Books, 2018; Seagull Books, 2019).

 

Laura A. Zink lives in Oakland, teaches fiction writing at Berkeley City College, and was an organizer for the Beast Crawl Literary Festival. She earned her MFA at St. Mary’s College of California and her MA in English at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Her fiction has appeared in Broad River Review, Full of Crow, sPARKLE & bLINK, Naked Bulb 2016 Summer Anthology, Literally Stories, FICTION on the WEB, and The East Bay Review.