Oral Florist

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last Of Her Name, which won the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut short story collection, a California Book Award silver medal, and a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award. She is also a finalist for the 2020 National Magazine Award, Northern California Book Award, and CLMP Firecracker Award. Mimi is also the founding director and executive editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights & oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program. Born and raised in the UK, Mimi lived and worked in China as a visual artist, writer, and educator before moving to the US, where she is currently based.

Joanna Ruocco is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Week, Field Glass, written with Joanna Howard, and Dan. Her novel, Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. She also writes historical romance under noms de plume. The Duke Undone, written as Joanna Lowell is forthcoming from Berkley Books in Spring 2021. She is an associate professor in the English Department at Wake Forest University and chair of the board of directors of the independent, author-run press Fiction Collective Two. 

Dougie Poole is a singer-songwriter based in Brooklyn, New York. His music has been described as an "intersection of experimental pop and outlaw country". Poole's second album, The Freelancer's Blues, was released in June 2020.

Jennifer S. Cheng is the author of MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize and named a “Best Book of 2018” by Publishers Weekly and Entropy magazine; House A, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize; and Invocation: An Essay, an image-text chapbook. She is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and has received awards and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas, Hong Kong, and Connecticut, she currently lives in rapture of the coastal prairies of northern California.

Hilary Leichter is the author of the novel Temporary, which was shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her writing has appeared in n+1, The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, and New York Magazine's The Cut. She teaches fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Jesse Ball’s work focuses on problems of knowledge and status. His absurd texts have been published in twenty languages.

Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and The Entire Predicament as well as a novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. Writings have appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, Ploughshares, Bomb, Tin House Magazine, and the most recent New American Stories anthology from Vintage. She was an American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize winner and an NEA fellow in literature. The Swank Hotel, her second novel, is forthcoming from Graywolf in October of 2021. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Léonie Guyer makes paintings, drawings, site-based work, and books. Her work is characterized by idiosyncratic shapes that are deployed in a variety of spaces. Guyer's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and held in numerous public collections including the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Reed College Art Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, and others. Guyer has collaborated on book projects with poets Franck André Jamme and Bill Berkson. She was born in New York, NY and lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Ismail Muhammad is a writer and critic based in Oakland, where he works as a story editor at The New York Times Magazine. Until recently he was the criticism editor at The Believer. His work has appeared in the Times Book Review, Paris Review, Catapult, The Nation, Bookforum, and other venues. He's currently working on a novel.

Alexandra Kleeman is the author of Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2020, she was awarded the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize. She is an Assistant Professor at the New School and her second novel, Something New Under the Sun, is forthcoming from Hogarth Press.

Rebekah Bergman is a fiction writer living in Rhode Island. Her stories have been published in Tin House Online, Hobart, Joyland, and other journals. Bergman was a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a winner of The Masters Review Anthology Prize, judged by Rebecca Makkai. She has earned fellowships from Art Farm, Brown University, and Tent Creative Writing. She is a contributing editor of NOON.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in southern California.

Brontez Purnell is an Oakland-based writer, musician, dancer, and director. He is the author of several books, including 100 Boyfriends (2021), and the zine Fag School. He is also the front man for the punk band The Younger Lovers and the founder of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company.

Sarah Gerard is the author of three books. Her essay collection Sunshine State was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her novel Binary Star was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was a best-book-of-the-year at NPR, Vanity Fair, and Buzzfeed. Her novel True Love was a Best Book of 2020 at Glamour and Bustle, and winner of an Audiofile Earphones Award. Her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, The Baffler, The Believer, Vice, Electric Literature, and many others. Her paper collages have appeared in Hazlitt, BOMB Magazine, The Creative Independent, Epiphany Magazine, No Tokens Journal, and the Blue Earth Review. Recycle, a co-authored book of collages and text, was published by Pacific in 2018.

Yuri Herrera is a Mexican author and political scientist. He has written several short novels, four of which have been translated into English: A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire (El incendio de la mina El Bordo), Transmigration of Bodies (Las transmigración de los Cuerpos), Signs Preceding the End of the World (Señales que precederán al fin del mundo) and Kingdom Cons (Trabajos del Reino). His debut novel, Kingdom Cons, won the 2003 Premio Binacional de Novela/Border of Words. Born in Actopan, Mexico, in 1970, he is currently teaching at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books of fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent book Barn 8 was named a best book of 2020 by NPR, Slate, Austin Chronicle, and Literary Hub. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes. An advocate of prison reform, Unferth founded and runs the Pen City Writers, a creative-writing certificate program at a maximum security prison in southern Texas.

Patrick Cottrell was born in Korea and raised in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee. His work has appeared in Guernica, BOMB, and Gulf Coast, among other publications. Sorry To Disrupt the Peace, Cottrell’s first novel, was long-listed for the Times Literary Supplement’s Republic of Consciousness Prize, and was the winner of the Best First Book – Fiction 2017 National Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and Barnes & Noble’s 2017 Discover Award for Fiction. Cottrell is the recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award and teaches at the University of Denver.

Samantha Hunt is the author of The Dark Dark: Stories and three novels. Her first novel, The Seas, earned her selection as one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35. Mr. Splitfoot, a ghost story, was an IndieNext Pick. The Invention of Everything Else, which is about the life of the inventor Nikola Tesla, was a finalist for the Orange Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. The Dark Dark was a best book of the year at NPR and Vogue, as well as a winner of the St. Francis College Literary Prize and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's, Tin House, A Public Space, and many others. She lives in upstate New York.

Diane Williams is the author of nine books of fiction, including her latest book, The Collected Stories of Diane Williams. Her tenth volume of short fiction How High? - That High will be published in October 2021. She is also the founder and editor of the distinguished literary annual NOON. She lives in New York City.

Vi Khi Nao’s work includes poetry, fiction, film, and cross-genre collaboration. She is the author of the novel Fish in Exile, the story collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize) and of four poetry collections: Human Tetris, Sheep Machine, Umbilical Hospital, and The Old Philosopher (winner of the 2014 Nightboat Prize). She was the fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. Her poetry collection, A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line, and her short stories collection, The Vegas Dilemma, are forthcoming from 11:11 Press Summer and Fall 2021 respectively.

Benjamin Booker is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He has recorded two albums: Benjamin Booker (2014) and Witness (2017). He cites The Gun Club, Blind Willie Johnson and T. Rex as influences. His music was described by the Chicago Tribune as "a raw brand of blues/boogie/soul," by The Independent as "frenzied guitar-strumming and raw, soulful vocals that are hair-raising in intensity" and by SPIN as "bright, furious, explosive garage rock."

Born in Beijing, C Pam Zhang is mostly an artifact of the United States. She is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature and nominated for the Booker Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics' Circle John Leonard Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award, among others. Zhang's writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, McSweeney's Quarterly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree.

Catherine Lacey is the author of four works of fiction: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States, and Pew. She is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2016 Whiting Award, and earned an artists' fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Granta Magazine named her one of their "Best of Young American Novelists" in 2017, and she has been longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award, NYPL's Young Lions Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and others.

Christine Schutt is the author of three short story collections, Nightwork; A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer; and most recently, Pure Hollywood, a New York Times notable book for 2018 and winner of the Katharine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her first novel, Florida, was a National Book Award finalist; her second novel, All Souls, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.  A third novel, Prosperous Friends, was noted in The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2012. Schutt has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and New York Foundation of the Arts grant.  She has twice won the O.Henry Short Story Prize, and her stories have been anthologized.