Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and a New York Times notable book of the year. The novel was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and an NAACP Image Award. She is a 2016-17 fellow at the New York Public Library Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Klay is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a Public Affairs Officer. After being discharged, Klay received his MFA from Hunter College. He is the author of Redeployment (The Penguin Press), a powerful collection of short stories that takes readers to the front lines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his book and public lectures, Klay explores the complex feelings of brutality, faith, guilt, and fear that a soldier experiences during war, while also revealing the isolation and despair that can accompany a soldier’s homecoming.
With his stark, realistic depictions of war, Klay’s book has been praised as “one of the best debuts of the year” by the Portland Oregonian and author Karen Russell calls his writing “searing and powerful, unsparing of its characters and its readers.” Redeployment won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2015 Chautauqua Prize. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Granta, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, the New York Daily News, Tin House, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012.
Nezhukumatathil is the author of three books of poetry: Lucky Fish, winner of the Hoffer Grand Prize for Prose and Independent Books; At the Drive-In Volcano; and Miracle Fruit. With Ross Gay, she co-authored Lace & Pyrite, a chapbook of nature poems (Organic Weapon Arts, 2014). She is the poetry editor of Orion magazine and her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and Tin House. Awards for her writing include an NEA Fellowship in poetry and the Pushcart Prize. She teaches at The State University of New York at Fredonia, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal of Excellence and named the campus-wide Hagan Young Scholar. In 2016-17, Nezhukumatathil will be the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi’s MFA program in creative writing.
Pierce's most recent book of poems is The Tornado Is the World (forthcoming in December 2016). She is also the author of The Girls of Peculiar, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize, and Famous Last Words, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2011), Best New Poets, Boston Review, Slate, Ploughshares, FIELD, and many other journals and anthologies. She co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.