Kimberly Parsons

October 2024

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the debut collection Black Light (Vintage), which was longlisted for both the 2019 National Book Award and the 2019 Story Prize. Parsons was a finalist for the 2020 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, the 2020 Texas Institute of Letters Best Work of First Fiction Award, and the 2020 Oregon Book Award. Her story “Foxes” (published in The Paris Review) won a 2020 National Magazine Award for Fiction.

Parsons is the recipient of fellowships from Columbia University, Yaddo, Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Oregon Arts Commission, Regional Arts and Culture Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation; her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, New York Tyrant, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her partner and sons in Portland, OR, where she is completing The Boiling River, a novel (Knopf, 2024) about Texas, motherhood, and LSD.

Rubén Degollado

November 2024

Rubén Degollado's work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Lit Hub, Texas Highways, The Common, and the anthologies Living Beyond Borders and Nepantla Familias. His YA novel, Throw, was published in 2019 and won the Texas Institute of Letters 2020 Award for Best Young Adult Book, was included on the Texas Library Association 2020 TAYSHAS list of best books for teen readers, and was a Christianity Today 2020 Book of Merit. Rubén’s debut literary novel, The Family Izquierdo, published in 2022 by W.W. Norton, was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award, is a Texas Institute of Letters Best Fiction Award finalist, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2022. Rubén has been an educator since 1994, serving as a tutor, teacher, assistant principal, principal, and director of school improvement. He has been married to his wife, Julie, for over 25 years and they live with their three children on a ranch in Texas.

Michael Parker

(Date is currently TBD)

Michael Parker is the author of eight novels – Hello Down There, Towns Without Rivers, Virginia Lovers, If You Want Me To Stay, The Watery Part of the World, All I Have In This World, Prairie Fever, and I Am the Light of This World--and three collections of stories, The Geographical Cure, Don’t Make Me Stop Now and Everything, Then and Since.   His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Five Points, the Georgia Review, The Southwest Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Oxford American, New England Review, Trail Runner, Runner’s World and Men's Journal.  He has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature and the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize. His work has been anthologized in the Pushcart and New Stories from the South anthologies, and he is a three-time winner of the O.Henry Award for short fiction. For nearly thirty years, he taught in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Since 2009 he has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.  He lives in Austin, Texas.