Antonia Angress

Antonia Angress is the author of the novel Sirens & Muses (Ballantine/Random House, 2022), which was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and was named a Best Book of the Year by Glamour Magazine. She is a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and a 2024 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grantee. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Minnesota. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Costa Rica, she currently resides in Minneapolis with her family. She attended the Community in 2019.

Photo: Dena Denny

Stacy D. Flood

Originally from Buffalo, and currently living in Seattle, Stacy D. Flood’s work has appeared at ACT, Ghost Light Theatricals, Theatre Battery, and Theater Schmeater in Seattle, as well as in SOMA Magazine, Seattle Weekly, three Seattle Fringe productions, the Akropolis Performance Lab’s New Year/New Play salon, Playlist Seattle, the Adaptive Arts Theatre Company’s Night of New Works, Macha Theatre Works’ Distillery series, Mirror Stage’s ‘Expand Upon’ readings, The Hansberry Project’s REPRESENT festival, Infinity Box’s Centrifuge, FUSION Theatre Company’s ‘The Seven’ Short Works Festival, and in Starbucks’ The Way I See It campaign. He has served as an instructor at Seattle’s Hugo House and Portland’s Literary Arts as well as a lecturer at San Francisco State University — from which he holds an MA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a Clark/Gross Novel Writing Award — and he has additionally been awarded both a Getty Fellowship to The Community of Writers and a Gregory Capasso Award in Fiction from the University at Buffalo. Furthermore, he has been a finalist in the Ashland New Play and Playwrights Foundation Bay Area festivals, and in addition, an artist-in-residence at DISQUIET in Lisbon and Millay Arts in New York. His play entitled The Optimist, or What Space Travel Means to Me will be featured as part of ACTLocal, and published by Lanternfish Press, The Salt Fields is his first novella.

Photo Credit: Bogdana Ferguson

Clare Frank

Clare Frank started firefighting in California at 17 and was promoted up the ranks, becoming the state’s first and only female Chief of Fire Protection. Along the way, she earned a BS in fire administration, an MFA in creative writing, and a JD. She has lectured at colleges, universities, and state and national fire conferences, and lives near Lake Tahoe with her husband and two dogs. Her first book, Burnt: A Memoir of Firefighting will be published by Abrams Press in 2023. She attended the Community of Writers in 2018. therealclarefrank.com
Photo credit:Cynthia Smalley

Ramona Reeves

Ramona Reeves is the author of the debut collection It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press) which won the 2022 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. She has been awarded an AROHO fellowship, received a residency at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, won the Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize and served as an associate fiction editor for Kallisto Gaia Press. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Southampton Review, Bayou Magazine, Pembroke, New South, Superstition Review, Texas Highways and others.

Photo: Claire Mulkey

Monica West

Monica West is the author of Revival Season, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, and short listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She received her B.A. from Duke University, her M.A. from New York University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. She has received fellowships and funding from Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She currently serves as the Visiting Assistant Professor of Fiction at the University of San Francisco. [F] monicawestwrites.com

Photo: Chickpea Photography