Emily Fridlund grew up in Minnesota and currently resides in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Her fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, Zyzzyva, FiveChapters, New Orleans Review, Sou’wester, New Delta Review, Chariton Review, Portland Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. The opening chapter of History Wolves won the 2013 McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction, and Fridlund’s collection of stories, Catapult, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and will be published by Sarabande in the fall of 2017.

Elisabeth Schmitz is Vice President and Editorial Director of Grove Atlantic.  Since joining the company in 1995, she has edited fiction and memoir for Grove including Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, Euphoria by Lily King, Peace Like a River by Leif Enger, Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas, An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine, Why Be Happy When You can Be Normal?  by Jeanette Winterson,Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman, and H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.  Elisabeth has been a fellow at the Jerusalem Book Fair, the Sydney Writer’s Festival and the Toronto Harbourfront Literary Festival and is an annual speaker at the Sewanee Writers Program and Princeton.

Literary agent Nicole Aragi founded Aragi Inc. in 2002, and has represented authors like Junot Díaz, Nathan Englander, Denis Johnson, Colson Whitehead, and Jonathan Safran Foer. In 2014, she was awarded the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction, which recognizes an editor, publisher, or agent who over the course of his or her career has “discovered, nurtured, and championed writers of fiction in the United States.”