J. A. Bernstein is the fiction editor of Tikkun magazine and an assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth. A Chicago native, he studied Near Eastern History at Brown University and in Jordan on a Fulbright Scholarship. He then lived in the Middle East for five years and completed a doctorate in creative writing and literature at USC, where he held the Middleton Fellowship. His first novel, RACHEL’S TOMB, won the Hackney Prize for the Novel and the Knut House Novel Prize, and his writings have been awarded honors from Crab Orchard Review, The Atlantic, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Redivider, among other journals, along with a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholarship. He’s also formerly the world’s #9 ranked cherry-pit spitter after notching a personal best of 52’7” at the International Cherry Pit Spitting Championship in Eau Claire, Michigan in 2012.

Annie Dawid’s story “Sex and Piano” won the Knut House Music Prize. Annie Dawid has published three books of fiction: And Darkness Was Under His Feet: Stories of a Family (Litchfield Review Press, winner of their Short Fiction Prize); Lily in the Desert (Carnegie-Mellon University Press) and York Ferry: A Novel (Cane Hill Press). Her long short story "Jonestown: Thirty Years On" was published in Best New Writing 2015. The director of creative writing for fifteen years at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, Dawid left teaching to write full-time. Her photography, assemblages, and rugs have appeared in various literary magazines, and shown in galleries throughout Oregon and Colorado. Her story about 9/11, “The Closer You Were, the Less You Knew,” won a prize in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open in 2007.

Theodore Worozbyt's poetry collection Smaller Than Death was published by Knut House Press in December 2015. The receipient of grants from the NEA and the Alabama and Georgia Arts councils, Worozbyt holds an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in literature from the University of Alabama. He is currently an associate professor of English at Georgia State University. His first collection The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press) won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and his second book Letters of Transit (University of Massachusetts Press) won the 2007 Juniper Prize. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Best American Poetry, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, The Mississippi Review 30 Year Anthology, New England Review, Po&sie, Poetry, Sentence, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly Online and Quarterly West.

Lizzi Wolf's story "The Terrible Expression" was featured in the November edition of Knut House Magazine, Volume 1: The Insanity Edition. Lizzi Wolf was born in Detroit. She attended Oberlin College and University of Michigan. Her novella Charcot was published in the Seattle Review in 2013. Her poetry and micro-fictions have recently appeared in Boston Literary Magazine, Midwest Quarterly, and Pembroke Magazine. Lizzi currently lives in Salem, Massachusetts, and teaches American culture studies at Endicott College. (LizziWolf.com)