Winter 2018

Venita Blackburn received the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, and she received the PEN America Los Angeles Literary Award in fiction. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

Stephen Doyle is the creative director of Doyle Partners. Doyle creates illustrations and constructions for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Wired, and others. He received the AIGA medal in 2014, and received Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Award for Communication in 2010.

Sylvia A. Harvey is an award-winning journalist and reporting fellow at the Investigative Fund. She reports at the intersection of race, class, and policy. Her work has appeared in Elle, the Nation, the Appeal, Yes! Magazine, WNYC, the Root, Colorlines, and elsewhere. 

Benjamin Rasmussen is a Denver-​based photographer whose work has been shown at the Annenberg Space for Photography. In 2010 he received an award from Pictures of the Year International, and he was included on the 2011 and 2012 lists of Flash Forward–Emerging Photographers.

Raj Telhan is a physician and writer who works at the intersection of literature, medicine, and culture. His writing appears in VQR and the American Scholar. His honors include the Smith-Shanubi Scholarship at the New York State Writers Institute and the VQR Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction. Telhan studied Literature and Medicine at the University of Virginia, where he was a Crispell Scholar.