Authors Anna Caritj and Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Anna Caritj holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia, where she studied Spanish and English literature, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Hollins. She received the Wagenheim Fiction Prize in 2012 and was a winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs' 2016 Intro Journals Project. Her debut novel, Leda and the Swan, was published in May 2021 by Riverhead Books. TIME called the collegiate coming-of-age tale mixed with classic suspense an “affecting narrative about consent, power, and loneliness.”

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Hollins. Her fiction was selected as a finalist for multiple awards, including eight Pushcart nominations, the 2016 Dundee International Book Prize, the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and the 2020 Indiana Review Fiction Prize. Gorcheva-Newberry is the winner of the 2013 Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her first collection of stories, What Isn’t Remembered, won the 2020 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Her debut novel is The Orchard.

Funding provided by the Benedict Fiction Fund and the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Fund.