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Joy Castro is the award-winning author of the 2023 historical novel One Brilliant Flame, set amidst the nineteenth-century anticolonial Cuban insurgent community in Key West; the environmental novel Flight Risk, a finalist for a 2022 International Thriller Award; the post-Katrina New Orleans thrillers Hell or High Water and Nearer Home; the story collection How Winter Began; the memoir The Truth Book; and the essay collection Island of Bones, which won the International Latino Book Award.  She edits the Machete series in innovative nonfiction by underrepresented voices at The Ohio State University Press and edited the craft collection Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family. Co-editor of the 2024 volume Tears and Flowers: A Poet of Migration in Old Key West, a new bilingual edition of the 1918 poetry collection Lágrimas y flores, she is the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she directs the Institute for Ethnic Studies.

Brook McClurg is assistant professor of nonfiction in the English and Comparative Literature Department at San José State University. His first book, A Dictionary of Modern Consternation, won the Permafrost Prize in Nonfiction. A Fulbright research fellow, his nonfiction, fiction, poetry and translation work have appeared in Cagibi, Iron Horse Literary Review, Pidgeonholes, Wanderlust, Exposition Review, Loch Raven Review & others. His essay “Geometry of Absence” was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2021 and he is currently editor in chief for Reed Magazine, California’s oldest literary journal.

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