Steve Yarbrough is the author of eleven books, most recently the novel The Unmade World, due out in January 2018. His other books are the nonfiction title Bookmarked: Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, the novels The Realm of Last Chances, Safe from the Neighbors, The End of California, Prisoners of War, Visible Spirits and The Oxygen Man, and the short story collections Veneer, Mississippi History and Family Men. His work has been published in several foreign languages, including Dutch, Japanese and Polish, and it has also appeared in Ireland, Canada, and the U.K. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award, and the Robert Penn Warren Award. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Called "one of the innovators of the short short story" by Publishers Weekly , Peter Cherches is a writer, singer and lyricist. Over the past 40 years his writing, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in dozens of magazines, anthologies and websites. His first recording as a jazz vocalist, Mercerized! Songs of Johnny Mercer , was released in 2016. He is the author of three previous prose collections, including LIFT YOUR RIGHT ARM (Pelekinesis, 2013) and AUTOBIOGRAPHY WITHOUT WORDS (Pelekinesis, 2017). Cherches is a native of Brooklyn, New York
Willie A. Wideman-Pleasants discovered her love for poetry at an early age. She loves Langston Hughes’ poetry. His words resonated within her. She understood how he felt during those troubled times in his life. As a woman of color, she had to endure discrimination, retaliation, lies, and limited promotions in the workplace. She even shared some of those stories in her first book, Ain’t That the Truth. Her writing has propelled her on a journey of reading and teaching to children and adults. This new book includes a poem about her disillusion of a thirty-year marriage called, Stayed Too Long. She believes that when people share their stories it can help to edify others.