The Virginia G. Piper
Center for Creative Writing

Beth Staples is an assistant professor of English and editor of the literary magazine Shenandoah at Washington & Lee University. She has worked as an editor and publishing professional in a variety of jobs: as the assistant director of The Publishing Laboratory at UNC Wilmington, as editor of Lookout Books, as senior editor of Ecotone, and as the managing editor of Hayden's Ferry Review. (In her early professional life, she also dipped her toe into medical publishing at Elsevier and the print-on-demand publishing world at Xlibris.) In addition to teaching creative writing classes at W&L, she has taught classes in fiction writing, editing, and publishing at UNCW, Mesa Community College, and Arizona State University, where she earned her MFA in fiction writing.

Jabari Jawan Allen, a Chicago, IL native, has received fellowships and scholarships from Tin House, Community of Writers, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, VONA, among others. Along with Jari Bradley and Willie Kinard III, he is a member of the Black queer gospel trio The Upper Room Collective. A Pushcart nominee, Allen’s poems either appear or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Vinyl, Virginia Quarterly Review, Wildness, the anthology The Impossible Beast: Queer Erotic Poems, and elsewhere. An Arizona Commission on the Arts grant recipient, Allen currently lives in Phoenix. 

Jim Butcher is the author of the Dresden Files, the Codex Alera, and a new steampunk series, the Cinder Spires. His resume includes a laundry list of skills which were useful a couple of centuries ago, and he plays guitar quite badly. An avid gamer, he plays tabletop games in varying systems, a variety of video games on PC and console, and LARPs whenever he can make time for it. Jim currently resides mostly inside his own head, but his head can generally be found in the mountains outside Denver, Colorado.

Jim goes by the moniker Longshot in a number of online locales. He came by this name in the early 1990’s when he decided he would become a published author. Usually only 3 in 1000 who make such an attempt actually manage to become published; of those, only 1 in 10 make enough money to call it a living. The sale of a second series was the breakthrough that let him beat the long odds against attaining a career as a novelist.

All the same, he refuses to change his nickname.

Leah Newsom is a fiction writer born and raised in Arizona. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and is the Founding Editor of Spilled Milk Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, Juked, Passages North, and more.

Yi Shun Lai (say "yeeshun" for her first name) lives in Southern California. Her debut novel, Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu was a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her memoir Pin Ups will be published in September 2020 by Homebound Publications. She teaches in the MFA programs at Bay Path and Southern New Hampshire Universities.