Live Through This: Heartbreak, Hope, & Humor

Kristen Arnett is a queer fiction and essay writer. She won the 2017 Coil Book Award for her debut short fiction collection, Felt in the Jaw, and was awarded Ninth Letter's 2015 Literary Award in Fiction. She's a columnist for Literary Hub and her work has either appeared or is upcoming at North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Electric Literature, Volume 1 Brooklyn, Bennington Review, Tin House Flash Fridays/The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her debut novel is Mostly Dead Things.

Morgan Parker is the author of the poetry collections Magical Negro, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night. Her debut YA novel Who Put This Song On? will be published in Fall 2019 from Delacorte Press, and her debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World/Random House. Park3er is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. With Tommy Pico, she co-curates the Poets with Attitude (PWA) reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She lives in Los Angeles.

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the debut collection Black Light (Vintage), which was longlisted for both the 2019 National Book Award and the 2019 Story Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, the 2020 Texas Institute of Letters Best Work of First Fiction Award, and the 2020 Oregon Book Award. Her story “Foxes” was among the trio that won The Paris Review 2020 National Magazine Award for Fiction from the American Society of Magazine Editors. Parsons is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University, Yaddo, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation; her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her partner and sons in Portland, where she is completing a novel (forthcoming from Knopf) about Texas, motherhood, and LSD.

Megan Labrise is the editor-at-large of Kirkus Reviews. She hosts the weekly podcast Fully Booked, writes the biweekly column “Field Notes,” and interviews hundreds of authors each year. In 2015 she judged the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, one of richest literary awards in the world, with author Colson Whitehead and bookseller Nicole Magistro. She is a graduate of Reed College and NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, a former newspaper reporter, and a food writer. Her work has appeared in Edible Hudson Valley, Epicurious, Gourmet Live, Guernica Daily, Salon, and other publications. She lives in Portland.