ALEX DAWSON: I'm full time faculty at Rutgers University, where I teach creative writing (with a focus on fantasy and weird fiction) and curate/host "Inside the Writers House," a weekly video chat with authors from all over the world. I also lead an extracurricular writing workshop/adventure retreat over winter break called Winter is Here! in which participants travel to evocative and frequently far-flung locales (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Iceland) to write and workshop spec fic with me and Irish fantasy writer Dave Rudden (as well as Lev Grossman, Michael Swanwick, and Joe Abercrombie). My forthcoming novel, Welcome to White Hart, has been called "magical and masterful" (Lev Grossman, The Magicians) and "a work of wizardry" (Idra Novey, Those Who Knew). Samantha Hunt (Mr. Splitfoot) called it a "wonder" and said it was "impossible not to be amazed," and Kevin Wilson (Nothing to See Here) said "in a perfect world, this would be the story we told our loved ones at Christmas." I'm a certified international tour guide, a licensed Central Park carriage driver, and the creator/owner of The Rac-On-Tour (get it?), a mobile bookstore/cabinet of wonder built on the back of a '53 International flatbed farm truck. I've been a bartender/bouncer in some of the roughest gutbuckets in NJ and have ridden a motorcycle for forty years.
***
AIMEE LABRIE: I teach creative writing at Rutgers and work as the senior program administrator for Writers House. My short stories have appeared in the Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost Magazine, and others. My second collection of short stories, Rage and Other Cages, won the 2022 Leapfrog Press Global Prize in Fiction and will be published in 2023. In 2020, my short story “Rage” won first place in Solstice Literary Magazine’s Annual Literary Contest and my novel in progress won the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award. In 2007, my first short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published in a small print run (University of North TexaLaBrie,+Aimee.jpegs Press). My short fiction has been nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes. In 2012, she won first place in the Zoetrope: All-Story’s Short Fiction Competition.
