This year’s Debutantes are:

Isaac Blum, The Life & Crimes of Hoodie Rosen, author of OTS #21, “Cassie, Two Kids”

Isaac Blum (he/him) is an author and educator. His debut novel, The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen, won the William C. Morris Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. He’s taught English at several colleges and universities, and at Orthodox Jewish and public schools. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Camden, and his stories and essays have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New York Times, and One Teen Story, among other places. Isaac lives with his wife in Philadelphia where he watches sports and reads books that make him laugh while showing him something true about the world. You can visit Isaac online at isaacblumauthor.com and follow him on Twitter and Instagram @isaacblum_

Rita Chang-Eppig, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, author of OS #299, “Walking the Dead”

Rita Chang-Eppig received her MFA from NYU. Her novel about the legendary pirate queen of China, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, is forthcoming in 2023 from Bloomsbury. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2021 (Eds. Jesmyn Ward and Heidi Pitlor), McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, Clarkesworld, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Writers Grotto, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, What We Fed to the Manticore, author of OS #291, “Let Your Body Meet the Ground”

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer from Northern California. Her debut collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore (Tin House 2022), was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the 2023 Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and was selected as a 2023 ALA RUSA Notable Book. It’s available now wherever books are sold. Her short fiction has been published in The Minnesota Review, Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, The Common, One Story, Orion, Five Dials, and the Adroit Journal. A lifelong Californian, Talia lives in the Central Valley with her husband, a teacher and printmaker, and a very skittish cat named Fig.

Gothataone Moeng, Call and Response, author of OS #269, “Small Wonders”

Gothataone Moeng was a 2022-2023 Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a 2018-2020 Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Her writing has also received fellowships and support from Tin House, where she was a 2019 Summer Workshop scholar and from A Public Space, where she was a 2016 Emerging Writer Fellow. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, the Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, A Public Space and the Oxford American, amongst others. She holds an MFA Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Mississippi. She was born in Serowe, Botswana.

David Lawrence Morse, The Book of Disbelieving, author of OS #43, “Conceived”

Originally from rural south Georgia, David Lawrence Morse studied in Russia after the collapse of communism, cleaned toilets in Yosemite, and taught English then lived on a rice farm in the foothills of Yamaguchi, Japan, before eventually earning an MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. He is now the director of the writing program at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, One Story, Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. His first play, Quartet, was performed by the Takács Quartet and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. In his spare time, Morse renovates old houses, watches fantasy movies with his family, and tosses the frisbee for his border collie, who wishes he could throw it farther.

Richard Mirabella, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, author of OTS #38, “Mold”

Richard Mirabella is a writer and office worker living in upstate New York. His work has appeared in Story Magazine, American Short Fiction online, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. His first novel is called Brother & Sister Enter the Forest.

Josh Riedel, Please Report Your Bug Here, author of OS #261, “Midnight Sessions”

Josh Riedel worked at tech startups for several years before earning his MFA from the University of Arizona. His short stories have appeared in One Story, Joyland, and Passages North, among others. His first novel, Please Report Your Bug Here, was published by Henry Holt in January 2023. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Laura Spence-Ash, Beyond That, the Sea, author of OS #188, “The Remains”

Laura Spence-Ash’s debut novel, Beyond That, the Sea, will be published by Celadon Books on March 21, 2023. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, New England Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Her critical essays and book reviews appear regularly in the Ploughshares blog. A founding editor of CRAFT, she received her MFA in fiction from Rutgers–Newark, and she lives in New Jersey.

Join us for a free virtual reading from these authors on Thursday, April 13th with Greenlight Bookstore. Details will be announced soon!

Tickets are on sale for the Ball now.