Michael Zapata, Hila Ratzabi, & Dan Fliegel

Michael Zapata is the author of the The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, which was the winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction; a finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction; and, a 2020 Best Book of the Year for NPR, A.V. Club, BookPage and Los Angeles Public Library.

Hila Ratzabi is the author of There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022), which won a gold Nautilus Book Award and was a finalist for a National Indie Excellence Award. Her poetry has been published widely in literary journals, including Narrative, Linebreak, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and others, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College (2007). She is director of communications at North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe and lives in Oak Park.

Dan Fliegel lives and teaches in Chicagoland. His chapbook, How Music Works On Us, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Press in early 2024. Poems are published in Adirondack Review, African American Review, Cold Mountain Review, Free State Review, Jet Fuel, The Dodge, The South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. He is the poetry editor for TriQuarterly. As a drummer, he has performed and recorded with The Eternals, Marvin Tate’s D-Settlement, Tortoise, Uptighty, and others. His ongoing musical project is Scurvy Jazzby.