Scott Phillips is the author of three of the most highly acclaimed crime novels of recent years. His debut novel, The Ice Harvest, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won a California Book Award. Its follow-up, The Walk-away, continued his success, with the New York Times calling it “wicked fun.” His third novel, Cottonwood, was published by Ballantine. Phillips has spent enough time at the poker tables in Las Vegas to know what works and what doesn’t.
Nora Pierce is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel The Insufficiency of Maps, a selection of the Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” program. She is currently in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and at work on a new novel. She teaches writing at Stanford University, where she was formerly a Wallace Stegner fellow. She has a love/hate relationship with the Nevada desert, and was once millimeters (millimeters!) away from a million-dollar jackpot.
Todd James Pierce is the author of three books, including the novel A Woman of Stone and the short story collection Newsworld, which won the 2006 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. He is an assistant professor of English at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, California.
José Skinner’s Flight and Other Stories was a finalist for the Western States Book Award for Fiction. He worked as an English/Spanish translator and interpreter in the criminal courts of New Mexico before earning his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has appeared in Boulevard, Colorado Review, Witness, Bilingual Review, and the anthology In the Shadow of the Strip: Las Vegas Stories. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas — Pan American.
Celeste Starr is a male-to-female transgendered escort based in Pahrump, Nevada. “Dirty Blood” is her first published story.
Vu Tran was born in Saigon and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he currently teaches creative writing and literature. His stories have appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Southern Review, Glimmer Train, Harvard Review, and many other publications.