Rudsdale High School
Oakland, CA

On The Bricks

Sean Gleason is the son of a storyteller. He grew up to the perpetual and haphazard rhythm of typewriter keys striking a ribbon. He currently teaches high school English in Oakland, CA, where he was named 2023-2024 Teacher of the Year. As an educator, he strives to challenge conventional practices despite the limitations of the classroom, engaging his students in creative project-based learning. As a writer, he struggles to find the discipline to tell a few stories of his own. As a grown-up, he continues to play around with bicycles, sometimes goes skateboarding with friends, and still dreams of being in a band.

Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School
Bethesda, MD

Elemental

Monica Judge is an essayist whose work has appeared in AGNI, Fourth Genre, Southern Humanities Review, River Teeth (Beautiful Things), New Delta Review, Off Assignment, and elsewhere. She won first place in the 2023 Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize and was a finalist for the 2020 Stories Out of School contest held in partnership with The Academy for Teachers and A Public Space. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net Anthology and was listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2023. An educator for over 15 years, Monica currently teaches high school English in her school's International Baccalaureate program and is the adviser to the student-run newspaper. Monica lives in Maryland with her husband and two children.

Lake Washington High School
Kirkland, WA

The Lighter Graveyard; Fairfield

Chad Marsh teaches English 10 Honors and ENGL 111 (a dual-credit University of Washington in the High School composition course) in Kirkland, Washington. In his eighteen years of teaching, he has found that the challenge of balancing a life as both a teacher and a writer has given him a sense of purpose that would not have existed if he had chosen to do either alone. He is currently wrapping up his first novel and is in the early stages of his second. He lives in Seattle with his wife, two teenage sons, and their wonderful COVID pup Mateo.

St. Andrew's Episcopal Upper School
Austin, TX

This Moment Moves Us Forward

Heather Tone is the author of a collection of poetry, Likenesses (Copper Canyon Press), as well as a poetry chapbook, Gestures (The Catenary Press). Her writing has appeared in The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, Fence, and other journals. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she now lives and teaches in Austin, Texas. Her fiction surfaces questions about how to respond with discernment and levity to the social and political contradictions of our contemporary moment. She and her partner are parents to two school-aged girls.

St. Sebastian's School
Needham, MA

The Island Rule

Adam White’s first novel, The Midcoast, was a national bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a CrimeReads Best Book of the Year. In addition to writing fiction, White has been nominated for an Emmy as co-producer of Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare and served as story consultant on the Oscar-nominated documentary Cartel Land. He is an Executive Producer and writer on the TV adaptation of The Midcoast, currently in development at Hulu, 20th Century Studios, and The Littlefield Company (Fargo, The Handmaid’s Tale). White has an MFA from Columbia University and now lives in Boston, where he teaches writing and coaches lacrosse at St. Sebastian's School. In 2022, USA Lacrosse honored White with the Gerry Carroll Award, given to one high school coach nationwide for exemplary service on and off the field.

The Fletcher School
Charlotte, NC

Beneath Her Shadow

Cyd Apellido was born in Iligan, Philippines, and she has always had a passion for writing and teaching. She has been teaching since 2006 and has taught at Gulliver Preparatory, University of Miami, and currently, she teaches literature and composition with a multisensory approach at The Fletcher School in Charlotte, NC.

The duality of her cultural experience as a Filipina American growing up in the Philippines and the United States informs her writing and world view. She considers it important to hone the creative skills of her students and expose them to a variety of works, so they have a well-rounded, critical perspective.

She is grateful for her time as a 2023 MacDowell Literature Fellow, where she met artists who inspired her with their diverse works and artistic processes. After her MacDowell residency, she is also the recipient of the 2023 Musa McKim Guston Fellowship, an honorary fellowship from MacDowell.

The International High School for Health Sciences
Queens, NY

A Leak in the Roof

Mohammad Hakima is an NYC-based author. He moved to the United States in August 1998 from Tehran, Iran, and started writing after learning to speak English. His work is published in Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, Black Warrior Review, Passages North, Popula, JMWW, and etc. His work has received support from Vermont Studio Center, and his stories have been twice a Finalist and once Shortlisted for the William Wisdom Faulkner prize. He works as a high school special education teacher and has an MFA in fiction from The New School.

Vaughn International Studies Academy (VISA High School)
Pacoima, CA

Roots of a Banyan Tree

Natalie Mislang Mann, a graduate of Bennington Writing Seminars, is a secondary school educator who holds an MA in Humanities from San Francisco State University. Supported by the PEN Emerging Voices fellowship, Tin House, VONA/Voices, and UCLA Extension’s Master Class, her writing has been published in Angel City Review, The Exposition Review, The Rattling Wall’s anthology Only Light Can Do That. Her latest essay about distance teaching during the pandemic appears in West Virginia Press’s Essential Voices: A Covid-19 Anthology. Natalie is currently revising a memoir based on her experiences growing up multi-ethnic in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley.

The Paideia School
Atlanta, GA

This Accidental World

Sarah Schiff earned her PhD in American literature from Emory University but is a fugitive from higher education. She now writes fiction and teaches high school English and creative writing in Atlanta, Georgia. Her short stories have appeared in Pembroke Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Cleaver, and MonkeyBicycle, among others, and her nonfiction can be found in such publications as Biography and Arizona Quarterly. She’s been twice nominated for a Pushcart prize, by J Journal and JMWW, and she was a finalist for the TulipTree Review's Wild Women Story Contest. When she's not working on her novel, grading papers, or taking care of her two children, you might find her playing bass guitar in a local rock cover band.

Sidwell Friends School
Washington, D.C.

The Mean Girls of Morehouse

Alonzo Vereen is a graduate of Morehouse College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’s taught English on the high school and collegiate levels for over a decade and worked as an editorial assistant at Crown Publishing Group, a leading non-fiction imprint at Penguin Random House. While at Crown, he served on the editorial teams for Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen’s Renegades, Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights, Seth Rogen’s Yearbook, and Jimmy Chin’s There and Back. He’s the author of Historically Black: American Icons Who Attended HBCUs.