Benjamin Anastas and Monica Ferrell

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC VIRTUALLY | Benjamin Anastas is the author of the novels An Underachiever’s Diary (Dial Press) and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance (FSG). His memoir Too Good to Be True (Little A) was a national bestseller, and his short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and Yale Review, where it was awarded the annual Smart Family Prize for Fiction. His journalism, essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Bookforum, the Oxford American, The Best American Essays 2012 and The New Yorker. He has been the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency fellowship in Marfa, Texas and a Bogliasco Fellowship from the Liguria Study Center in Italy. He teaches literature and writing at Bennington College and is fiction editor of Bennington Review.

Monica Ferrell is the author of three books of fiction and poetry, most recently the collection You Darling Thing (Four Way, 2018), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and Believer Book Award in Poetry. Her novel The Answer Is Always Yes (Dial Press/Random House) was named one of Booklist's Top Ten Debut Novels of the Year. Her first collection of poems, Beasts for the Chase, was a finalist for the Asian American Writers Workshop Prize in Poetry and won the Sarabande Books Kathryn A. Morton Prize. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, among other magazines, and has been widely anthologized, most recently in The Penguin Book of Indian Poets (2022). Born in New Delhi, India, she is the winner of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and a Discovery/The Nation Prize, and is the Doris and Carl Kempner Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Purchase College (SUNY).