Linda Lightsey Rice, a native of South Carolina who has been coming to Taos regularly since 1995, is the author of the novels SOUTHERN EXPOSURE and AGAINST THE RUINS. Her first novel, favorably compared in reviews to the work of William Faulkner, was nominated for the PEN Hemingway Award. The recipient of numerous writing awards, including the McKnight Foundation Fellowship in Creative Prose, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant to Ireland, and an Artistic Residency at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland, she also previously worked in the NYC publishing industry and has taught creative writing in colleges and universities in the Southeast, Midwest, and Upstate New York. She has been a program administrator and Master Teacher of the Novel at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, where she currently resides. Rice has often been a resident artist at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, where she is spending this fall. She calls Taos her “psychic home—perhaps because my prose is heavily visual, the juxtaposition of light and color and landscape here is more revelatory to me than almost any other place I’ve been.” Brian Allan Skinner has written more than 120 published short stories which have appeared in small press and literary magazines in the United States, Canada, and Ireland. He is a former poetry and non-fiction reviewer for Kirkus Reviews and a production artist for Scientific American Newsletters in New York City. His most recent work, a collection of linked short stories, is Shoot Me, Jesus: Tales of the Old & New Southwest, published through Nighthawk Press. In 2015, Brian moved to Taos, New Mexico, which he first visited with his grandmother on a cross-country train trip aboard the Santa Fe Chief in 1960.