Something (rather than nothing‪)‬ Ken Volante

Ross McMeekin the author of The Hummingbirds (Skyhorse, 2018.) His short fiction has appeared in literary journals and magazines such as Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Redivider, and X-R-A-Y. He has won fellowships from Hugo House and Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle. For the last ten years, he has served as editor of the literary journal, Spartan. 

McMeekin's Below the Falls is a collection filled with passion, tenderness, love, and peril.

Two climbers in the North Cascades risk their friendship and lives ascending a frozen waterfall. The girlfriend of a famous comedian in Greenwich Village must decide whether she wants to raise a child in the spotlight of fame. A mysterious Bird of Paradise makes daily overtures to an elderly widow in the frigid Midwest. A Texas fracking mogul struggles to find the love his money prevents. The deeply rendered American landscapes of these stories emerge as a vital background for characters faced with conflicts that cannot be easily resolved, illuminating interior worlds filled with contradiction.

You can find him at www.rossmcmeekin.com [http://www.rossmcmeekin.com/]

SRTN Website [https://www.somethingratherthannothing.com/episodes]

Matthew Kyle Levine is a filmmaker and cinematographer based in New York City.  His short films have won awards and played at numerous film festivals throughout North America, including the Williamsburg Independent Film Festival and the Canada Shorts Film Festival, most notably for his short film "Miss Freelance".

Watch 'Caleb and Sarah" and other short films on Mathew Kyle Levine's Vimeo:

MKL Vimeo [https://vimeo.com/matthewkylelevine]

SRTN Website [https://www.somethingratherthannothing.com/]

Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021), The Museum of Heartache (Pski's Porch Publishing, 2021), the 11th installment of Belle Point Press' Prose Series, and The Realm of the Dog (J. New Books, 2024.) He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Paul's Website [https://pluikart2.wixsite.com/paulluikart]

The Ill-Fitting Skin [https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-ill-fitting-skin-shannon-robinson/21168757?aid=5819&ean=9781950413751&listref=2024-clients&] is layered with surreal storytelling but remains an extraordinarily realistic read, in the sense that even the most solid realities of life—and death—tend to blur and shimmer at their raw edges. The talkative bird that nests in a woman's womb is as real as the "previous tenant." The love of a mother for her uncontrollable son is as real as the wildness that is in her too. The women of The Ill-Fitting Skin are real women—who work and grieve and create and destroy, who love and do not love, whether at the roll of the dice or because "the pages are paths, and you will have to choose among them."

Shannon Robinson's debut short story collection, The Ill-Fitting Skin, is winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction (forthcoming with Press 53 in May 2024). Her writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Joyland, Water-Stone Review, Nimrod, failbetter, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2011 she was the Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts. Other honors include Nimrod's Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts, a Hedgebrook Fellowship, a Sewanee Scholarship, and an Independent Artist Award from the Maryland Arts Council. She teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with her husband and son. www.shannonrobinson.org [http://www.shannonrobinson.org/]

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? [https://www.getunderlined.com/books/592224/who-put-this-song-on-by-morgan-parker/]; and the poetry collections Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night [https://www.amazon.com/Other-Peoples-Comfort-Keeps-Night/dp/0986187615/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483403242&sr=1-1&keywords=other+people%27s+comfort+keeps+me+up+at+night], There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé [https://tinhouse.com/product/there-are-more-beautiful-things-than-beyonce-morgan-parker/], and Magical Negro [https://tinhouse.com/product/magical-negro/], which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as "a dynamic craftsperson" of "considerable consequence to American poetry."

Parker's debut book of nonfiction, You Get What You Pay For   [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/576870/you-get-what-you-pay-for-by-morgan-parker/9780525511441/] is available at your favorite bookstore.

Ruby Roth [https://www.rubyroth.art/work]'s work is defined by the female form and depicts the inner lives of women through emotionally visceral representations of the bodies they inhabit.

For the past several years, amidst a radical transition from a decade of familial life as a best-selling children's book author-illustrator to self-determined independence as a single female artist, Roth has explored the deep end of the feminine spectrum and its archetypes.

Roth's work often features solitary women navigating inner and outer wildernesses. In vast emptiness, surrounded by hints of nature, her wild women and "girl gods" find their way through physical and spiritual dimensions of darkness and light, bondage and freedom, apocalypse and utopia, life and death, transmuting nourishing or toxic forces into usable means.

Roth has been a keen observer of the body since childhood, having been diagnosed with scoliosis, which required 13 years of aggressive and painful treatment. Rooted in academic anatomy and pop surrealism, her artwork——often created in live-model sessions——exaggerates and distorts female forms to reflect them as vessels of powerful, feminine processing.

Roth is based in Los Angeles, CA.

SRTN Website [https://www.somethingratherthannothing.com/]