About Us

Dawnie Walton

Dawnie Walton is Co-Founder and Editorial Director. She is the author of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, winner of the Aspen Words Literary Prize, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and named one of the best books of 2021 by The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, and former U.S. President Barack Obama, among others. Her work explores identity, place, and the influence of pop culture. Formerly an editor at Essence and Entertainment Weekly, she has received fellowships from MacDowell and Tin House, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

Deesha Philyaw

Deesha Philyaw is Co-Founder, Editor at Large, and co-host of Ursa Short Fiction and Reckon True Stories. Her collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and she is currently at work developing TV shows based on her short fiction.

Her debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026.

Mark Armstrong

Mark Armstrong is Co-Founder and Producer. He was previously the Founder and CEO of Longreads, the National Magazine Award-winning site that Armstrong started as a Twitter account and hashtag and was dubbed “A digital renaissance for the long form” by The New York Times. Longreads was acquired by Automattic (parent company of WordPress and Tumblr). Mark is currently Editor of Nieman Storyboard at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and he’s a singer-songwriter. He lives in Seattle with his family.