Born in Peru and raised in Chile, Isabel Allende is the author of a number of bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including Violeta, A Long Petal of the Sea, The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and Paula. Her books have been translated into more than 42 languages and have sold more than 77 million copies worldwide. Allende has received 15 honorary doctorates, the PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. She is also the founder of The Isabel Allende Foundation, an organization that empowers women and girls in order to secure reproductive rights, economic independence and freedom from violence. 

Azam Ahmed is a Global Investigative Correspondent for the New York Times. He is the former Bureau Chief in Mexico, and previously was the New York Times Bureau Chief in Afghanistan. 

Erica Bauermeister is the author of the bestselling novel The School of Essential Ingredients, Joy for Beginners, and The Lost Art of Mixing. She is also the co-author of non-fiction works, 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide and Let’s Hear It For the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.  She has a PhD in literature from the University of Washington, and has taught there and at Antioch University. She is a founding member of the Seattle7Writers and currently lives in Port Townsend, Washington. 

Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories, which won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He has also been awarded an O. Henry Prize, the Rome Prize, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, A Public Space, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. He was raised in the Bronx and in Brooklyn, New York, and currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the memoir Wild Game, which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and The Washington Post and is in development as a Netflix film, and Little Monsters. She founded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, and currently serves as executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute. She splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod, where she lives with her husband and children. 

Lucy Burdette is the author of the popular Key West Food Critic mystery series. Her standalone thriller, Unsafe Haven, is also published by Severn House. Lucy’s alter-ego, clinical psychologist Roberta Isleib, has published eight mysteries including the Golf Lover's mystery series and the Advice Column mysteries. Lucy's books and stories have been shortlisted for Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. The Key Lime Crime won the bronze medal for popular fiction from the Florida Book Awards. She's a member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, a past president of Sisters in Crime, and currently serves as the president of the Friends of the Key West Library. 

Bonnie Jo Campbell teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of the AWP's Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and a Pushcart Prize. The author of Once Upon a River, American Salvage, and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, she lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her new book, The Waters: A Novel, will be published by Norton in October 2023. 

Jillian Cantor is the USA Today and internationally bestselling author of eleven novels for teens and adults, which have been chosen for LibraryReads, Indie Next, Amazon Best of the Month, and have been translated into 13 languages. 

 J.C. Cervantes is a New York Times best-selling author of books for children and young adults. Her books have appeared on national lists, including the American Booksellers Association New Voices, Barnes and Noble’s Best Young Reader Books, as well as Amazon’s Best Books of the Month. She has earned multiple awards and recognitions, including the New Mexico Book Award, the Zia Book Award, and most recently the 2021 New Mexico Land of Enchantment Readers’ Choice Award. 

Heather Chavez is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley’s English literature program and has worked as a newspaper reporter, editor, and contributor to mystery and television blogs. She lives with her family in Santa Rosa, California. She’s the author of the thrillers No Bad Deed and Blood Will Tell. 

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She is an internationally bestselling author of several non-fiction titles, including her 2011 memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which was a runaway international bestseller that has been translated into over 30 languages. Chua graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and cum laude from Harvard Law School. After practicing on Wall Street for a few years, she joined the Yale Law School faculty in 2001. The Golden Gate is her fiction debut. 

Ann Cleeves is the multi-million copy bestselling author behind two hit television series—Shetland, starring Douglas Henshall, and Vera, starring Academy Award Nominee Brenda Blethyn—both of which are watched and loved in the United States. Shetland and Vera are available on BritBox in the United States. An adaptation of The Long Call, the first book in her Two Rivers series, premiered on BritBox in 2021. The first Shetland novel, Raven Black, won the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel, and Ann was awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger in 2017. She lives in the United Kingdom. 

Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 to Nigerian parents and grew up in Lagos. His books include the novel Open City, the essay collections Known and Strange Things and Black Paper, and the experimental photobook Blind Spot. He has been honored with the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Previously the photography critic of The New York Times Magazine, Cole is currently a Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard. 

Kendra Coulter is Professor in Management and Organizational Studies at Huron University College at Western University and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. 

Amanda Cox is the author of The Edge of Belonging and The Secret Keepers of Old Depot Grocery, both of which were the Christy Award Book of the Year in 2021 and 2022, respectively. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Bible and theology and a master’s degree in professional counseling, but her first love is communicating through story. Her studies and her interactions with hurting families over a decade have allowed her to create multidimensional characters that connect emotionally with readers. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with her husband and their three children. Learn more at Am 

Patrick deWitt is the author of the novels French Exit (a national bestseller), The Sisters Brothers (a New York Times bestseller short-listed for the Booker Prize), and the critically acclaimed Undermajordomo Minor and Ablutions. Born in British Columbia, he has also lived in California and Washington, and now resides in Portland, Oregon. 

Azzedine Downes is the President and CEO of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). Before joining IFAW, he served as the Chief of Party for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Jerusalem and Morocco, as well as the Acting Regional Director for the U.S. Peace Corps in Eurasia and the Middle East. Fast Company has named Downes one of The 100 Most Creative People in Business. He is a member of the Global Tiger Forum Advisory Council, the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation’s Council of Hope, and currently sits on the U.S. Trade and Environmental Policy Advisory Committee. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island. The Couscous Chronicles is his first book. 

Drew Gilpin Faust is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. She was Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007, and after twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, she served as Harvard's president from 2007 to 2018. Faust is the author of several books, including This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Rea Frey is the award-winning, bestselling author of several nonfiction books and four domestic suspense novels, Not Her Daughter, Because You're Mine, Until I Find You, and Secrets of Our House. As a book doula, she helps other writers birth their own stories into the world. Her weekly podcast, The Book Doula, demystifies the publishing industry for writers everywhere. 

Adele Griffin is the acclaimed author of over thirty books. Her works include National Book Award Finalists Sons of Liberty and Where I Want to Be. She lives with her husband, Erich, their two sons, a cat named Toby and a dog named Gertrude, in Los Angeles, California 

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and novelist. She is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a NAACP Image Award. Griffiths is also a recipient of fellowships from many organizations, including Cave Canem Foundation, Kimbilio, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, and other publications. 

Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, and Matrix, and the short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Groff’s work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists. 

Daniel Gumbiner’s first book, The Boatbuilder, was nominated for the National Book Award and a finalist for the California Book Awards. He is the Editor of The Believer and a 2022–23 Hermitage Fellow. He lives in Oakland, CA. 

Myriam Gurba is a writer and artist. She is the author of the true crime memoir Mean, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. O, The Oprah Magazine, ranked Mean as one of the best LGBTQ books of all time. Publishers Weekly describes Gurba as having a voice like no other. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Paris Review, Time, and 4Columns. She has shown art in galleries, museums, and community centers. Her latest book is Creep: Accusations and Confessions. She lives in Pasadena, California. 

Terah Shelton Harris is a collection development librarian based in Alabama and a freelance writer. She has been published in Women’s Health, Natural Solutions, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Backpacker, Draft, and Women’s Adventure. 

Rachel Hauck is an award-winning, New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. She is a double RITA finalist, and a Christy and Carol Award winner. Her book Once Upon a Prince, first in the Royal Wedding series, was filmed for an Original Hallmark movie. A graduate of Ohio State, Rachel lives in sunny central Florida with her husband and ornery cat. 

Mick Herron is a British novelist and short story writer who was born in Newcastle and studied English at Oxford. He is the author of the Slough House espionage series, four Oxford mysteries, and three standalone novels. His work has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, the Theakston’s Novel of the Year Award, the Palle Rosenkrantz Prize, the Ellery Queen Readers Award and the USC Libraries Scripter Award, and been nominated for the Macavity, Barry and Shamus Awards. He currently lives in Oxford and writes full-time. 

Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including The Invisible Hour, The Book of Magic, Magic Lessons, The World That We Knew, Practical Magic, The Rules of Magic (a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick), the Oprah’s Book Club Selection Here on Earth, The Red Garden, The Dovekeepers, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, The Marriage of Opposites, and Faithful. She lives near Boston. 

Stephen Mack Jones is a published poet, an award-winning playwright, and a recipient of the Hammett Prize, the Nero Award, and the Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellowship. He was born in Lansing, Michigan, and currently lives in the suburbs of Detroit. He worked in advertising and marketing communications for a number of years before turning to fiction. 

Lt. Joe Kenda spent twenty-one years chasing killers as a homicide detective and commander of the major crimes unit in Colorado Springs. After retiring from law enforcement, he starred in Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda, an American true-crime documentary series that ran for nine seasons on the Investigation Discovery network and was aired in sixty-nine countries and territories worldwide. Homicide Hunter airs on Investigation Discovery, the #1 true crime channel, which is available in more than 80 million homes. All Is Not Forgiven is his first novel. 

Jean Kwok is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of Searching for Sylvie Lee, Girl in Translation, and Mambo in Chinatown. Her work has been published in twenty countries and is taught in universities, colleges, and high schools across the world. She has been selected for numerous honors, including the American Library Association Alex Award, the Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award international shortlist. She is fluent in Chinese, Dutch, and English, and divides her time between the Netherlands and New York City. 

Stephanie Land is the author of the New York Times bestseller Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, called “a testimony…worth listening to,” by The New York Times and inspiration for the Netflix series Maid and Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many other outlets. Her writing focuses on social and economic justice and parenting under the poverty line. She is a frequent speaker at colleges and national advocacy organizations. Find out more at Stepville.com. 

Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Arrest, The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California. 

Since Laura Lippman's debut in 1997, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the "essential" crime writers of the last 100 years. In 2022, Lippman celebrated her silver anniversary as a published author. In that time, she has produced 24 novels, 2 collections of short stories, a serialized novella, a book of essays, and a children's picture book. Her work has been published in more than 25 languages. A New York Times bestseller, she has won more than 20 prizes for her work and been shortlisted for 30 more. Her 2019 novel, Lady in the Lake, is being adapted into a miniseries starring Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram. Lippman lives in Baltimore and New Orleans. 

Dr. Bettina L. Love is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and the bestselling author of We Want To Do More Than Survive. In 2022, the Kennedy Center named Dr. Love one of the Next 50 Leaders making the world more inspired, inclusive, and compassionate. A co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN), whose mission is to develop and support teachers and parents fighting injustice within their schools and communities, they have granted over $250,000 to abolitionists around the country. She is also a founding member of the Task Force that launched the program In Her Hands, distributing more than $15 million to Black women living in Georgia. In Her Hands is one of the largest guaranteed income pilot programs in the U.S. Dr. Love is a sought-after public speaker on a range of topics, including abolitionist teaching, anti-racism, Hip Hop education, Black girlhood, queer youth, educational reparations, and art-based education to foster youth civic engagement. In 2018, she was granted a resolution by Georgia's House of Representatives for her impact on the field of education. 

Victor Luckerson is a journalist and author based in Tulsa who works to bring neglected black history to light. He is a former staff writer at The Ringer and business reporter for Time magazine. His writing and research have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Wired, and Smithsonian. He was nominated for a National Magazine Award for his reporting in Time on the 1923 Rosewood Massacre. He also manages an email newsletter about underexplored aspects of black history called Run It Back. 

The Darkness Surrounds Us is Gail Lukasik’s fifth mystery novel and her first Gothic mystery. Kirkus Reviews praised Gail’s mysteries as “riveting, fast-paced and loaded with suspense.” Gail’s memoir, White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing, captured national attention and led to her appearance on NBC’s The Today Show. The Washington Post named White Like Her one of the most inspiring stories of 2017. Once a member of the Cleveland Civic Ballet Company, she credits her aesthetic sensibility, her stage presence, and her writerly discipline to her training as a classical ballerina. 

David Mark spent seven years as crime reporter for the Yorkshire Post and now writes full-time. A former Richard & Judy pick, and a Sunday Times bestseller, he is the author of the DS Aector McAvoy series and a number of standalone thrillers. He lives in Northumberland with his family.

Madeline Martin is a New York Times and International Bestselling author of historical fiction and historical romance novels filled with twists and turns, adventure, steamy romance, empowered heroines and the men who are strong enough to love them. 

Daniel Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, The Winter Soldier, and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages, adapted for opera and the stage, and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His short stories and essays have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and an O. Henry Prize. He is an assistant professor in the Stanford University department of psychiatry. 

Molly McGhee is from a cluster of unincorporated towns outside of Nashville, Tennessee. She completed her M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia University, where, in addition to receiving a Chair’s Fellowship, she taught in the undergraduate creative writing department. She has worked in the editorial departments of McSweeney’s, The Believer, NOON, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Tor. Currently living in Brooklyn, her work has appeared in The Paris Review. 

Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. He is the author of Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior, Post-Truth, and The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience, all published by the MIT Press. 

Shelley Fraser Mickle is an award-winning novelist whose first novel, The Queen of October, was a New York Times Notable Book and selected by Library Journal as one of the ten best adult books suitable for young adults. Her novel Replacing Dad won an America's Writers Award in Chicago and was adapted for film. From 2000 to 2006 she was a commentator for National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." Her husband trained under the Brigham hospital surgeons who are the focus of her 2020 nonfiction, Borrowing Life. 

Sandra A. Miller is the author of the award-winning memoir Trove: A Woman’s Search for Truth and Buried Treasure. She has written for The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications. One of her essays was turned into a short film called Wait, starring Kerry Washington. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and lives outside of Boston with her family. 

Tiya Miles is a professor of history at Harvard University, the author of six prize-winning works in the history of early American race relations, and a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship recipient. She is the founder and director of the Michigan-based ECO Girls program and the author of the National Book Award-winning, New York Times bestselling All That She Carried. Her new book, Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, will be published by Norton in September 2023. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

Lorrie Moore is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Tim O’Brien received the National Book Award in Fiction for Going After Cacciato. His book The Things They Carried and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; it received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction and France’s Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger. In 2005, The Things They Carried was named by The New York Times as one of the twenty-two best books of the last quarter century. In the Lake of the Woods, published in 1994, was chosen by Time magazine as the best novel of that year. The book also received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times. In 2010, O’Brien received the Katherine Anne Porter Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for a distinguished body of work. He also received the Mark Twain Award in literature and lifetime achievement awards from the Dayton Peace Prize Foundation and the Pritzker Military Library. O’Brien has been elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Ann Patchett is the author of several novels, works of nonfiction, and children's books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the National Humanities Medal, PEN/Faulkner, the Women's Prize in the U.K., and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. TIME magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books. 

Ed Piskor is the New York Times bestselling creator of Hip Hop Family Tree and X-Men: Grand Design as well as the co-conspirator behind the YouTube channel sensation, Cartoonist Kayfabe. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA. 

Anna Pitoniak is the author of The Helsinki Affair, Our American Friend, Necessary People and The Futures. Before becoming a full-time author, she worked in book publishing, including as a senior editor at Random House. Anna grew up in Whistler, British Columbia. She graduated from Yale, and lives in New York City and East Hampton. 

Michelle Porter is a writer and scholar from the Métis homeland and living in Newfoundland and Labrador. She is a descendent of the Métis Goulet family from the Manitoba Red River, and the author of Approaching Fire, Scratching River. A Grandmother Begins the Story is her first novel. My first book of poetry, Inquiries, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry, Canada 2019. She teaches creative writing at Memorial University in Newfoundland. 

Douglas Preston worked as a writer and editor for the American Museum of Natural History and taught writing at Princeton University. He has written for the New Yorker, Natural History, National Geographic, Harper’s, Smithsonian, and the Atlantic. The author of several acclaimed nonfiction books—including Lost City of the Monkey God, Cities of Gold and The Monster of Florence—Preston is also the coauthor with Lincoln Child of the bestselling series of novels featuring FBI agent Pendergast. 

Cecilia Rabess previously worked as a data scientist at Google and as an associate at Goldman Sachs. Her nonfiction has been featured in McSweeneys, FiveThirtyEight, Fast Company, and FlowingData, among other places. Everything’s Fine is her debut novel. 

Cultural critic and historian Lorissa Rinehart writes about art, war, politics, and the places where these discourses intersect. She is the author of FIRST TO THE FRONT: The Untold Story of Dickey Chapelle, Trailblazing Female War Correspondent. Her writing has recently appeared in Hyperallergic, Perfect Strangers, and Narratively, among other publications. She holds an MA from NYU in Experimental Humanities and a BA in Literature from UC Santa Cruz. 

Julia Rockwell is a mother and zero-waste expert, educator, and writer. She is the founder of the Mothering Earth Project, an organization dedicated to helping others live sustainably through community and connection. Additionally, she works with families, mothers in particular, to help them reduce their carbon, plastic, and waste footprints. A lifelong lover of healthy and mindful living, Rockwell holds an arts-activism-based BA in world arts & cultures from UCLA. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children, where they lead a zero-waste lifestyle. 

Riley Sager is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels, most recently Survive the Night and The House Across the Lake. A native of Pennsylvania, he now lives in Princeton, New Jersey. 

Lisa See is the New York Times bestselling author of Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, The Island of Sea Women, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, Shanghai Girls, China Dolls, and Dreams of Joy, which debuted at #1. She is also the author of On Gold Mountain, which tells the story of her Chinese American family’s settlement in Los Angeles. See was the recipient of the Golden Spike Award from the Chinese Historical Association of Southern California and the Historymaker’s Award from the Chinese American Museum. She was also named National Woman of the Year by the Organization of Chinese American Women. 

Ashley Shew is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech and specializes in disability studies and technology ethics. With support from the Mellon Foundation, she is developing a Disability Community Technology (DisCoTec) Center in collaboration with UNC-Charlotte and Virginia Tech. Her new book, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, will be published by Norton in September 2023. Her previous books include Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge and Spaces for the Future. She lives in Blacksburg, Virginia 

Ruth J. Simmons is the president of Prairie View A&M University, Texas's oldest HBCU, as well as the former president of Brown University and Smith College and former vice provost of Princeton. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Dillard University and her master's and doctorate from Harvard in Romance languages and literatures. The president of France named her chevalier of the French Legion of Honor and President Biden named her to the White House HBCU Advisory Board. 

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. 

Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. He was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, and The Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles, and teaches at UCLA. 

Pauls Toutonghi’s parents were both refugees to the United States. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, an Andrew W. Mellon research fellowship, a Fulbright Grant, and a residency at Hawthornden Castle. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Outside Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Granta, Tin House, and other periodicals. He is the author of The Refugee Ocean. He’s married to the novelist Peyton Marshall. He lives in Oregon, where he teaches at Lewis and Clark College. 

Gail Tsukiyama was born in San Francisco, California to a Chinese mother from Hong Kong and a Japanese father from Hawaii. She attended San Francisco State University where she received both her Bachelor of Arts Degree and a Master of Arts Degree in English. She is the bestselling author of Women of the Silk and The Samurai's Garden, as well as the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. She divides her time between El Cerrito and Napa Valley, California. 

Vauhini Vara has worked as a Wall Street Journal technology reporter and as the business editor for The New Yorker. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an O. Henry Prize winner, and the author of the novel The Immortal King Rao. Her new book, This is Salvaged: Stories, will be published by Norton in September 2023.  

Jenni L. Walsh worked for a decade enticing readers as an award-winning advertising copywriter before becoming an author. Her passion lies in transporting readers to another world, be it in historical or contemporary settings. She is a proud graduate of Villanova University, and lives in the Philadelphia suburbs with her husband, daughter, son, and various pets. 

Pim Wangtechawat is a Thai-Chinese writer from Bangkok, Thailand. Pim’s short stories, poems, and articles have been published in various websites, literary magazines, and journals, including the Mekong Review, the Nikkei Asian Review, Den of Geek, and YesPoetry. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from King’s College London and graduated with distinction from Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland with a master’s in creative writing. The Moon Represents My Heart is her debut novel. 

Ruth P. Watson is the author of A Right Worthy Woman, Blackberry Days of Summer, An Elderberry Fall, Cranberry Winter, and Strawberry Spring. A musical stage play, Blackberry Daze, is based on her debut novel. She is the recipient of the Caversham Fellowship, an artist and writer’s residency in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where she published her first children’s book in Zulu, Our Secret Bond. She is a freelance writer and member of Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and has written for Upscale, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other publications. She is an adjunct professor and project manager, who lives with family in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Social Media Handle:  Facebook, @AuthorRuthPWatson 

Michelle Wildgen is the author of You’re Not You, But Not For Long, and Bread and Butter, and editor of the food writing anthology Food & Booze. Formerly executive editor with the award-winning literary journal Tin House, Wildgen is now a freelance editor and creative writing teacher in Madison, WI. Since 2013, she and novelist Susanna Daniel have run the Madison Writers’ Studio, offering a variety of creative writing workshops and classes. 

Raquel Willis (she/her) is an award-winning writer, activist, and media strategist dedicated to Black transgender liberation. She has been director of communications for Ms. Foundation for Women, executive editor of Out magazine, and national organizer for the Transgender Law Center. Her writing has been published in Black Futures by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha Blain, among other places. She has also written for Essence, Bitch, VICE, Buzzfeed, The Cut, and Vogue. This is her first book. 

Originally from Shanghai, Jenny Xie graduated from UC Berkeley and earned her MFA at Johns Hopkins University. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Ninth Letter, Joyland, Narrative, and the Best of the Net Anthology. Jenny is the recipient of a Bread Loaf scholarship and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was the executive editor of Dwell, and is a contributing writer for Architectural Digest, and Apartment Therapy. 

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