Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, ritualist and Torah teacher. She is the author of poetry books Divinity School (2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize) and Fruit Geode (finalist for the 2018 Jewish Book Award), and has released three albums with Girls in Trouble, her indie-folk song cycle about Biblical women. She is currently at work on an independent feature film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff.

Amy Haddad is a poet, nurse and educator at Creighton University where she now holds the rank of Professor Emerita. Her poetry and short stories have been published in the American Journal of Nursing, Janus Head, Journal of Medical Humanities, Touch, Bellevue Literary Review, Pulse, Persimmon Tree, Annals of Internal Medicine, Aji Magazine, DASH, Oberon Poetry Magazine and the anthologies Between the Heart Beats and Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses, and Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies. Her first collection of poetry, “An Otherwise Healthy Woman,” will be published in spring 2022 by Backwaters Press.

Anjali Sachdeva’s short story collection, All the Names They Used for God, is the winner of the 2019 Chautauqua Prize and was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College.

Anuradha D. Rajurkar was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois, a proud daughter to South Asian immigrant parents. She earned two degrees from Northwestern University before becoming a public school teacher, writing fiction in her off-hours. When American Betiya was just a manuscript, it was honored with the nationwide Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Emerging Voices Award. American Betiya is her first novel.

April Henry is the New York Times bestselling author of many acclaimed mysteries for adults and young adults, including the YA novels Girl, Stolen and The Night She Disappeared and the thriller Face of Betrayal, co-authored with Lis Wiehl.

Beth de Guzman is the Digital and Paperback Publisher of Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette. She also leads the Editorial and Marketing/Publicity teams of Forever, Grand Central’s romance and women's fiction imprint, and acquires titles in the suspense/thiller, women's fiction, historical fiction, and commercial nonfiction categories.

Brie Spangler graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and is the author-illustrator of two picture books, Peg Leg Peke and The Grumpy Dump Truck, as well as the YA novel Beast.

C. Dale Young is the author of a novel and five collections of poetry, the most recent being Prometeo (Four Way Books 2021). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, he practices medicine full-time and teaches for the Warren-Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of 12 novels, including Pictures of You, Is This Tomorrow, Cruel Beautiful World and With or Without You, which was a Good Morning America online Book Pick. A book critic for People and AARP, Caroline teaches novel writing online at Stanford and UCLA and for private clients.

Cate Marvin's fourth book, Event Horizon, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in Spring 2022. Her previous collections include Oracle (Norton, 2015), Fragment of the Head of a Queen (Sarabande, 2007) and World's Tallest Disaster (2001). A former Guggenheim Fellow, Whiting Award recipient, and Kate Tufts Discovery Prize winner, she teaches creative writing at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and serves as faculty mentor for the Stonecoast Low-Residency M.F.A. Program.

Catherine Chung won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, Forgotten Country, and has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Granta New Voice, and a Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and worked at a think tank in Santa Monica before receiving her MFA from Cornell University.

Chinelo Onwualu is a Nigerian writer and editor living in Toronto. She’s the non-fiction editor of Anathema Magazine and co-founder of Omenana, a magazine of African Speculative Fiction. Her short stories have been featured in Slate.com, Uncanny, Magazine and Strange Horizons, as well as in several anthologies including the award-winning New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction from People of Colour and Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond.

In the process of writing sixty five commercially published books, Christine Taylor Butler realized that just as we need to inspire students to read for pleasure, we also need to show them the path towards math and science, and how art and math are not mutually exclusive in terms of how higher order thinking is developed.

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Wilder (Milkweed Editions), which won the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award. Her second collection, Redmouth, was published with Tinderbox Editions in 2019.

David Harrison’s first book for children, The Boy with a Drum, was released in 1969 and sold over two million copies. The first of his long list of awards came in 1972 when he received the Christopher Award for The Book of Giant Stories. Since then, David has published ninety original titles that have sold millions of copies. His work has been anthologized in more than one hundred eighty-five books.

Dean Atta’s poems deal with themes of race, gender, and identity. He regularly performs across the UK and internationally and his work has been shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize and appeared on MTV and BET. The Black Flamingo is his debut YA novel.

Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. Her latest book, Island of the Innocent, a Consideration of the Book of Job, is from Turtle Point Press, 2020. Forthcoming are A Line of Driftwood, a Story of Ada Blackjack, and Still Moving, How the Road, the Land and the Sacred Shape a Life. Among her awards are two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Minnesota Book Award, an Oklahoma Book Award, an American Book Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.

Elizabeth Lim grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she was raised on a hearty diet of fairy tales, myths, and songs. Before becoming an author, Elizabeth was a professional film and video game composer, and she still tends to come up with her best book ideas when writing near a piano. An alumna of Harvard College and the Juilliard School, she now lives in New York City with her husband and her daughter. Spin the Dawn (book 1 in the Blood of Stars duology) was her first original novel, and Unravel the Dusk is her second. She is also a contributor to the New York Times Bestselling "A Twisted Tale..." series.

elizabethlim.com

Emily Arrow is a children’s producer, author, and award-winning songwriter. Her albums Storytime Singalong, Vol. 1-3 include #1 songs on SiriusXM’s Kids' Place Live and have received recognitions of The Lennon Award, National Parenting Products Award, Nashville Scene’s Best Local Kid’s Entertainer and Parents’ Choice Gold Award. Emily’s debut picture book as an author, Studio: A Place for Art to Start celebrates spaces for creativity to grow. Her book, Kids' Guide To Learning The Ukulele is a hands-on workbook for early elementary students who want to play along on the ukulele. Emily is also the composer and writer of the 4-book series My Feelings, My Choices.

Erika L. Sánchez’s first novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, was immediately heralded as one of the most significant works of young adult fiction in recent years. Born and raised in a working class town outside of Chicago to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants, Sánchez’s experience informed her moving depiction of the realities of undocumented life in America. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times bestseller.

Eugenia Cheng is a mathematician and concert pianist. Her first popular math book "How to Bake Pi" was featured on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and "Beyond Infinity" was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2017. She also writes the Everyday Math column for the Wall Street Journal. She is the founder of the Liederstube, an intimate oasis for art song based in Chicago. She has also written "The Art of Logic in an Illogical World", "X+Y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Re-thinking Gender", and her first children's book "Molly and the Mathematical Mystery", due out in the US in March 2021.

Gordon Korman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 75 books for kids and young adults. His writing career began at the age of twelve when his seventh-grade English assignment became his first novel, This Can’t Be Happening at MacDonald Hall, which was published while he was a freshman in high school. He now has more than 17 million copies of his novels in print.

Grant H. Blackwell, A.K.A BWELL or Eddy English, is a visual artist, poet, novelist and scholar born in the Saint Louis 80s. He is the author of Ant Life and Marie. Blackwell is a founding member of IndyGround Entertainment and the Big Black Lies (BBL) art crew.

Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, in The New York Times, Guernica and elsewhere. Her poetry collections have won the Arab American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Series. Her second novel, THE ARSONIST'S CITY, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in March 2021.

Ibi Zoboi’s YA novel American Street was a National Book Award finalist and her debut middle grade novel, My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, was a New York Times bestseller. She is the author of Pride, a contemporary YA remix of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and editor of the anthology, Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America. Her most recent bestseller, Punching the Air, is a YA novel-in-verse, co-authored by prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five.

Janine Joseph is a poet and librettist from the Philippines. She is the author of Driving Without a License, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, and Decade of the Brain, forthcoming in 2023 from Alice James Books. Her writing has recently appeared in The Nation, The Georgia Review, Orion Magazine, Pleiades, and The Atlantic.

Jay Deshpande is the author of Love the Stranger (YesYes Books) and the new chapbook The Umbrian Sonnets (PANK Books). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Kundiman fellowship, and residencies at Civitella Ranieri and the Saltonstall Arts Colony.

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and A Public Space, and her essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Literary History and The Volta.

Jennifer Haupt is the editor of Alone Together: Stories of Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19. Haupt's work has been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, Parenting, The Rumpus, Spirituality & Health, The Sun and many other publications. She also curates the popular Psychology Todayblog, "One True Thing." Her debut novel, In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills, was awarded the Foreword Reviews Bronze Indie Award for Historical Fiction.

The Yellow Bird Sings is Jennifer's debut novel, called "exquisite, heart-rending...an absolutely beautiful and necessary novel" by The New York Times Book Review. Her previously published books include the memoir, If A Tree Falls: A Family's Quest to Hear and Be Heard, and the picture book, The Mitten String, a Sydney Taylor Book Award Notable.

Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level, a finalist for the National Book Award and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize. She lives in New York City, and has taught at NYU, Bard College, and Princeton.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Julie Metz is the New York Times bestselling author of Perfection. She has written on a wide range of women’s issues for publications, including The New York Times, Salon, Redbook, and Glamour. Her personal essays have appeared in the anthologies The Moment and The House That Made Me. She has been a fellow at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center.

Louisa Onomé holds a BA in professional writing from York University and lives in Toronto. Her debut novel is Like Home. To learn more about Louisa and her books visit louisaonome.com or follow @louisaonome_ on Twitter and @louisaonome on Instagram.

Karen Craigo is the Poet Laureate of the State of Missouri. She has two full-length poetry collections, Passing Through Humansville (2018) and No More Milk (2016), both from Sundress Publications, as well as three chapbooks. She lives in Springfield, Missouri, with her husband, the fiction writer Michael Czyzniejewski, and their two sons, and she is a full-time freelance writer and editor.

Karen Olsson is the author of the novels Waterloo, which was a runner-up for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and All the Houses. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Bookforum, and Texas Monthly, among other publications, and she is also a former editor of The Texas Observer.

Katherine May is an author of fiction and memoir whose titles include Wintering, The Electricity of Every Living Thing and The Whitstable High Tide Swimming Club. She is the editor of The Best, Most Awful Job, an anthology of essays about motherhood. Her journalism and essays have appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, The Observer, Good Housekeeping and Aeon.

Kathleen Alcalá is a creative writing instructor and the author of six books, most recently, The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island. Both a student and instructor in the Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, she is a member of Los Norteños Writers, a founding editor of The Raven Chronicles, and a member of the Ópata Nation. Her first novel, Spirits of the Ordinary, will be republished in 2021 by Raven Chronicles Press.

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, the Everett Southwest Literary Award, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Award at Bread Loaf, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among other places.

Kerrin McCadden is the author of American Wake (Black Sparrow Press, March, 2021) and Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, winner of the Vermont Book Award and the New Issues Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbook Keep This to Yourself, winner of the Button Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as the Sustainable Arts Foundation Writing Award.

Laura Munson is the New York Times bestselling author of This Is Not The Story You Think It Is, which chronicles her journey through her own midlife crossroads. Drawing from the striking response to her memoir, the essay version of it in the New York Times “Modern Love” column, and her speaking events at women’s conferences across the US, Laura founded the acclaimed Haven Writing Retreats and Workshops.

Lauren Tarshis is the author of the New York Times bestselling I Survived series. Each of these historical fiction books focuses on an iconic event from history, and tells the story through the eyes of a child who was there. Lauren is also the author of the critically acclaimed Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree, a Golden Kite honor book for fiction and Oprah Book Club pick, and the sequel, Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell in Love.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Leanne is the author of six previous books, including her new novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail. A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin is forthcoming from the University of Alberta Press in 2021.

Lindsay Sproul is the author of We Were Promised Spotlights, which was published in 2020 by Putnam/Penguin Random House. Her fiction and essays have appeared in such journals as Epoch, Glimmer Train, The Massachusetts Review, Witness, The Kenyon Review and elsewhere.

Lupita Eyde-Tucker writes and translates poetry in English and Spanish. She's the winner of the 2021 Unbound Emerging Poet Prize, and her poems appear in Nashville Review, Columbia Journal, Raleigh Review, Women's Voices for Change, Yemassee, Rattle, and [PANK]. She is currently translating two collections of poetry by Venezuelan poet, Oriette D'Angelo.

Marlee Grace is a dancer and writer whose work focuses on the self, devotion, ritual, creativity, and art making. Her practice is rooted in improvisation as a compositional form that takes shape in movement videos, books, quilting, online courses, and hosting artists. Marlee's Instagram dance project Personal Practice has been featured in the New York Times, Dance Magazine, Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, and more.

Mary Troy is the author of the novels Swimming on Hwy N and Beauties (winner of the USA Book Award and finalist for Forewords Book of the Year award) and the short story collections Cookie Lily (winner of the Devils’ Kitchen Reading Award), The Alibi Café and other stories, and Joe Baker Is Dead (a PEN/Faulkner Award Nominee).

Michael Barakiva is an Armenian/Israeli American theater director and writer who lives in Hell Kitchen, NYC with his husband. His first novel, One Man Guy, published by Macmillan (FSG), was ranked the #1 Gay Young Adult novel on Goodreads in 2014, was named to the Rainbow List and Family Equality Council’s Book Nook and was released in Brazil by LeYa. The stand-alone sequel, Hold My Hand, was released in May 2019. He is currently working on his third novel, a queer protagonist urban epic fantasy, entitled These Precious Stones, also with Macmillan (FSG).

Michael Kardos is the author of the novels Bluff, Before He Finds Her, and The Three-Day Affair, as well as the story collection One Last Good Time and the textbook The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer’s Guide. His short stories have appeared in One Story, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and many other magazines and anthologies, and have won a Pushcart Prize.

Michael Nye is the author of three works of fiction, most recently the story collection Until We Have Faces. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared inAmerican Literary Review, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Literary Hub, The Millions, and Epoch, among many others.

Minh Lê is the author of the picture books Lift (a Washington Post Best Book of the Year) and Drawn Together (winner of the 2019 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature) illustrated by Caldecott Medalist Dan Santat, Let Me Finish! (named an NPR Best Book of 2016) illustrated by Isabel Roxas, and The Perfect Seat, illustrated by Gus Gordon. He also wrote Green Lantern: Legacy, a middle grade graphic novel (illustrated by Andie Tong) for DC Comics.

Minsoo Kang is is the author of the history books Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination and Invincible and Righteous Outlaw: The Korean Hero Hong Gildong in Literature, History, and Culture, the short story collection Of Tales and Enigmas, and the translator of the Penguin classics edition of the classic Korean novel The Story of Hong Gildong.

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the poetry collection, The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is the author of eleven books in Vietnamese and English. She has received some of the top literary awards of Việt Nam, including the 2010 Poetry of the Year Award from the Hà Nội Writers Association. Her debut novel in English, The Mountains Sing, is the Winner of the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship, a New York Times Editors' Choice, an NPR’s Best Book of 2020, among others.

Nisi Shawl is the author of the Nebula Award finalist novel Everfair, an alternate history set in the nineteenth and twentieth century Congo, and of the Tiptree Award-winning collection Filter House, praised by Ursula K. Le Guin as “superbly written” and by Samuel R. Delany as “brilliant.” They’re a co-author of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, an acclaimed text on inclusive representation in imaginative fiction, and editor of the multiple award-winning New Suns anthology.

Parneshia Jones is the author of Vessel: Poems (Milkweed Editions), winner of the Midwest Book Award and featured as one of “12 Books to Savor” by O, The Oprah Magazine. Jones has been honored with the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Margaret Walker Short Story Award, and the Aquarius Press Legacy Award.

Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collections The World Doesn’t Require You and Insurrections, which was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 and Crab Orchard Review, among other publications.

R. M. Kinder’s A Common Person and Other Stories was selected by the University of Notre Dame's Creative Writing Program as winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize for short fiction. Kinder is the author of two other award-winning story collections, Sweet Angel Band and A Near Perfect Gift; two novels, An Absolute Gentleman and The Universe Playing Strings; and coauthor of Old Time Fiddling: Hal Sappington, Missouri Fiddler, a dual media biography.

Ron A. Austin's short stories have been placed in Boulevard, Pleiades, Story Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Black Warrior Review, and other journals. Avery Colt Is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar, his first collection of linked stories, has received several honors including: The 2017 Nilsen Prize, a 2019 Foreward INDIES GOLD Award, a 2020 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, a 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize nomination, and a 2020 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nomination.

Rosanna Warren teaches at the University of Chicago. She is the author of six books of poetry, most recently So Forth (2020) and Ghost in a Red Hat (2011). Her biography of Max Jacob, Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters, appeared in October 2020.

Ruben Quesada is the author of Revelations, Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda, and Next Extinct Mammal. His writing has appeared in the Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, and other anthologies and journals. He is founder of the Latinx Writers Caucus, poetry editor at AGNI magazine, and a blogger at The Kenyon Review.

Ruta Sepetys is an internationally acclaimed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction published in over sixty countries and forty languages. She is considered a “crossover” novelist as her books are read by both students and adults worldwide. Winner of the Carnegie Medal for her novel Salt to the Sea, Sepetys is renowned for giving voice to underrepresented history and those who experienced it. Her books have won or been shortlisted for over forty book prizes, are included on over thirty state reading lists, and are currently in development for film and television.

Sadia Hassan is a Somali American essayist and poet, and is an MFA Candidate at the University of Mississippi. She is the winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation’s 2020 Award for College Writers in Poetry. Her essay “Silence is a Lonely Country” was nominated for the 2019 Krause Essay Prize, and her chapbook “Enumeration” appears in the New Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Set.

Sarah Kendzior is best known for her reporting on St. Louis and the 2016 election, her academic research on authoritarian states, and her New York Times bestselling debut The View from Flyover Country. She is a co-host of the podcast Gaslit Nation and was named one of Foreign Policy's “100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events.”

Sojourner Ahebee writes stories about African diaspora identities and the eternal question of home and belonging. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Academy of American Poets (Poem A Day), Muzzle Magazine, For Harriet, Winter Tangerine Review, Apiary Magazine and elsewhere. In 2013 she served as a National Student Poet, the nation's highest honor for young poets presenting original work.

Stephanie Williams is the Director of Wayne State University Press and was involved in the creation of Unbound Book Festival while she was marketing manager at the University of Missouri Press. Stephanie has worked as a bookseller and in marketing positions in publishing for nearly thirty years.

In 2017, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith was appointed the 22nd United States Poet Laureate. Smith is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Nonfiction and selected as a Notable Book by the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as four books of poetry. Her most recent collection of poems, Wade in the Water (Graywolf, 2018) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book.

Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina, and a Teaching Assistant Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the author of two poetry collections River Hymns 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner and Cardinal from Copper Canyon Press 2020.

Walter Johnson is Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of the critically acclaimed River of Dark Dreams and Soul by Soul, which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the Avery O. Craven Award, and several other prestigious prizes.