Lauren Acampora is the author of the novel The Paper Wasp, published in June 2019 by Grove Atlantic. It was named a Best Summer Read by The New York Times, O Magzine, ELLE, Town & Country, BBC.com, Daily Mail (UK), Tatler, The Hollywood Reporter, Thrillist, Literary Hub, and Publishers Weekly, as well as one of USA Today’s “5 books not to miss.” It was also longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and nominated for the Kirkus Prize. Lauren's debut collection of linked stories, The Wonder Garden, was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and an Indie Next selection, and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Amazon and NPR. It won the GLCA New Writers Award and was a finalist for the New England Book Award, as well as being longlisted for the Story Prize and nominated for the Kirkus Prize. She lives in Westchester County, New York with her husband and daughter. 

Scott Adlerberg is the author of four books. They include Graveyard
Love (2016), a psychological thriller that takes place in the dead of
winter in upstate New York, and Jack Waters (2018), a story of revenge
and revolution on a Caribbean island in the early twentieth century. He
contributes pieces regularly to Criminal Element, Crime Reads, and
Mystery Tribune, and every summer he hosts the Word for Word Reel
Talks film series in Bryant Park in Manhattan. Most recently, his essay
on Chester Himes had a place in the book Sticking It to the Man:
Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction from 1950 to 1980. He lives in Brooklyn.

Laurie Albanese is the author of two novels and a memoir: Stolen Beauty, Blue Suburbia, and Lynelle by the Sea, and the co-author of the novel The Miracles of Prato. Her books have been translated into Spanish, French, German and Portuguese. Lico Albanese earned her MFA from Stonecoast at the Univesrity of Southern Maine, where she will be leading workshops this summer. She's taught creative and formal writing to all ages and has worked in book publishing and journalism. Her travel and general-interest stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. 

Jeffrey J. Antonucci is the author of the magical realism novel, Deep Within a Blueberry Sky. For many years, he followed in the footsteps of his father, uncle, and grandfather, all master tradesmen, by working in construction as a bricklayer. It wasn’t until the idea for his first novel came to Jeff, as he tells it, like a slideshow before his eyes, that he ever even thought of writing a story. Jeff wrote Deep Within a Blueberry Sky with a desire for spreading the importance of love and peace for all people and all things. Find out more at InspiredWorks.net Facebook.com/InspiredWorksLLC. Author image: Rigoglioso Photography.

Amir Ahmadi Arian started out as a journalist in Iran in 2000 and has since published a collection of stories, a nonfiction book, and two novels in Persian. He also translated from English to Persian novels by E.L Doctorow, Paul Auster, P.D. James, and Cormac McCarthy. Since leaving Iran in 2011 to complete a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Queensland, Australia, he has published short stories and essays in Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, The New York Times, and The Guardian. He currently lives in New York where he earned an MFA in the NYU Creative Writing Program as The Axinn Foundation/E.L. Doctorow Fellowship recipient, and teaches literature and creative writing at CUNY City College.

Mona Awad is the author of the novel Bunny, published by Viking in 2019. Bunny was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror and for the New England Book Award; it was selected as a Best Book of 2019 by Time, Vogue,  Bookriot, Electric Literature, CBC Books, and the New York Public Library. Her first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl won the Amazon Best First Novel Award and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She earned an MFA in Fiction from Brown University and a PhD in Creative Writing and English from the University of Denver. She is currently a Visiting Writer at UMass Amherst and lives in Boston. 

Marina Budhos is an award-winning author who often writes on immigrant themes, including the novels Watched, about surveillance of Muslim communities; Ask Me No Questions, about an undocumented family, cited by Bustle.com as one of “12 YA Novels That Will Make You See the World Differently,” and Tell Us We’re Home, about immigrant daughters of maids and nannies in a NJ suburb. Her nonfiction includes Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers and Eyes of the World, co-authored with Marc Aronson, about Jewish refugees who invented modern photojournalism during the Spanish Civil War. Her latest novel, The Long Ride, is about three mixed race girls during a 1970s integration battle. www.marinabudhos.com

Michelle Cameron's debut novel, The Fruit of Her Hands: the story of Shira of Ashkenaz relates the life of her 13th Century ancestor, Rabbi
Meir of Rothenberg. Publisher’s Weekly praised the novel’s “powerful
immediacy” and Library Journal its “rich details.” Her full-length novel in
verse, In the Shadow of the Globe, was named the Shakespeare Theatre
of New Jersey’s 2003-4 Winter Book Selection. Her forthcoming
historical novel, Beyond the Ghetto Gates, will be published by SheWrites
Press in Spring 2020. She joined The Writers Circle in 2011 and is now a
co-director, teaching children, teens, and aspiring novelists. Learn more
at https://michelle-cameron.com/.

Maisy Card holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and is a public librarian. These Ghosts are Family is her first novel. Her nonfiction has appeared in Lenny Letter and is forthcoming in School Library Journal. Her short fiction has been published by AGNI, Sycamore Review, Liars’ League NYC, and Ampersand Review. Maisy was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, but was raised in Queens, New York. She earned an MLIS from Rutgers University and a BA in English and American Studies from Wesleyan University. 

Tobias Carroll is the author of the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the novel Reel (Rare Bird). He is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn, and writes Words Without Borders’ Watchlist column. His writing has been published by Tin House, Rolling Stone, Hazlitt, The Scofield, Bookforum, and more. He has taught writing courses for LitReactor and Catapult. His newest book, Political Sign, will be released by Bloomsbury as part of the Object Lessons series on September 3, 2020.

Philip Cioffari is a novelist, short story writer, filmmaker, playwright and Professor of English at William Paterson University. His newest novel, If Anyone Asks, Say I Died from the Heartbreaking Blues, is forthcoming in February 2020. Previous novels include: The Bronx Kill; Jesusville; Dark Road, Dead End; and Catholic Boys, and his story collection, A History of Things Lost or Broken, won the Tartt First Fiction Prize and the D.H. Lawrence award. Cioffari’s plays have been produced OFF and OFF-OFF Broadway. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing, and directs the Performing & Literary Arts Honors program at WP University.

Marcy Dermansky is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Very Nice, The Red Car, Bad Marie, and Twins. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. She lives with her daughter in Montclair, New Jersey.

Garth Risk Hallberg's first novel, City on Fire, was a New York Times and international bestseller, has been translated into 17 languages, and was named one of the best books of 2015 by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Vogue. He is also the author of a novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family. His short stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train, and Best New American Voices 2008, and he has written critical essays for The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Millions, and Slate.

Nicole Haroutunian is co-founder—along with Apryl Lee—of Halfway There, a quarterly literary reading series in Montclair. She is the author of the short story collection Speed Dreaming (Little A, 2015) and an editor of the anthology Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City’s Forgotten Waterfront (Damiani, 2016). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Bennington Review, Tin House's Open Bar, Joyland, Post Road, Pigeon Pages, and elsewhere. She is an editor of the digital arts platform Underwater New York. She lives in Queens, but is from New Jersey.

David Haynes is professor emeritus of English at Southern Methodist University, where he directed the creative writing program for 10 years.  For the past 23 years he has also been on the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is the founder of Kimbilio, and in 2019 he concluded a seven-year term as a Trustee for AWP.  He is the author of seven novels for adults and five books for younger readers, most recently, A Star in the Face of the Sky, which was published in 2013 by New Rivers Press. 

Stephanie Jimenez is based in Queens, New York. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the Guardian, O! the Oprah Magazine, Joyland Magazine, The New York Times, and more. She is a former Fulbright recipient and a graduate of Scripps College in Claremont, California. Her debut novel, They Could Have Named Her Anything, was published on August 1, 2019 (Little A).

Lily King is the award-winning author of the novels The Pleasing Hour, The English Teacher, Father of the Rain and Euphoria, one of the New York Times Book Review’s “10 Best Books of 2014,” finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Kirkus Prize for fiction. Her latest novel is Writers & Lovers. She lives in Maine.

Christina Baker Kline is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including Tin Ticket (forthcoming 9/2020), Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World. Her 2013 novel Orphan Train spent more than two years on the NYT bestseller list, including five weeks at #1, and was published in 40 countries. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, and Psychology Today, among other places. 

Denise Laidler is a communication specialist and culture and travel writer and Founder and Creative Director of GoldenPen Ink Communication. Her fiction has been featured in the Caribbean Writer Vol. 27 and was awarded the anthology's David Hough Literary Prize to a Caribbean author for her short story Where Dreams Die, an excerpt from her debut novel Journey to Land of Look Behind. 

Apryl Lee is the co-founder—along with Nicole Haroutunian—and host of Halfway There, a quarterly reading series in Montclair. Her short stories and essays have been published at The New Orleans Review, Joyland Magazine, Word Riot, Underwater New York, Keyhole Press, Necessary Fiction, and Handwritten Work, among others. She teaches writing and screenwriting and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and son and has recently completed a novel-in-stories.

Benilde Little is the author of the bestselling novels Good Hair, The Itch, Acting Out, Who Does She Think She Is? (Simon and Schuster) and a memoir Welcome to My Breakdown (Atria). Good Hair was one of the ten best books of the year (LA Times). A former reporter for the Star-Ledger, People magazine and a senior editor at Essence, Benilde has written for the New York Times and contributed to numerous anthologies. She has been a creative writing professor at Ramapo College, The City College of New York and currently teaches memoir writing in Montclair. She is currently working on a one-woman show based on her memoir and lives in Montclair with her husband.  They have an adult daughter and college-age son.

Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica, whose short fiction has appeared in over forty anthologies and magazines and has been reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year series, Years Best Weird Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of Best Erotica. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors (2011, Lethe Press), received two Shirley Jackson Award nominations, for Best Collection, and for Best Novelette (for "Omphalos"). Her story "Furnace" received a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nomination for Best Short Story. Her second collection, Furnace (2016, Word Horde Press), received a Shirley Jackson Award nomination for Best Collection and won the 2016 This is Horror Award for Best Collection. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com, and on Instagram and Twitter.

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa's first novel, Daughters of the Stone was selected as a finalist for the 2010 PEN America Bingham Literary Award. Her work has appeared in a number of literary journals including Narrative Fiction, Kweli Journal, Label Me Latina, The Latino Book Review, Pleiades, The Afro-Hispanic Review and Auburn Avenue. Ms. Llanos has also contributed to several anthologies, including the bilingual publication, Breaking Ground: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York City 1980-2012 and Latina Authors and Their Muses. For further information refer to her website at www.dahlmallanosfigueroa.com  

Colum McCann is the internationally bestselling author of the novels TransAtlantic, Let the Great World Spin, Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as three critically acclaimed story collections and the nonfiction book Letters to a Young Writer. His fiction has been published in over 40 languages.

Madeline Miller has taught and tutored Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare to high school students for over 15 years. The Song of Achilles, her first novel, was awarded the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a New York Times bestseller. Her second novel, Circe, was winner of the Goodreads Choice Award, and was widely named best book of the year. 

Martha Moffett was born at the end of a dirt road in St. Clair County, Alabama.  She worked in publishing in New York City (GQ, American Heritage Dictionary, Ladies’ Home Journal) and wrote for Cosmopolitan and other magazines. At one point, with a full-time job and three children, she wrote her first novel (The Common Garden) on the subway, going back and forth to work.  She returned to a small southern town (Lantana, Florida, another dirt road), where she was chief librarian at AMI. Asked what that was like, she says, “Like being flung into a Victorian workhouse.”

Liz Moore is the author of the acclaimed novels Heft and The Unseen World, as well as the newly released Long Bright River. A winner of the 2014 Rome Prize in Literature, she lives in Philadelphia.

Tochi Onyebuchi holds a BA from Yale, an MFA in screenwriting from Tisch, a master's degree in global economic law from L'institut d'études politiques, and a JD from Columbia Law School. His writing has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction and Ideomancer, among other places, and he is the author of the novels Beasts Made of Night and Crown of Thunder. Tochi resides in Connecticut. 

Thomas Pluck is the author of the Anthony-finalist thriller Bad Boy Boogie, the adventure novel Blade of Dishonor, and the story collection Life During Wartime. His story "Deadbeat" was chosen as distinguished mystery story of 2018 by Best American Mystery Stories, and "The Big Snip" was included in The Year's Best Crime & Mystery Stories 2016. He has been published in The Utne Reader, Weird New Jersey, Lit Hub, and The Good Men Project, and Library Journal called his writing "stunning." He lives in Montclair with his wife and Louie the cat. 

Ernesto Quiñonez is an acclaimed novelist, essayist, a Sundance fellow, and a Moth storyteller.  He was raised in Spanish Harlem and is a product of public education from kindergarten at PS 101 on 111th Street and Lex to his Master at the City College of New York. His debut Bodega Dreams is now a landmark classic, his latest novel Taina, was released in September of 2019. 

Marco Rafalà is a first-generation Sicilian American novelist, musician, and writer for award-winning tabletop role-playing games. He earned his MFA in Fiction from The New School and is a cocurator of the Guerrilla Lit Reading Series in New York City. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review and LitHub. How Fires End is his debut novel.

John Sayles works as a fiction writer, screenwriter, actor and feature film director. His novel Union Dues (1978) was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Critics’ Circle Award. He has written over 100 screenplays and was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has directed 18 feature films, with another, I Passed This Way, currently in progress. His films Matewan and Lone Star, as well as his previous novel A Moment in the Sun, are often used for instruction in History and American Studies courses. Yellow Earth is his fifth novel.

Renee Simms' debut story collection Meet Behind Mars (Wayne State University Press) was a Foreword Indies Finalist and listed by The Root as one of 28 brilliant books by black authors in 2018. She has received fellowships from the NEA and Bread Loaf and teaches at the University of Puget Sound and in the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is currently at work on a novel and a collection of linked essays.

Laura Sims’ debut novel, Looker (Scribner), was published to critical acclaim in early 2019 and named a Best Book of 2019 by Vogue, Esquire UK, CrimeReads, and The Star-Ledger, and a Best New Book by People, Entertainmen​t Weekly, CosmoUK, The Washington Independent Review of Books and more. Looker has been optioned for television by Entertainment One and Emily Mortimer’s King Bee Productions. Sims has also published four books of poetry, including, most recently, Staying Alive; her first poetry collection, Practice, Restraint, was the winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, and other journals. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

Nancy Star is the author of five novels including the bestselling Sisters, One, Two, Three, which landed on the Publishers Weekly list of Top Ten Bestsellers of 2016. Her sixth novel, Rules for Moving, the story of a beloved advice columnist whose life is out of control, will be published this May by Lake Union. In addition to her novels, Nancy’s essays have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Family Circle, among other places. Before becoming a novelist, she spent over a decade working as a movie executive at the Samuel Goldwyn Company and The Ladd Company, dividing her time between New York and London. She raised and launched two kids here in Montclair, where she still lives with her husband.

Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, he moved to New York City, where he began a career in fashion design. Shuggie Bain is his first novel.

Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer spent her early years in Sri Lanka and lived in India, Thailand, Canada and Australia before settling in the United States. Her short fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including the Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, the Summerset Review, Quiddity, Michigan Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, Saranac Review, and the Examined Life. She won the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 2018 and the Commonwealth Short Story Competition in 2004. Her novel, The Mask Collectors, is forthcoming in June 2019. She is a clinical associate professor of psychology at New York University.

Teddy Wayne is the author of Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times, and McSweeney’s.  

Charlotte Alter is a national correspondent for Time, covering the 2016, 2018 and 2020 elections, women in politics, and the rise of the grassroots left. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and she has appeared on Good Morning America, Morning Joe, The Last Word, and CNN's Reliable Sources. The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For is her first book.

Harvey Araton is a longtime sports journalist with the New York Times and other New York-area newspapers, author or co-author of nine books and adjunct professor at Montclair State University. He co-produced a documentary of his 2011 book, When The Garden Was Eden, for ESPN. His 2012 book, Driving Mr. Yogi, was a New York Times best-seller.

Steph Auteri is a writer and editor who has written about women's health and sexuality for the Atlantic, VICE, Pacific Standard, the Washington Post, Rewire.News, and other publications. Her more literary work has appeared in Narratively, The Rumpus, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Steph is the author of A Dirty Word (Cleis Press, October 2018), a reported memoir about the ways in which our culture has co-opted female sexuality. She lives in Verona, NJ with her husband and daughter.

Yasemin Besen-Cassino is a Professor and Chair of Sociology and Distinguished Scholar at Montclair State University. She is the Editor of Contemporary Sociology. She is the author of six books, her newest book Cost of Being a Girl: Teen Work and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap came out from Temple University Press. Her work focuses on gender, work and youth. Her work has appeared in many academic journals and featured in popular outlets such as Washington Post, the Guardian, BBC4, the Atlantic, Fortune magazine, CNN, NBC and MTV among many others.

Ada Calhoun is the author of the memoir Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, named an Amazon Book of the Month and one of the top ten memoirs of 2017 by W magazine; and the history St. Marks Is Dead, one of the best books of 2015, according to Kirkus and the Boston Globe. She has collaborated on several New York Times bestsellers, and written for the New York Times, New York, and The New Republic.  Her latest book is Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis.

Jill Rooney Carr works in hospitality and events in the New York City area.

Ben Cohen is a sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He writes about the NBA, the Olympics and other topics that don't involve extraordinarily athletic people. He lives in New York with his wife and their cat. The Hot Hand is his first book.

Dr. Melissa L. Cooper  is a writer, historian and professor. She is the author of the groundbreaking historical study, Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Dr. Cooper’s teaching experience spans more than two decades. She is currently an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark and has been a member of the faculty at the University of South Carolina and Columbia University. Her long teaching career includes teaching diverse populations of learners in New Jersey public high schools. As a result, Dr. Cooper was featured in the Peabody Award winning documentary “Minding the Gap: Why Good Schools are Failing Black Students” produced by Nancy Solomon, Spencer Fellow, in 2008. Dr. Cooper also appears in the interactive web documentary, Between the Waters: Hobcaw Barony. Dr. Cooper was recently awarded the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Corporation Fellowship.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis is the congressional editor and deputy Washington editor at the New York Times. She has covered politics and policy from Washington for two decades, including three presidential campaigns, three presidents and many sessions of Congress. She was previously a White House correspondent for the Times, and has also worked at Bloomberg, the Associated Press, the Baltimore Sun, and Congressional Quarterly. She is the 2009 winner of the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress for her coverage of the federal response to the 2008 financial meltdown. Julie is the co-author with Michael D. Shear of Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration, released in October 2019 and soon to be published in paperback by Simon & Schuster.

Arielle Eckstut is co-founder of The Book Doctors. She is the author of nine books including The Secret Language of Color: The Science, Nature, History, Culture and Beauty of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue & Violet. She is also an agent-at-large at the Levine Greenberg Rostan 
Literary Agency, where for over 20 years, she has been helping hundreds of talented writers become published authors. Lastly, Arielle co-founded the iconic company, LittleMissMatched, and grew it from a tiny operation into a leading national brand, which now has stores from coast to coast, everywhere from Disneyland to Disney World to Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Hillary Frank is the creator of The Longest Shortest Time, a podcast about the surprises and absurdities of raising other humans. The show was named one of the 50 Best Podcasts by The Atlantic and TIME and has won several awards. Hillary's first radio story aired on This American Life in 1999. She went on to become a regular contributor to the program, and also reported stories for Studio 360, Marketplace, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend America. Hillary is also the author and illustrator of three young adult novels. Her latest book is Weird Parenting Wins: Bathtub Dining, Family Screams, and Other Hacks from the Parenting Trenches.

Matthew Futterman is a deputy sports editor and writer at the New York Times. He is the bestselling author of Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed, and Players: How Sports Became a Business. He was previously a senior special writer for sports at the Wall Street Journal. He was also part of the team at the Star-Ledger of New Jersey awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News.  He has covered the past five Olympics, five World Cups and numerous other major international sports events. In his spare time he runs marathons – 25 and counting. 

Ylonda Gault is the author of the parenting memoir Child, Please (Penguin/Random House) and an Opinion contributor for the New York Times. An award-winning journalist and former editor at ESSENCE, she specializes in issues related to feminism, motherhood, family and the Black experience. Her work has been featured in iconic anthologies on Beyonce Knowles Carter and Michelle Obama recently published by St. Martin's Press. Gault, who is Senior Editorial Director at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, lives in New Jersey with her three awesome children.

Gabrielle Glaser is the author of the forthcoming, American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption", to be published by Viking in June. Her 2013 book examining women's drinking and the American rehab industry, Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink -- and How They Can Regain Control, was a New York Times bestseller. Her 2015 Atlantic story, "The False Gospel of Alcoholics Anonymous," which examined science-based approaches to addiction, was included in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology of 2016.  She has covered the intersection of health, medicine, and culture for the New York Times and many other publications, including the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, and Scientific American.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl is a writer, an educator, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at Type Media Center. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Nation, Complex, Hazlitt, Out, The Washington Spectator, The Toast, the anthologies The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality and Emerge, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of residencies and fellowships from Lambda Literary, Monson Arts, the Studios at Key West, and the Vermont Studio Center. Before working in journalism, she spent five years as a teacher and youth development professional, helping people who had left school to complete their high school equivalency diplomas. She was born, raised, and still lives in Brooklyn.

Jonathan Greenberg is an Emmy Award winning screenwriter and Professor of English at Montclair State University. His television credits include the children's animated series Rugrats, Hey Arnold, Recess, and Arthur. He is the author of two books in addition to Mobituaries: Modernism, Satire, and the Novel (2011), and The Cambridge Introduction to Satire (2019), both from Cambridge University Press.

Stephen Haff is the founder of Still Waters in a Storm, a one-room school serving Spanish-speaking immigrant children in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Previously, he taught English at a public school in Bushwick for nearly a decade. He earned his MFA in Theater Studies at Yale, and has made a living directing plays and writing essays for the Village Voice and other publications. Stephen lives in Queens with his wife, children’s book author Tina Schneider, and their three children.

Victoria James has worked in restaurants since she was 13. She was certified as a sommelier when she was 21, making her the youngest sommelier in the country. She was Food & Wine’s Sommelier of the Year in 2018 and has appeared on both Forbes and Zagat’s “30 Under 30” lists. She has worked at some of the most prestigious restaurants in New York City, including Marea and Aureole. Currently, she is the Beverage Director and partner at Cote, a Michelin-starred hot spot in the Flatiron district. She is the author of Drink Pink: A Celebration of Rosé and Wine Girl: The Obstacles, Humiliations, and Triumphs of America’s Youngest Sommelier.

Jack Jenkins is a national reporter for Religion News Service and a former Senior Religion Reporter for ThinkProgress. His work has also been published in The Atlanticand the Washington Post, and he is cited regularly in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, MSNBC, and other top media outlets. He is a regular guest on radio shows and podcasts, including ABC, BBC, various NPR affiliates, Sirius XM, Vox.com’s Today Explained podcast, and many others. A graduate of Presbyterian College, Jenkins earned his Master of Divinity at Harvard University.

Ronen Kauffman is the author of New Brunswick, New Jersey, Goodbye - Bands, Dirty Basements and the Search for Self. He is a public elementary school teacher, sings for the band Zombie Apocalypse and is a devoted yogi. Kauffman lives with his family in Union City, NJ. Photo credit: Michael Alago. 

Melissa Klurman is a former book editor at both Fodor’s and Frommer’s travel guides; a Lowell Thomas Travel Writing Award Winner for her work on Fodor’s Caribbean Guidebook; and the editor of Frommer's 2020 Orlando/Walt Disney World Guidebook. Melissa’s travel writing has appeared in myriad lifestyle publications including Elle, Islands, Brides, Martha Stewart Weddings, Reader’s Digest, Parents, and Saveur. She lives in Montclair with her husband, son, and rescue dog, Pepper.

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the first husband and wife to share a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, have co-authored four previous books: A Path Appears, Half the Sky, Thunder from the East, and China Wakes. They were awarded a Pulitzer in 1990 for their coverage of China, as well as the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement Award. Now an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, Kristof was previously bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. He won his second Pulitzer in 2006 for his columns on Darfur. WuDunn worked at the Times as a business editor and foreign correspondent in Tokyo and Beijing, and now works in finance and consulting.

Paul Krugman, recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics and a best-selling author, has been a columnist at The New York Times for 20 years. A Distinguished Professor at City University of New York, he resides in New York City.

Tish Lampert, a photojournalist, writer & host of the blog “America Speaks,” is author of the new book, We Protest: Fighting For What We Believe In (Rizzoli). Lampert has chronicled protest movements that have been catalysts for reform in America for 20 years, including the 1992 riots in Los Angeles; the Cesar Chavez movement for migrant worker’s rights; the Navajo Nation in Arizona. Her investigations include assignments for Conflict Awareness Project, Voices of African Mothers, Gente Unide and Border Angels. She has won awards for her work in Sub-Sahara Africa and has exhibited in the United Nations, Photo LA and elsewhere. Visit www.tishlampert.org.

Erik Larson is the author of five national bestsellers: Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and Isaac's Storm, which have collectively sold more than nine million copies. His books have been published in nearly 20 countries.

Steve Lohr has covered technology, business and economics for the New York Times for more than twenty years. In 2013, he was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He was a foreign correspondent for a decade and served as an editor, and has written for magazines including the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and the Washington Monthly. He is the author of Data-ism, which examines the field of data science and decision-making (Harper Business, 2015). He is also the author of a history of software and computer programming, Go To (Basic Books, 2001).

Steve Luxenberg is an associate editor at the Washington Post and an award-winning author. During his 40 years as an editor and reporter, Steve has overseen reporting that has earned many national honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes. His latest book, Separate, has garnered several honors: The New York Times named it as one of 100 Notable Books for 2019 and designated it as an Editors’ Choice. Amazon selected it as one of the year’s Best Books for History. It was longlisted for the Cundill History Prize, an international award recognizing the best history writing in English. As a work in progress, it won the 2016 J. Anthony Lukas Prize for excellence in nonfiction.

Dewar MacLeod is Professor of History at William Paterson University. He is the author of Making the Scene in the Garden State: Popular Music in New Jersey from Edison to Springsteen and Beyond (March 2020) and Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California (2010). He sings and plays guitar for Thee Volatiles, the greatest punk rock band in Montclair, New Jersey. And he is co-owner, with his daughter Sinéad MacLeod, of Legacy Coffee on Glenridge Ave & Bay Street in Montclair.

Adrienne Miller was the literary and fiction editor of Esquire from 1997-2006. She is the author of the novel The Coast of Akron. She lives in New York City with her husband, son, and Italian Greyhound. To learn more, please visit AdrienneMiller.com.

A singular voice in journalism and public affairs for more than five decades, Bill Moyers was a founding organizer of the Peace Corps and, at age 28, its first deputy director. He became President Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant for domestic policy and then White House Press Secretary before resigning in 1967 to become publisher of New York Newsday. He served as senior correspondent of CBS Reports and senior news analyst for the CBS Evening News before he and his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers, formed an independent production company. Their ground-breaking PBS series earned more than 40 Emmy Awards and nine Peabodys. Bill Moyers received a National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Lifetime Achievement Award and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the PEN USA Courageous Advocacy Award. He is president of The Schumann Media Center, a non-profit which supports independent journalism. 

Eva Natiello is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Memory Box, a self-published psychological thriller which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide. She is a sought after speaker who has appeared at ThrillerFest, BookBaby Independent Author Conferences, Morristown Festival of Books, among others. Eva draws on her 20+ years of experience in PR, marketing and branding to coach authors on self-publishing and book marketing. Her articles and essays have appeared in the Huffington Post, New Jersey Magazine, Martha's Vineyard Magazine (2020), and others. 

Judith Newman is the author of the bestseller To Siri With Love:  A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines, a collection of illuminating stories about life with a fourteen-year-old boy with autism.  The New York Times called it “an uncommonly riotous and moving book…with whipsaws of brilliant zingers and heart punches.”  The Washington Post called Newman “a gifted personal essayist, her warmth and wit recalling Nora Ephron’s.” Previous books include You Make Me Feel Like An Unnatural Woman:  Diary of a New (Old) Mother, about her adventures in the world of infertility. In addition to books and personal essays, Judith is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review. Her profiles are featured in a variety of publications from the New York Times and People to Vanity Fair, AARP, and National Geographic. 

Doreen Oliver is a writer and performer whose critically-acclaimed one-woman show about raising a child with autism, Everything is Fine Until It’s Not, broke a record for the fastest sell-out in the NY Fringe Festival's 20-year history and won the Audience Award at the United Solo Festival. Her essays about race, autism, and life's contradictions have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Root, Kenyon Review and elsewhere. Awarded fellowships from Hedgebrook, VCCA, Stanford Business School, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation at Gallery Aferro, Doreen is a former film producer for Lee Daniels Entertainment. More at www.doreenoliver.com or @doreenoliver on Twitter. Photo:© 2016 Julia Maloof Verderosa

Deesha Phillyaw’s collection of short stories about Black women, sex, and the Black church, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press in September 2020. Her work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series and has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Brevity, Full Grown People, Apogee Journal, TueNight, ESPN’s The Undefeated, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. Deesha is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. 

Adam Platt has been a contributing editor and restaurant critic for New York magazine since 2000. He won the James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for Restaurant Reviews in 2010. During the course of nearly twenty-five years in the magazine business, Platt has written for a variety of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Observer, Esquire, and Condé Nast Traveler. He lives in Greenwich Village with his wife and two pizza-loving daughters.

Eduardo Porter was born in Phoenix and grew up in the United States, Mexico, and Belgium. He is an economics reporter for The New York Times, where he was a member of the editorial board from 2007 to 2012 and the Economic Scene columnist from 2012 to 2018. He began his career in journalism as a financial reporter for Notimex, a Mexican news agency, in Mexico City. He was a correspondent in Tokyo and London, and in 1996 moved to São Paulo, Brazil, as editor of América Economía, a business magazine. In 2000, he went to work at The Wall Street Journal in Los Angeles to cover the growing Hispanic population. He is the author of The Price of Everything (2011), an exploration of the cost-benefit analyses that underpin human behaviors and institutions. He lives in Brooklyn.

Leah Price has taught at Cambridge University, Harvard University, and Rutgers University, where she is currently Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of English and Founding Director of the Rutgers Book Initiative. Her most recent book is What We Talk About When We Talk About Books. She writes for the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, and Public Books, where she also serves as the “Print/Screen” editor.

Nancy Princenthal is a New York–based writer. A former senior editor of Art in America, where she remains a contributing editor, she has also written for the New York Times, Parkett, the Village Voice, and many other publications. She is currently on the faculty of the MFA art writing program at the School of Visual Arts. Her previous book, Agnes Martin, won 2016 PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld award for biography. 

Ben Reiter is the author of Astroball: The New Way to Win It All, a New York Times bestseller. As a longtime senior writer for Sports Illustrated, he wrote 27 cover stories and won the 2018 Deadline Award for Magazine Profile for his feature ‘The Seeker: The Complicated Life and Death of Hideki Irabu.’ Before joining SI, he was a research assistant for the legendary investigative journalist Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice. He is currently at work on both a narrative podcast and a documentary television series investigating the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal. Reiter is a member of the board of directors of The Marshall Project. He grew up in South Orange, NJ, and lives in New York City.

Ambassador Susan E. Rice is currently Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at the School of International Service at American University, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She serves on the boards of Netflix and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and previously served on several nonprofit boards, including the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. 

Mo Rocca is a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, host of The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation, and host and creator of the Cooking Channel’s My Grandmother’s Ravioli, in which he learned to cook from grandmothers and grandfathers across the country. He’s also a frequent panelist on NPR’s hit weekly quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! Rocca spent four seasons as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Dale Russakoff spent 28 years as a reporter for the Washington Post and is now a freelance writer, focusing on education and immigration. She is the author of The Prize -- Who's in Charge of America's Schools (Houghton Mifflin, 2015), a New York Times best-seller about Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to the Newark schools. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, ProPublica and elsewhere. Dale and her husband have lived in Montclair for 25 years and have two grown sons who attended Montclair Public Schools.

Maria Russo is the Children's Book Editor for the New York Times Book Review. A longtime cultural journalist, she has been a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times, the New York Observer, and Salon, and holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She is the author, with Pamela Paul, of How to Raise a Reader. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey with her husband and three children.

Sharon Saline Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of the award-winning book, What Your ADHD Child Wishes You Knew: Working Together to Empower Kids for Success in School and Life. She specializes in working with kids, young adults and families living with ADHD, learning disabilities and mental health issues. Her unique perspective - as a sibling in an ADHD home, combined with decades of experience as a clinical psychologist and consultant - assists her in guiding people towards effective communication and closer connections. She lectures and facilitates workshops internationally on ADHD, executive functioning, anxiety and working with different kinds of learners.

David Henry Sterry is co-founder of The Book Doctors. He is the author of 16 books on a wide variety of subjects, from memoir to middle grade fiction, sports to reference. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages, optioned by Hollywood, and appeared on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. He is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post. Before writing professionally, David was a comic and an actor. His one man show, based on his memoir, Chicken, was named the number one show in the United Kingdom for its entire run at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, Fringe by The Independent.

Neda Toloui-Semnani is a journalist and writer whose work has appeared in various online and print publications, including the Washington Post, New York, LA Review of Books, The Baffler, The Week, BuzzFeed, and Roll Call among others. Her work has also been featured in The Rumpus and This American Life. She holds a Masters of Science in Gender and Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Masters in Fine Arts in Nonfiction from Goucher College. In 2017, she was named a NYFA fellow in Nonfiction. They Said They Wanted a Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents is forthcoming from Little A.

Dr. Larry Westreich, a board-certified psychiatrist, is Associate Clinical Professor Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine.  Dr. Westreich formerly directed the Detoxification Ward and the Dual Diagnosis Ward at Bellevue Hospital, where he remains on the faculty.  He maintains a private practice in addiction treatment in New York and New Jersey, is Past President of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry, and the author of Helping the Addict You Love, (Simon and Schuster, 2017) and A Parent’s Guide to Teen Addiction (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017).  Dr. Westreich has served since 2003 as the Consultant on Behavioral Health and Addiction to Major League Baseball.

Alexis Wichowski is the deputy chief technology officer for the City of New York, and an adjunct professor of technology, media, and communications at Columbia University. A widely recognized technology expert, Wichowski spent the past two decades working at the intersection of technology, media, and government, most recently at the State Department and the United Nations. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, TechCrunch, Foreign Affairs, and Wired, which published her viral piece, “Net States Rule the World: Ignore Them at Your Peril.”

Z. Williams, MD, is a board-certified ophthalmic plastic surgeon and writer. She has two decades’ worth of publications within ophthalmology textbooks and peer-reviewed journal articles. Her writing shifted from scientific to narrative after she left full-time clinical practice to pursue interests outside of medicine. Her work now focuses on themes illustrating the harmful consequences the medical system has on doctors, juxtaposed against the struggles of patients, who suffer the downstream effects within this toxic medical culture. Dr. Williams cares for patients during humanitarian campaigns to Central America and on a part time basis at a public city hospital in Queens, New York. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled Enduring Caduceus, which details a physician's turbulent first year of medical training.

Eilene Zimmerman has been a journalist for three decades, covering business, technology and social issues for a wide array of national magazines and newspapers. She was a columnist for The New York Times Sunday Business section for six years and since 2004 has been a regular contributor to the newspaper. In 2017, Zimmerman also began pursuing a master’s degree in social work. She lives in New York City.