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.
Kevin Barry is the author of the novels Night Boat to Tangier, Beatlebone, and City of Bohane and the story collections Dark Lies the Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. His awards include the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. His stories and essays appear in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter, and he lives in County Sligo, Ireland.
Maisy Card's novel, These Ghosts are Family, was shortlisted for The Center For Fiction's First Novel Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Lenny Letter, The New York Times, Guernica and other publications. Maisy was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, but was raised in Queens, New York. She earned an MFA from Brooklyn College, an MLIS from Rutgers University and a BA in English and American Studies from Wesleyan University. She is currently an instructor for the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop and a fiction editor for The Brooklyn Rail.
Frances Cha is a former travel and culture editor for CNN in Seoul. She grew up in the United States, Hong Kong, and South Korea. A graduate of Dartmouth College and the Columbia University MFA writing program, she has written for The Atlantic, The Believer, and Yonhap News, among other publications, and has lectured at Columbia University, Ewha University, Seoul National University, and Yonsei University. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters. If I Had Your Face is her first novel.
Karen Chee is a comedian and writer for Late Night with Seth Meyers. She has also written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Golden Globes. She is currently writing a humor collection (Holt/Macmillan), which should come out in about 50 years, if not later.
Distinguishing himself as one of the most prolific and celebrated poets of our time, two-term U. S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins occupies a rarefied place at theintersection of critical and popular acclaim. His well-chosen words, often initially laid down in playful and humorous tones, generally make a subtle but sharp turn to thought-provoking revelations about life’s more serious and contemplative subjects. No living poet is any better at his craft, and Collins has won many coveted accolades for his 12 books of poetry. These collections have appeared regularly on The New York Times Bestseller list, and he has been honored with fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry, and most recently, he was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Letters.
Alan Cumming is a Scottish-American actor, writer, singer, filmmaker, and activist. He has performed with Jay Z and Liza with a Z; he has won a Tony, hosted the Tonys and been nominated for an Emmy for doing so; he made back-to-back films with Stanley Kubrick and the Spice Girls; he has played God, the Devil, Hitler, the Pope, a teleporting superhero, Hamlet, all the parts in Macbeth, General Batista of Cuba, a goat opposite Sean Connery, Dionysus, a Smurf (twice) the EmCee in Cabaret (thrice), a James Bond baddie - oh, and political spinmeister Eli Gold on seven seasons of The Good Wife for which he received multiple Golden Globe, Emmy and SAG award nominations; he is the author of six books including a #1 New York Times best-selling memoir Not My Father's Son and the upcoming memoir Baggage; he played the first ever gay leading role on an US network drama, CBS’s Instinct. He has received over 40 awards for his humanitarianism and social activism, three honorary doctorates, both the Great Scot and Icon of Scotland awards from his homeland and was made an OBE (Officer of the British Empire) for his contributions to the arts and LBGT equality.
Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey and received her BA in art history from Barnard College and her MA in history of art at University College, London. While working as an art writer and curator in India, Avni began writing fiction. She has been awarded the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize and a Charles Pick Fellowship. Her debut novel, Burnt Sugar, was longlisted for the prestigious Tata Literature Live! First Book Award upon its publication in India and was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize in Fiction. Avni lives in Dubai with her family.
Elisabeth Egan is an editor at the New York Times Book Review and the author of A Window Opens. She lives in Montclair with her family.
Pilar Fraile is one of the most innovative of the generation of Spanish writers who came of age post-Franco. She is considered by the critics as one of the most cutting-edge voices of the Spanish literary scene. Her works deal with the problematic relationship between past and present values and the relationship between the self and the community. Her publications include the novels Días de euforia, Las ventajas de la vida en el campo, the short stories collection Los nuevos pobladores, the nonfiction book Materiales para la ficción, de Poe a Fosters Wallace, and five poetry books. Some of the stories have been published in translation at prestigious American journals such as The Paris Review, The Chicago Review, Conjunctions or The Brookyln Rail. A section of her poetry book Cerca was translated and anthologized by Forrest Gander in «Panic Cure: poetry from Spain for the XXI century», that was published in both UK and USA. Lizzie Davis has also translated and published a wide extension of her poetry work at journals like Asymptote, The Drunken Boat, Circumference, etc. A whole section of her poetry book Falta has been published at Two Lines Press.
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His new poem, Be Holding, was released from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September of 2020. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. Ross is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook "Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens," in addition to being co-author, with Rosechard Wehrenberg, of the chapbook, "River." He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin', in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He also works on The Tenderness Project with Shayla Lawson and Essence London. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.
Cherie S.A. Jones was born in 1974. She received a LL.B degree from the University of the West Indies, Barbados, in 1995, a Legal Education Certificate from the Hugh Wooding Law School, St. Augustine, Trinidad in 1997 and was admitted to the Bar in Barbados in October 1997. Cherie won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 1999. She won both the Archie Markham Award and the A.M. Heath Prize at Sheffield Hallam in the UK. A collection of interconnected stories set in a different small community in Barbados won a third prize at the Frank Collymore Endowment Awards in 2016. She still works as a lawyer, in addition to her writing.
Nancy Jooyoun Kim is the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Story of Mina Lee, a Reese's Book Club pick. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, NPR/PRI’s Selected Shorts, Salon, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Christina Baker Kline is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World, Christina Baker Kline is published in 40 countries. Her novels have received the New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among other prizes, and have been chosen by hundreds of communities, universities and schools as “One Book, One Read” selections. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in publications such as the New York Times and the NYT Book Review, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Psychology Today, and Slate.
Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. For her work at The New Yorker, where she's a a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
Don Lemon, the host of CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, is more popular than ever. As America’s only Black prime-time anchor, his daily monologues on racism and antiracism, on the failures of the Trump administration and of so many of our leaders, and on America’s systemic flaws speak for his millions of fans. Lemon was the leading voice on CNN guiding viewers through the death of George Floyd and a summer of nationwide protests and riots. Viewers relied on his nightly coverage to guide them through a global pandemic. Now, in an urgent, deeply personal, riveting plea, he shows us all how deep our problems lie, and what we can do to begin to fix them.
Marta López-Luaces was born in Spain, in 1964, and lives in New York. She is a poet, writer and translator. She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Literatures from New York University (1998). She is a Full Professor at Montclair State University. She published two novels and a book of short stories: La Virgen de la Noche (2009), Los traductores del viento (Madrid-Monterrey, Vaso Roto, 2013), won the International Latino Book Award for Best Fantasy Novel, 2014 and El Placer de matar a una madre (Madrid: Ediciones B, Penguin Random House, 2019). She also published five books of poetry Diatancia y destierros (1998), Las lenguas del viajero (2005), Los arquitectos del imaginario finalist of the prestigious award Ausiás March was published by Pre-Texto 2011) and Después de la oscuridad (Valencia, Pre-Texto 2016).
Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been translated into eleven languages, adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a miniseries. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Imbolo Mbue lives in New York City.
Andrew Motion was the UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2019, and is the co-founder of The Poetry Archive; he is now Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Baltimore. He has written biographies of Philip Larkin and John Keats, and his most recent collection of poems is Randomly Moving Particles (Faber, 2020, Pittsburgh University Press 2021).
Aimee Nezhukumatathil (neh-ZOO / KOO-mah / tah-TILL) is the author of the New York Times best selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At The Drive-In Volcano, and Miracle Fruit, the last three from Tupelo Press. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House. Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
Michelle Nijhuis is the author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, a history of the conservation movement published in March 2021. She is a project editor at The Atlantic and a longtime contributing editor of the environmental journal High Country News; her award-winning writing about science and the environment appears in National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications. She is also the author of The Science Writers' Essay Handbook and the co-editor of The Science Writers' Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish, and Prosper in the Digital Age. She lives in White Salmon, Washington.
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 Masters 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. He teaches English at Cornell University.
Joy-Ann Reid is a political analyst for MSNBC and host of “The ReidOut,” which launched on July 20, 2020 and airs weeknights at 7 p.m. ET. She is the author of The New York Times bestseller The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story, as well as Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons and the Racial Divide and We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama, which she co-edited with Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. Reid also hosts the podcast “Reid This-Reid That” with veteran journalist Jacque Reid and a book podcast called “What to Reid.
Previously, Joy hosted the MSNBC show “AM Joy,” offering distinctive analysis and insight on the news every weekend morning. Before that, she hosted the weekday program “The Reid Report.” From 2011 to 2014, she was the Managing Editor of theGrio.com, a daily online news and opinion platform devoted to delivering stories and perspectives that reflect and affect African-American audiences, while also serving as an MSNBC contributor. She has worked in local and national TV news, talk radio and as a press secretary during two presidential campaigns, including Barack Obama's Florida campaign in 2008. Her columns have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Miami Herald, New York Magazine and The Daily Beast.
Reid graduated from Harvard University with a concentration in film in 1991. She taught a course on “race, gender and media” at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Communications’ New York City annex from 2017 through 2018. Reid and her husband Jason own a documentary film production company. They reside in Maryland and have three children.
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, as published in May 2020 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 is a Scottish-American author. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, won the Booker Prize. It is published by Grove Atlantic in the US and Picador in the UK, and is to be translated into 22 languages. He wrote Shuggie Bain over a ten-year period and is currently at work on his second novel, Loch Awe. His short stories, Found Wanting, and The Englishman, were published in The New Yorker magazine. His essay, Poverty, Anxiety, and Gender in Scottish Working-Class Literature was published by Lit Hub. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he has an MA from the Royal College of Art in London and since 2000 he has lived and worked in New York City.
Matthew Thomas’ New York Times bestselling novel We Are Not Ourselves was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award, longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Folio Prize, named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple, and others, and named one of Janet Maslin’s ten favorite books of the year in the New York Times. It has been translated into a dozen languages. Matthew teaches at Xavier High School in Manhattan, as well as in NYU’s Low-Residency MFA Program in Paris.
Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer is the author of The Mask Collectors (2019), a literary thriller set in New Jersey and Sri Lanka. She is also the author of a collection of short stories, The Water Diviner and Other Stories (2018), which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. She is a former winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, and her short fiction has appeared in many literary journals. Before her career as an academic psychologist, she worked as a science writer for NASA and as a therapist in many settings, including a jail. Until recently, she had a day job as a psychology professor at New York University. She lives in New Jersey.
Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. Tiphanie is also the author of the novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and was listed by NPR as one of the Best Book of 2014. Land of Love and Drowning was also a finalist for the Orion Award in Environmental Literature and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. She is also the author of a collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5Under35. Her writing has also won the Bocas Award for Caribbean Fiction, the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for and her writing has been published in the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction and other places. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and received tenure from The New School before heading to the English Department at Wesleyan University as an associate professor, where she was also the Director of the Creative Writing Program. She currently teaches English and Creative Writing at Emory College of Arts and Sciences.