Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children, which received the the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die, and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work appears in POETRY Magazine, Callaloo, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me.

Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine. In addition to the upcoming We Are Fugitives and 2019’s Nothing to See Here, Kevin is also the author of the novels The Family Fang—a NYT bestseller adapted into a film—and the critically acclaimed Perfect Little World. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in two volumes of the Best American Short Stories anthology as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil (neh-ZOO / KOO-mah / tah-TILL) is the author of the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Valcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing has appeared in the Best American Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House. In 2021, she became the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

Stacey Swann’s debut novel Olympus, Texas was a Good Morning America Book Club selection, an Indie Next Pick, and was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Swann holds an M.F.A. from Texas State University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared in LitHub, Electric Literature, Texas Highways, Epoch, and other journals. She splits her time between Austin and Lampasas, Texas.

Jane Wong is the author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything and Overpour. Her debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, is forthcoming in 2023. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University. Her poems have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the U.S. Fulbright Program. The recipient of the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award, her first solo art show “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly” was exhibited at the Frye Art Museum in 2019. Her artwork will also be a part of “Nourish,” an exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery in 2022.

Joy Williams is the author of five novels. Her first, State of Grace, was nominated for a National Book Award. Her book The Quick and the Dead was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her essay collection, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is the author of the short story collections Taking Care, Escapes, and Honored Guest. A 30th anniversary reprint of The Changeling was issued in 2008 with an introduction by the American novelist Rick Moody. The book was also republished in 2018 to celebrate 40 years from its original publication. Her most recent novel, Harrow, was published in September 2021.

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME Magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. He is the author of the collections Valleyesque and Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas, as well as a novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Tor.com. His fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Frieze, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.