Vendela Vida is the award-winning author of six books, including Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty. Her new novel is We Run the Tides. She is a founding editor of The Believer and coeditor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers and Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence, a collection of interviews with musicians. She was a founding board member of 826 Valencia, the San Francisco writing center for youth, and lives in the Bay Area with her family.  

Autumn de Wilde made her narrative feature film debut with the Academy Award-nominated Emma. (2020) after a decades-long career of creating iconic images for artists through her portraits, album covers, music videos, commercials, books, and films. Through intimate collaboration with each of her subjects, de Wilde has helped define the visual identity of an ever-expanding pool of notable talent, which includes Beck, Elliott Smith, The White Stripes, Rodarte, Jenny Lewis, Death Cab For Cutie, Miranda July, Lena Dunham, Florence + The Machine, and so many more.

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman's, a literary annual of new writing, and executive editor of Literary Hub. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as Tales of Two Americas, an anthology about income inequality in America, and Tales of Two Planets, an anthology of new writing about inequality and the climate crisis globally. He is also the author of two collections of poems, Maps and The Park. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he teaches writing at New York University.

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, and essayist whose work explores the lives of the working class. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, and the National Medal of the Arts, awarded to her by President Obama in 2016. Her novel The House on Mango Street has sold over six million copies, has been translated into over twenty languages, and is required reading in elementary, high school, and universities across the nation. A new book, Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo, a story in English and in Spanish, will be published in 2021. Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico and earns her living by her pen.

Manuel Muñoz is the author of two collections of short stories, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. His first novel, What You See in the Dark, was published in 2011. Three of his short stories have received the O. Henry Prize, and one was chosen for inclusion in Best American Short Stories. The Consequences, Muñoz’sthird collection, will be published by Graywolf Press.

George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer, which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees, the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award, and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.

Laila Lalami is the author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Secret Son, and The Moor's Account, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper's Magazine, and The Guardian. In 2019, she was awarded the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize for her body of work. A professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, she lives in Los Angeles.

Gish Jen has published short work in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and dozens of other periodicals, anthologies, and textbooks. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories four times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, her work was featured in a PBS American Masters special on the American novel and is widely taught. Her newest novel, The Resisters, is her eighth book.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, TriQuarterly, Narrative, and the Chicago Tribune , and he is the author of the academic book Race and Resistance. His first novel, The Sympathizer , won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. His nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, will be published in April 2016. He teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the author of Sabrina & Corina, a 2019 Finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction and The Story Prize. Fajardo-Anstine is the 2019 recipient of the Denver Mayor’s Award for Global Impact in the Arts. Her fiction has appeared in The American Scholar, Bellevue Literary Review, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and Hedgebrook. She has an MFA from the University of Wyoming and is from Denver, Colorado.

Lisa Lucas is the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, she served as the Publisher of Guernica Magazine and as Director of Education at the Tribeca Film Institute.

Sloane Crosley is the author of the novel The Clasp and three essay collections: Look Alive Out There and the New York Times bestsellers I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number. A two-time finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, she lives in New York City. Cult Classic is her second novel.

Judy Greer has appeared in nearly two-hundred roles to date, including in the Blumhouse reboot of Halloween, starring alongside Jamie Lee Curtis; Driven opposite Jason Sudeikis; Richard Linklater’s Where’d You Go Bernadette opposite Cate Blanchett; the Academy Award-winning The Descendants directed by Alexander Payne; and many others. For the past ten years, Judy has voiced the role of Cheryl on the FXX Emmy-winning animated comedy Archer. Other television roles have included the FX comedy series Married, Netflix’s Arrested Development, and Hulu’s Casual. In 2018, Judy made her feature film directorial debut with A Happening Of Monumental Proportions, and she will be starring in the lead role in the forthcoming Hulu/20th Television series Reboot, with Keegan Michael Key, Johnny Knoxville and Paul Reiser.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Ryan Coogler  is a film director, producer, and screenwriter. His first feature film, Fruitvale Station (2013), won the top audience and grand jury awards in the U.S. dramatic competition at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. He has since co-written and directed the seventh film in the Rocky series, Creed (2015), and the Marvel film Black Panther (2018), the latter of which broke numerous box office records and became the highest-grossing film of all time by a black director.

Rachel Cusk is the author of Outline, Transit, the memoirs A Life’s Work, The Last Supper, and Aftermath, and several novels: Saving Agnes, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Temporary; The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Lucky Ones; In the Fold; Arlington Park; and The Bradshaw Variations. She was chosen as one of Granta’s 2003 Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in London.

Ann Friedman is a journalist who writes about gender, media, politics, and culture. She is the co-host of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend and is a regular contributor for New York magazine and The Los Angeles Times. Currently, Friedman is writing a book with podcast co-host Aminatou Sow that will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2020.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller.

Amanda Stern is the author of thirteen books: eleven for children written under pseudonyms, a novel, and most recently the memoir Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life. She is the creator and founder of the critically acclaimed music and literary event series Happy Ending in NYC which ran from 2003-2018. She lives in Brooklyn with her daughter Busy, who just happens to be a dog.

Tommy Orange is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 MacDowell Fellow and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California, and currently lives in Angels Camp, California.

Rigoberto González is the author of What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood (March 2018) and four books of poetry, most recently Unpeopled Eden, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His twelve books of prose include two bilingual children’s books, the three YA novels in the Mariposa Club series, and four books of nonfiction, including Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, which received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. The recipient of Guggenheim, NEA, and USA Rolón fellowships, he is contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine and writes a monthly column for NBC-Latino online. Currently, he is a professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey, and the inaugural Stan Rubin Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Rainier Writing Workshop. As of 2016, he serves as critic-at-large with the L.A. Times.