Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013. Her first novel, Telex from Cuba was also a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Los Angeles.

Danzy Senna is the author of five critically acclaimed books of fiction and nonfiction. Her first novel, Caucasia, won the Book of the Month Award for First Fiction and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Caucasia was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her other books include the novel, Symptomatic, the memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, and the short story collection, You Are Free, and the forthcoming novel, New People. Senna is a recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and was recently awarded the 2017 Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times and Vogue, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles.

Mohsin Hamid is the author of four novels, Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Exit West, and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations. His writing has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and translated into over thirty-five languages. Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, and is a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling novel The Small Backs of Children (winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award’s Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and the Reader’s Choice Award), the novel Dora: A Headcase, and three books of short fiction. Her widely acclaimed memoir, The Chronology of Water, was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader’s Choice. Lidia received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives and teaches in Oregon with her husband, Andy Mingo, and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.

Amber Tamblyn has been nominated for an Emmy, Golden Globe, and Independent Spirit Award for her work in television and film and is known for her work as Joan on the CBS television program Joan of Arcadia.  Her debut collection of poetry Free Stallion, won the Borders Book Choice Award for Breakout Writing in 2006. Her work has since been published in New York Quarterly, San Francisco Chronicle, Poets & Writers, Interview, and others. She is the Executive Producer of “The Drums Inside Your Chest”, an annual poetry concert that showcases outstanding contemporary poets, and co-founder of the nonprofit Write Now Poetry Society which works to build an audience for unique poetry events. Her second book of poetry and prose Bang Ditto, published in 2009, was an Independent Best Seller. She currently writes for The Poetry Foundation and is a poetry reviewer for Bust Magazine. She lives in New York City with her betrothed, comedian David Cross.

Ann Friedman is a freelance journalist who writes about gender, media, technology, and culture. Former executive editor of GOOD Magazine, she is a frequent contributor to The Los Angeles Times, The Gentlewoman, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, ELLE, The Guardian, and Los Angeles magazine. Along with Aminatou Sow, she co-hosts the hit podcast Call Your Girlfriend, featuring engaging dialogues on friendship, pop culture, and politics.

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her most recent book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her new novel, Manhattan Beach, was published in October 2017.

Marisa Silver is the author of Little Nothing, Mary Coin, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller’s Award, and an NPR and BBC Best Book of the Year, Alone with You, The God of War, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, No Direction Home, and Babe in Paradise, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her short fiction first appeared in The New Yorker when she was featured in the inaugural Debut Fiction issue. Her stories, criticism, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker , and other publications. In 2017, Silver was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Creative Arts.

Janet Fitch‘s a first novel, White Oleander, a #1 bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club selection, has been translated into 24 languages and was made into a feature film. Her most recent novel, Paint It Black, hit bestseller lists across the country and has also been made into a film. She lives in Los Angeles and is currently working on the second part of Marina’s story.

Boris Dralyuk is the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a Ph.D. from UCLA and has taught Russian literature there and at the University of St Andrews. His work has appeared in the TLS, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, The Guardian, and other publications. His recent translations include Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories. He is the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, and co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry.

Stephen Greenblatt is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Recipient of the Holberg Prize, he is the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World, and the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Jack Miles, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine, has written on religion, politics, and culture for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The WorldPost and many other publications. His book God: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996. The Norton Anthology of World Religions, of which he was the general editor, was published in 2014 in hardcover and in 2015 in a six-volume paperback edition. A MacArthur Fellow during the years 2003-2007, he is currently completing a new work to be entitled God in the Qur’an.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a world-renowned Kenyan writer, scholar, and social activist. Ngũgĩ’s diverse body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, articles, essays, and poems, which have been translated into over 60 languages. A Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, he has received numerous awards and 11 honorary doctorates. Ngũgĩ refers to himself as a “language warrior” because of his fight for the recognition of his native Gĩkũyũ and other marginalized languages.

Richard Ali A Mutu was born in Mbandaka, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in 1988. He won the Mark Twain Award in 2009 and published his first novel, Tabu’s Nightmares, written in French, in 2011. His novel Mr. Fix-It, the first novel written in Lingala to be translated into English, appeared from Phoneme Media in 2017. Ali was the only writer working in indigenous languages for the Africa 39 anthology, which showcased the continent’s most talented writers under forty, including Chimamanda Adichie and Dinaw Mengetsu. He works as a lawyer and writer in Kinshasa and hosts a weekly television program about Congolese literature.

Maile Meloy’s new novel is Do Not Become Alarmed. She is also the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter, the story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (one of The New York Times’ Best Books of the Year), and the Apothecary middle grade trilogy. She has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize, the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in Helena, Montana, she now lives in Los Angeles.

Marisa Silver is the author of Little Nothing, Mary Coin, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller’s Award, and an NPR and BBC Best Book of the Year, Alone with You, The God of War, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, No Direction Home, and Babe in Paradise, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her short fiction first appeared in The New Yorker when she was featured in the inaugural Debut Fiction issue.  Her stories, criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker and other publications. In 2017, Silver was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Creative Arts.