Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and 1983 and grew up in South Africa. A novelist (Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth) and essayist (Sidewalks), her work has been translated into many languages and has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Granta, and McSweeney’s. In 2014, Faces in the Crowd was the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the 2015 Los Angeles Times Prize for Best Fiction. She lives in New York City.

The New York Times described Guadalupe Nettel’s acclaimed English-language debut, Natural Histories, as “five flawless stories.” A Bogotá 39 author and Granta “Best Untranslated Writer,” Nettel has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize, the Antonin Artaud Prize, the Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, and most recently the 2014 Herralde Novel Prize. The Body Where I Was Born is her highly anticipated first novel to appear in English. She lives and works in Mexico City.

El New York Times describió el aclamado debut en lengua inglesa de Guadalupe Nettel, Natural Histories, como ‘cinco historias perfectas.’ Una autora de Bogotá 39 y ‘Mejor escritora sin traducir’ de Granta, Nettel ha recibido numerosos premios prestigiosos, incluyendo el Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize, el Antonin Artaud Prize, el Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, y más recientemente el 2014 Herralde Novel Prize. The Body Where I Was Born es su primera novela muy anticipada a aparecer en inglés. Ella vive y trabaja en México D.F.

Magdalena Edwards’ writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), The Millions, and El Mercurio. She is translating Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s novel The Chandelier from Portuguese for New Directions, a project that took her to Yaddo. A contributing editor at LARB and an Artist Resident in Motherhood, Magdalena is completing a literary memoir In the Middle of the Road: Traveling with Elizabeth Bishop, Clarice Lispector, and Raúl Zurita and translating, from Spanish, Chilean surrealist Juan Emar’s posthumous novel Love. She holds a BA in Social Studies from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA.

Paul Beatty is the author of three novels—Slumberland, Tuff, and The White Boy Shuffle—and two books of poetry: Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. He is the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. In 2016, he became the first American to win the Man Booker Prize for his latest novel, The Sellout. He lives in New York City.

Dana Johnson is the author of the short story collection In the Not Quite Dark. She is also the author of the novel Elsewhere, California and Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Callaloo, The Iowa Review and Huizache, among others. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, she is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Sara Benincasa is a comedian and the author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs (William Morrow 2016) as well as the books DC Trip (Adaptive 2015); Great (HarperTeen 2014); and Agorafabulous: Dispatches From My Bedroom (William Morrow 2012). She also wrote a very silly book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad (2016). She is currently adapting DC Trip as a film with producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa (Little Miss Sunshine); Agorafabulous! for TV with Diablo Cody; and Great for TV with Muse Entertainment.

MariNaomi is the award-winning author and illustrator of Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22 (Harper Perennial, 2011), Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories (2dcloud/Uncivilized Books, 2014), Turning Japanese (2dcloud, 2016), I Thought You Hated Me (Retrofit Comics, 2016), and Estrus Comics (self-published, 1998 to 2009). Her work has appeared in over sixty print publications and has been featured on numerous websites, such as The Rumpus, The Weeklings, LA Review of Books, Midnight Breakfast, Truth-out, XOJane, BuzzFeed, PEN America and more.

Shanthi Sekaran‘s new novel, Lucky Boy, was hailed by author Tom Barbash as “an ambitious, compassionate and intelligent book with new things to say on the timely subjects of motherhood, fertility, class, and identity.” She teaches creative writing at California College of the Arts and is a member of the Portuguese Artists’ Colony and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. She is the author of the novel The Prayer Room. Her work has appeared in Best New American Voices and Canteen and online at Zyzzyva and Mutha Magazine.

Author and literary organizer Michelle Tea is the author of ten books of memoir, fiction, and poetry, most recently the speculative memoir Black Wave. Her award-winning memoir Valencia was made into a feature-length film with the help of 21 directors, including Jill Soloway, Cheryl Dunye, and Silas Howard. She is the editor of Amethyst Editions, an imprint of Feminist Press. Her writing has appeared in Harpers, The Believer, n+1, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, xoJane.com and many other print and web publications. She lives in Los Angeles.

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the novels The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Gentlemen of the Road, and Telegraph Avenue; the short story collections A Model World and Werewolves in Their Youth; and the essay collections Maps and Legends and Manhood for Amateurs.

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of eight previous books, including The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the former book critic and book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

T.C. Boyle has published fifteen novels and ten volumes of short stories, including the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning World’s End; The Tortilla Curtain, which was awarded France’s prestigious Prix Médicis étranger; and most recently, the New York Times bestseller The Harder They Come. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Michael Silverblatt is the host of KCRW’s half-hour radio show Bookworm, where he introduces listeners to new and emerging authors along with writers of renown. He created Bookworm for KCRW in 1989. The complete Bookworm archive can be heard at kcrw.com/bookworm.

Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish emigrant twice over: she spent eight years in Cambridge doing a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century literature before moving to London, Ontario. She migrates between genres, writing for screen, stage, and radio, as well as historical and contemporary novels and short stories. Her other books include Frog Music, Slammerkin, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, and Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature.

Ramona Ausubel burst onto the literary scene in 2012 with her debut novel No One is Here Except All of Us, earning the love of critics with her inimitable voice and imaginative style, and winning the PEN Center USA Fiction Award and the VCU Cabell First Novel Award, as well as being named a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Next came A Guide to Being Born, an enthralling story collection that Aimee Bender declared “fresh, delicate, beautiful, expressive, otherworldly.” Now comes a gorgeous, spellbinding new novel from this rising luminary: Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty.

Colson Whitehead is the New York Times bestselling author of The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and one collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.

Joy Press is the former books and culture editor of the Los Angeles Times and the Village Voice. She is currently writing a book about the history of women and television.

Phil LaMarr was one of the original cast members of Mad TV and an alumnus of Yale University and The Groundlings Theater. He is known for his work in Pulp Fiction and for his extensive voice-over work, including animated shows Futurama, Samurai Jack, Justice League, Family Guy and Bojack Horseman, and video games like Injustice, Shadow of Mordor and Mortal Kombat X. He can currently be seen in this season of HBO’s Veep and in The Black Version improv comedy show monthly at Largo At The Coronet.

Eileen Myles has published more than a dozen books of poetry, art journalism, and fiction. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital Grant, and a 2014 Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant. She lives in New York.

Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and nonfiction author of several books, including The Argonauts, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a New York Times Best Seller; The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial; The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning; Bluets; and Jane: A Murder. She teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles, California.

Mike Padilla is the author of the short story collection Hard Language and the novel The Girls from the Revolutionary Cantina.

Natalie Lima was born in Miami. A first-generation college student, she will begin her MFA in creative writing at the University of Alabama as a McNair Graduate Fellow in the fall. Her writing has been awarded a Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA) Fellowship, and a UCLA Extension Kirkwood Literary Prize Nomination. Natalie’s fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Word Riot and Reservoir Lit. She is currently an instructor at Writopia Lab Los Angeles and is working on a short story collection titled Smash.

Claire Bidwell Smith is the author of two books of nonfiction: The Rules of Inheritance and After This: When Life is Over Where Do We Go?

Christa Parravani (representing Claire Bidwell Smith) is the author of Her: A Memoir.

Marnie Goodfriend grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, and earned a bachelor of fine arts in photography from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she’s a sexual assault activist, online content writer, media consultant, and visual artist. Her writing has been published in Jezebel, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan UK. Marnie is currently working on two memoirs titled Birth Marks and Chewing Gravel.

Carmiel Banasky is the author of the novel The Suicide of Claire Bishop.

Chelsea Sutton is a fiction writer and playwright raised in Southern California. She earned her bachelor’s degree in literature from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Chelsea’s fiction has been published in Spectrum, Catalyst, Bourbon Penn, and other online publications. She was the winner of NYC Midnight’s Flash Fiction Contest in 2011, and her plays have been produced and developed across Los Angeles. Chelsea is working on a collection of short stories titled Curious Monsters.

Alicia Partnoy is the author of the novel The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival, and the poetry collections Flowering Fires/Fuegos florales, Little Low Flying/Volando bajito, and Revenge of the Apple/Venganza de la manzana.

Wendy Labinger was raised in Southern California. She received a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Iowa, and her master’s in deaf education from Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. She has taught English as a second language for 20 years. Wendy’s poems have been published in Potpourri and Sheila-Na-Gig. She lives in Los Angeles and is working on a collection of poems titled scatters me into the night.

Patrick O’Neil is the author of the memoir Gun, Needle, Spoon.

Jian Huang’s parents brought her to the United States from Shanghai, China, when she was six years old. She grew up in South Los Angeles and earned her bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of Southern California. She has worked for a number of social service organizations, including the LA Conservation Corps, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and Little Tokyo Service Center. Jian is working on her first memoir titled Business In The Front about the journey to the American Dream.

Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Berkeley, California.

Ayana A. H. Jamieson is a writer, editor, and organizer. She is a lecturer for the State University of New York, Empire State College’s Center for Distance Learning. She is the founder of the Los Angeles-based Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, a community organization that highlights the ongoing creative, scholarly, community, and social justice work inspired by speculative fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Jamieson was one of the organizers of the "Ferguson is the Future—Incubating Alternative Worlds Through Arts, Activism, and Scholarship" symposium at Princeton University. Her current book project is Octavia Butler’s biography based on Butler’s own published and unpublished writing and her Southern California origins.