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.

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.

Poet and essayist Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, he has received many honors including fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Vuong’s writings have been featured in The Atlantic, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, Ocean has been featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, VICE, and The New Yorker. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in New York City.

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 newest nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War was be published in April 2016. He teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Maxine Hong Kingston is Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. For her memoirs and fiction, The Fifth Book of Peace, The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, and Hawai’i One Summer, she has earned numerous awards, among them the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the title of “Living Treasure of Hawai’i.” In July 2014, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama.

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 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.