Emily Schultz is the cofounder of the influential Joyland magazine. Her newest novel, Little Threats, was published by GP Putnam's Sons and was named an Apple Books Best of November 2020 pick. Her novel, The Blondes, released in the U.S. with St. Martin’s Press and Picador, and in Canada with Doubleday was named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR, BookPage, and Kirkus Reviews. Schultz's writing has appeared in Elle, Slate, Evergreen Review, Vice, Hazlitt, and Prairie Schooner. She is currently a producer at indie media company Heroic Collective and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.

Claire Schultz is a writer, editor, and academic.

Her short fiction has been featured in literary journals including Coffin Bell, Crow & Cross Keys, and more, and has won the Hotel Commonwealth Emerging Writers Prize. She works primarily in the overlap of fantasy, horror, and literary fiction.

Claire’s debut adult novel, Even Your Bones Would Do, will be published by Berkley Books in the US & Daphne Press in the UK in early 2027. As Claire Rose, she also writes Young Adult fiction.

After some time living in London and working in publishing, she recently relocated to a remote farm in Michigan, where she lives with a haunted cat and several overzealous dogs.

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Edward Schwarzschild is the author of the novel Responsible Men and the story collection The Family Diamond. His stories and essays have appeared in The Guardian, Hazlitt, Tin House, The Yale Journal of Criticism, The Virginia Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, The Believer and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, NYFA Fellow in Fiction, and Fulbright Scholar, he is now Director of Creative Writing at the University at Albany, SUNY, and a fellow at the New York State Writers Institute.

Pinar Selek is a sociologist, feminist and anti-militarist activist. With a particular interest in oppressed and marginalised groups, she fell victim to the repression suffered by intellectuals in Turkey, and was imprisoned in 1998. Since then, she has been acquitted four times, but the Turkish government insists on appealing, so the trial has been going on for 25 years. She lives in France, where she has published several books, including fiction, short stories, essays and articles. Azucena ou Les fourmis zinzines, her latest novel (Des femmes, 2022), has been published in Turkey and Italy. Éditions des Femmes has also published her latest essay, Le Chaudron militaire turc, un exemple de production de la violence masculine in 2023.

Alan Shapiro is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Reel to Reel.  He is also the author of the memoirs The Last Happy Occasion and Vigil, and the novel Broadway Baby. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Award, and he was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Elizabeth L. Silver is the acclaimed author of The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty (Penguin Press, 2017) and the novel The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (Crown, 2013). Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, New York Magazine, McSweeney’s, Lenny Letter, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review, The Millions, The Dallas Morning News, among other publications. Her next novel, Memoirs of a Justice, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.

Britt Silver is an ex-journalist who writes about characters with big opinions and bigger problems. When she's not working, she enjoys hiking, gardening, and trying to convince her friends to move into the same house, Golden Girls-style.

Kevin Sites is an award-winning journalist, author and Associate Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. He has worked as a reporter for more than thirty years, half of that covering war and disaster for ABC, NBC, CNN, Yahoo and Vice News. He’s the author of three books on war: In the Hot Zone, The Things They Cannot Say and Swimming with Warlords. The Ocean Above Me is his first novel.

Beck Dorey-Stein spent five years as a White House Stenographer. Prior to transcribing President Obama and Trump, she taught high school English. Beck graduated from Wesleyan University, where she worked in undergraduate admissions and served as captain of the women's lacrosse team.

Amanda Sthers is a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker. She has written ten novels which have been translated in more than fourteen countries, and was given the title of "Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres" by the French government. Her latest novel, Holy Lands, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.

Cheryl Strayed is the internationally acclaimed author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail; Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar; and Brave Enough. The New York Times Book Review hailed Wild as “a literary and human triumph." It has sold over four million copies and has been translated into more than forty languages. Wild became a major motion picture starring Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. 

Strayed’s New York Times bestseller Tiny Beautiful Things has been embraced by readers worldwide. The Hulu series based on the book premiered in 2023, and an Off-Broadway play has been staged nationwide. Her book Brave Enough collects more than one hundred of her inspiring quotations. Strayed is also the author of the debut novel Torch and co-host of two hit podcasts, Sugar Calling and Dear Sugars.

Cheryl Strayed’s stories and essays have been published in The Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Salon, and elsewhere and have been widely anthologized. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels HOLD STILL, WANT, and most recently, FLIGHT. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, Bomb, Guernica, Literary Hub, Catapult, Elle.com, The Cut, New York Magazine, LARB, The Millions, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Princeton and her next novel THE FLOAT TEST is forthcoming from Mariner Books

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of the debut novel Big Girl, a New York Times  Editors’ Choice  and named one of Time Magazine's Best Books of the Month. Big Girl was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as  “achingly beautiful," and in  a starred review, Publishers Weekly raved “Sullivan charms in her stunning debut novel about a Black girl’s coming-of-age... This is a treasure.” Big Girl has won the highest praise from bestselling authors, including Kiese Laymon, who hails it as “a new American classic.” For Janet Mock, it is “a tender and sumptuous offering of beauty.”  And from Jacqueline Woodson, “Sullivan has given us a gift as big, beautiful and complicated as living itself.”

Sullivan’s award-winning short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, won the Lambda Literary Judith A. Markowitz Award for emerging LGBTQ writers. Among Sullivan’s many other honors and awards are the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College. Sullivan is a Professor of English at Georgetown University.

Shubhangi Swarup is a writer and educator. Latitudes of Longing, her debut novel, was a bestseller soon after its release in India and has been published in seventeen languages worldwide. It won the Tata Literature Live! Award for debut fiction, was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature, and longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2020 and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. She was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship for creative writing at the University of East Anglia, and has also won awards for gender sensitivity in feature writing. She lives in Mumbai.

Karin Tanabe is the author of the historical fiction novels The Diplomat's Daughter and The Gilded Years (soon to be a major motion picture), as well as The List and The Price of Inheritance, all published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Her latest novel, A Hundred Suns, is out now from St. Martin's Press.A former Politico reporter, her work has appeared in dozens of publications including The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer and in the anthology Crush: Writers Reflect on Love, Longing and the Lasting Power of Their First Celebrity Crush.

Sophie Tavert-Macian has been bringing her eclectic universe to cinema for twenty years, in a dozen films that play with formats (haiku, short and long), techniques (live action or animation), and genres. Her animated short 'Traces' was nominated for the 2021 Césars and Oscars. The adaptation of this film into an illustrated children's book was published by Delachaux et Niestlé in 2022. Her first novel, the sports-oriented and contemporary Gamba, was published in 2024 by Belfond.

Sarah Stewart Taylor is a fiction writer and journalist who lives with her family on a farm in Vermont; her published mysteries include the Maggie d’Arcy series, starting with The Mountains Wild, the Sweeney St. George mystery series (the first book in the series, O’ Artful Death, was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel), The Expeditioners series of adventure novels for middle grade readers, and Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, a graphic novel for younger readers, which was nominated for an Eisner Award.

Souvankham Thammavongsa is a prize-winning poet and fiction writer, and author of three books of poetry, Light (2013) which received the Trillium Book Award, Found (2007), and Small Arguments (2003) which won the re-Lit Prize. Her stories have been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper’s, Granta, Ploughshares, NOON, and Best American Non-Required Reading. Her newest collection of poems, Cluster, was published by McClelland & Stewart in Canada in 2019 and her collection of stories, How to Pronounce Knife, is out now from McClelland & Stewart and Little, Brown.

Michelle Theall is the editor of Alaska magazine and the author of the acclaimed memoir Teaching the Cat to Sit (Gallery, 2014). Her writing and photography have been featured in National Geographic, Sierra Magazine, Backpacker, UtneReader, Outdoor Photographer, and elsewhere. She lives in Boulder, CO.

Ruby Todd is the author of the debut novel, Bright Objects. Named a Best Book of 2024 by Publishers Weekly, Bright Objects  is set in a small town in Australia, where the appearance of a comet that has not been visible for centuries sets off a series of dramatic events for a young widow, an American astronomer, and a Doomsday prophet.  The reviewer in the daily New York Times called it " luminous, unusual, unexpected."  The  New York Times Book Review named it an Editors' Choice: "Ruby Todd's gorgeously written Bright Objects...cranks into an unexpected thrillerish gear toward the end...the prose burns bright."

Winner of the Ploughshares magazine Emerging Writer’s Contest, the AAWP Chapter One Prize, and the inaugural Furphy Literary Award, Australia’s largest prize for a short story, she is also a creative researcher, poet, and essayist. Todd holds a PhD in poetics from Deakin University, Australia, and a B.A in Creative Writing and Visual Media from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Janey Tracey is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, where she received a University Writing fellowship and a scholarship to the New York State Summer Writers Program. Her work has appeared in Fiction, CRAFT, and Entertainment Weekly. Her debut novel True Believer is forthcoming from Mariner Books. She lives in Queens, New York.

Monique Truong is the award-winning author of the bestselling novels The Book of Salt, Bitter in the Mouth, and The Sweetest Fruits. She is also an essayist, food writer, lyricist/librettist, and intellectual property attorney.

Monique's first novel, The Book of Salt, was a national bestseller and the recipient of many awards, including the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship, and an Asian American Literary Award. The Book of Salt was a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, a Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction Books, a Village Voice 25 Favorite Books, and a Miami Herald’s Top 10 Books, among other citations. Truong’s second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and was named in 2010 as a 25 Best Fiction Books  by Barnes & Noble, a 10 Best Fiction Books by Hudson Booksellers, and the adult fiction Honor Book by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association. Among other honors, her third novel, The Sweetest Fruits, received the 2020 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Truong received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in 2021. She and fashion designer Thai Nguyen are the authors of the new children's picture book, Mai's Áo Dài.

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Dana Vachon is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of the novel Mergers & Acquisitions (Riverhead, 2007) and the co-author, with Jim Carrey, of the New York Times bestseller Memoirs & Misinformation (Knopf, 2020). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and Slate.

Donna VanLiere is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 13 books, including The Christmas Shoes, The Christmas Hope, and The Good Dream (St. Martin’s Press). Four of her books have been adapted into movies for CBS, Lifetime, and The Hallmark Channel. She has won a Retailer’s Choice Award for Fiction, a Dove Award, a Silver Angel Award, and two Audie Awards for best inspirational fiction and has been nominated for a Gold Medallion Book of the Year. She also serves on the board of directors for the National House of Hope.

P. J. Vernon was born in South Carolina and has been called “a name to watch in the thriller genre” (Booklist). Library Journal and Book Riot compare his critically-acclaimed Gothic debut When You Find Me to Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects. His most recent thriller, Bath Haus, was published in June 2021 (Doubleday). Vernon is represented by Aevitas Creative Management and Sugar 23 (TV/film). He lives in Canada with his partner and two wily dogs.

Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert Bingham prize for fiction. Her work has been published in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Tin House, Zyzzyva and in Best American Essays. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother, and her second novel The Offshore Grounds is out now from Knopf.

Zachary Tyler Vickers is the author of the award-winning story collection Congratulations on Your Martyrdom! He is the recipient of the Richard Yates Prize, judged by novelist Adam Haslett, and the Clark Fisher Ansley Prize for excellence in fiction, and he was a finalist for the Graywolf Press Fiction Prize and the Italo Calvino Prize. His work has appeared in the Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, the KGB Lit Bar Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Hope Wabuke is a poet, academic, and essayist. The author of the poetry collections The Leaving, Movement No.1: Trains, and Her, her work has been published in various journals and magazines, including NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Magazine, Ms. Magazine online, The Daily Beast, The Hairpin, and others. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her forthcoming memoir Please Don't Kill My Black Son Please is forthcoming from Vintage.

Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of the debut poetry collection Philomath, winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series and a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book. Her new collection, Lazarus Species, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2025.  Her writing has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. 

Devon earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  She was the recipient of the 2018 New England Review’s Emerging Writer Award; the 2021 Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Award; scholarships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and Bucknell University; and she was the 2022-2023 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholar.  She is currently a Visiting Faculty member in Literature at Bennington College.  

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Amy Watson is a native of Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She is a married mother of two boys and three cats, as well as an avid baker and coffee drinker.

Based in London, Holly Watt is an investigative journalist for the Guardian. She has also written for the Sunday Times and the Telegraph. To the Lions is her first novel. Aevitas represents the North American rights on behalf of her primary agents, David Higham & Associates.

Tessa Wegert is the author of the Shana Merchant mysteries, including Death in the Family, The Dead Season, Dead Wind, and The Kind to Kill (2022). A former freelance journalist, Tessa has contributed to such publications as Forbes, The Huffington Post, Adweek, The Economist, and The Globe and Mail. Tessa grew up in Quebec and now lives with her husband and children in Connecticut, where she studies martial arts and is currently at work on her next novel.

Jules Wernersbach is a writer and bookseller in Brooklyn. Their debut novel, Work To Do, is forthcoming from University of Iowa Press in 2026. Their short fiction has been published in Bennington Review, Heavy Feather Review, and other journals. They are the author of Vegan Survival Guide to Austin and The Swimming Holes of Texas. They are the co-owner of Hive Mind Books, an independent queer bookstore and coffee shop in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Aliya Whiteley writes across many different genres and lengths. Her first published full-length novels, Three Things About Me and Light Reading, were comic crime adventures. Her 2014 SF-horror novella The Beauty was shortlisted for the James Tiptree and Shirley Jackson awards. The following historical-SF novella, The Arrival of Missives, was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, and her noir novel The Loosening Skin was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award.She has written over one hundred published short stories that have appeared in Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Static, Strange Horizons, The Dark, McSweeney’s, Internet Tendency and The Guardian, as well as in anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ 2084 and Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction.She also writes a regular non-fiction column for Interzone.

Lis Wiehl is a former legal analyst for Fox News. She is also the former co-host of WOR radio's “WOR Tonight with Joe Concha and Lis Wiehl,” has served as legal analyst and reporter for NBC News and NPR’s All Things Considered and as a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office, and was a tenured professor of law at the University of Washington. Today, she appears frequently on CNN as a legal analyst.Lis Wiehl is considered one of the nation’s most prominent trial lawyers and highly regarded commentators. She earned her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and her Master of Arts in Literature from the University of Queensland.Wiehl is the author of 19 books including Hunting The Unabomber, Hunting Charles Manson, The 51% Minority, which won the 2008 award for Books for a Better Life in the motivational category, and Winning Every Time.

Mary Ann Winkowski, paranormal investigator and consultant to CBS’s Ghost Whisperer, is author of When Ghosts Speak (Grand Central) and co-author, with Maureen Foley, of The Book of Illumination and The Ice Cradle (Three Rivers/Crown), the first two titles in the Ghost Files mystery series.

Sujin Witherspoon is a Korean-American author, artist, and lover of words she can’t pronounce. Shegravitates toward stories that will either plague her nightmares or make her stomach hurt from laughter—noin between. Having earned her degree in English from the University of Washington, she spends her timewriting, thinking about writing, or thinking about how she should be writing.

Jim Worrad spent ten years as a terrible rock and roller before settling into life in the midlands. He's always wanted to write fantasy books. He lives in Leicester with his cat and boyfriend.

Jenny Xie is a writer and editor based in Oakland, California. Originally from Shanghai, she graduated from UC Berkeley and earned her MFA at Johns Hopkins University. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Ninth Letter, Joyland, Adroit Journal, Narrative, The Offing, and the Best of the Net Anthology, among other publications, and she is the recipient of a Bread Loaf scholarship and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Kundiman, Aspen Words, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her debut novel Holding Pattern is forthcoming from Riverhead in 2023.

Susie Yang is the New York Times bestselling Author of the novel WHITE IVY, which was a Jenna Bush Hager/Today Show Book Club Pick. Susie was born in China and came to the United States as a child. After receiving her doctorate of pharmacy from Rutgers, she launched a tech startup in San Francisco that has taught 20,000 people how to code. She has studied creative writing at Tin House and Sackett Street. She has lived across the United States, Europe, and Asia, and currently resides in Seattle.

Hester Young has an MFA from the University of Hawaii and is the author of The Gates of Evangeline, The Shimmering Road, and The Burning Island (Putnam).

Heather is the author of two novels. Her debut, The Lost Girls, won the Strand Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for an Edgar Award. The Distant Dead was published on June 9, 2020, and was named one of the Best Books of Summer by PeopleMagazine, Parade, and CrimeReads. A former antitrust and intellectual property litigator, she traded the legal world for the literary one and earned her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2011. She lives in Mill Valley, California.

Emma Young is an award-winning science and health journalist and author. She has worked on titles including the Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald and the New Scientist, for which she worked as a senior online reporter in London and Australasian Editor in Sydney. Now employed by the British Psychological Society as a Staff Writer, she is also a freelance journalist and author. A regular contributor to Mosaic and the New Scientist, her work is carried widely by other media outlets, including BBC and the Atlantic.

As E.L. Young, she is also the author of a series of science-based thrillers for children. Her awards include Feature of the Year, awarded by UK Medical Journalist’s Association, 2017, Australian Health Journalist of the Year (2010), Writer of the Year at the Australian magazine industry Bell Awards, and a European Online Journalism award for best news story.

Jung Yun’s work has appeared in Tin House (the “Emerging Voices” issue); The Best of Tin House: Stories; and The Massachusetts Review. She has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Yun received an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize and was awarded an Artist’s Fellowship in fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her debut novel, Shelter, was published in 2016 by Picador.

Yara Zgheib is the author of the critically acclaimed novel No Land to Light On (Atria, 2022), which has been longlisted for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize and selected as an Indie Book Read. Lauded as a “masterful story of tragedy and redemption” written in “soul-searing prose,” the novel was chosen by The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, and Newsweek as one of the top books of 2022. From Alki Joshi, bestselling author of The Henna Artist, “Zgheib writes so lyrically about rootlessness, separation and a fierce longing for home.” 

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Yara’s debut novel, The Girls at 17 Swann Street (St. Martin’s Press, 2019), was a People Pick for Best New Books, which hailed it as “an absorbing page-turner,” as well as a Barnes and Noble pick for Best Books of 2019, and a BookMovement Group Read. Her new novel, Why Paris, and her essay collection An Absolute Necessity are forthcoming from Harper Via.  

Zgheib is a Fulbright scholar and holds a PhD in International Affairs in Diplomacy. She publishes a weekly essay on “The non-Utilitarian,” and her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, Glimmer Train, Lithub, Holiday, The European, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been adapted for two musical albums, Dust and Ions (2020) and City Rhapsodies (2022)

Writer and social commentator, Zhang lives in Beijing and focuses on human stories set in China. She is a regular speaker on BBC Radio and NPR, and is the author of the memoir SOCIALISM IS GREAT!

Angel Di Zhang was born in China and raised in China, England, Canada, and the USA. She was educated in the joint BA-MIA program at Columbia University and was a Pitch Wars class of 2019 mentee. She is an internationally exhibited fine-art photographer. Her first novel is The Light of Eternal Spring, excerpts of which have been awarded ten writing grants, including one from the Canada Council for the Arts. Angel lives in a secret garden on a cloud that floats above Toronto.