Rebecca Rolland is the author of The Art of Talking with Children (HarperCollins, 2022), as well as three books of poems and many short stories. She won the Dana Award for Short Fiction and has published in Slice, Michigan Quarterly Review, and North American Review. She is a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is on the faculty at the Harvard Medical School. She also serves as an oral and written language specialist in the Neurology Department of Boston Children's Hospital and as an advisor in curriculum development for the World Bank. As a nationally-certified speech-language pathologist, she has worked clinically with populations ranging from early childhood through high school and has provided teacher professional development. She lives in Boston with her husband and two conversation-loving kids.

Read more on her website.

William Martin is the New York Times bestselling author of twelve novels, a PBS documentary, book reviews, magazine articles, and a cult-classic horror movie, too. His first novel, Back Bay, established him as "a master storyteller." He has been following the lives of the great and anonymous in American history ever since, taking readers from the Mayflower in Cape Cod to Ford's Theater in The Lincoln Letter to the South Tower on 9/11 in City of Dreams. His latest, Bound for Gold, sweeps readers back to California in the legendary year of 1849 and "solidifies his claim as king of the historical thriller" (Providence Journal). He will publish December '41, a World War II thriller, in June. He was the 2005 recipient of the New England Book Award, given to an author "whose body of work stands as a significant contribution to the culture of the region." In 2015, the USS Constitution Museum gave him the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, for "patriotic pride, artful scholarship, and an eclectic interest in the sea and things maritime." And in 2018, the Mystery Writers of America (New England Chapter) gave him the Robert B. Parker Award. He serves on the boards of many of Boston's historical and cultural organizations, has taught writing at the Harvard Extension School and the famed Maui Writes Conference, lives near Boston with his wife, and has three grown children.

Read more on his website.

SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels, two hybrid chapbooks, and two forthcoming graphic novels. Her first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award and her second novel, Blue-Skinned Gods, was published in November 2021. A 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University. Sindu teaches at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Sindu’s newest work, a hybrid chapbook titled Dominant Genes, was published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2022. More at her website or @sjsindu on Twitter/Instagram.

Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of the memoir The Natural Mother of the Child (Counterpoint) and the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet). His essays have been featured in Granta, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Krys lives in Philadelphia with his partner and their three young children and works as an educator in a pediatric hospital.

Read more on his website.

Sanjena Sathian is the author of Gold Diggers, which was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by the Washington Post, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, chosen as an Amazon Best of 2021 pick, a Good Morning America Buzz pick, and more. She is working on the television adaptation with Mindy Kaling’s production company, Kaling International. Her award-winning short fiction also appears in The Atlantic, Conjunctions, Boulevard, and more, and she’s written nonfiction for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, TIME, and more. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, from which she received a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship, and where she was supported by the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.

Read more about Sanjena on her website.

Anjali Enjeti is a former attorney, organizer, and journalist based near Atlanta. She is the author of Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, which the Washington Post called "a nuanced and much-needed journey into exploring what it means to be American," and The Parted Earth, which was recently selected as a 2022 Book All Georgians Should Read. Her other writing has appeared in Oxford American, Boston Globe, Poets & Writers, Harper’s Bazaar, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and elsewhere.

Anjali has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors, multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and two notable mentions in The Best American Essays series. A former board member of the National Books Critics Circle, she teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia.

Read more about Anjali on her website.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, which was published by One World Random House in August 2021. It is a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. It was longlisted for the 2021 DUBLIN Literary Award, the Center for Fiction Prize and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. The novel was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Award for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Kenyon Review, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

Read more about Maurice on his website.

Ann Hood is the author of the bestselling novels The Knitting Circle, The Obituary Writer, and The Book That Matters Most; and the bestselling memoirs Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love and Food,  and Comfort: A Journey Through Grief which was a NYT Editors Choice and named one of the top 10 non fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. She has written The Treasure Chest series for middle readers and three YA novels, including Jude Banks, Super Hero. Hood has won two Pushcart Prizes, two Best American Food Writing Awards, and a Best American Travel Writing Award. Her essays have been among the 100 Notable Essays of the Year more than a dozen times and her books have been translated into twenty-two languages. She is the founding director of the low residency Newport MFA. Her most recent book is the memoir FLY GIRL, about her years as a TWA flight attendant.

Read more about Ann on her website.