Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. He lives in Iowa City.

Priscilla Morris is a British author of Bosnian and Cornish parentage. She grew up in London, spending summers in Sarajevo, and studied at Cambridge University and the University of East Anglia. She teaches creative writing and divides her time between Ireland and Spain. Inspired by real-life accounts of the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–96), Black Butterflies is her debut novel. It was short-listed for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, the Wilbur Smith Prize, the Nota Bene Prize and the Women’s Prize 2023.

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University and professor at the Yale School of the Environment. He is the author of five books, most recently The Burning Earth, and recipient of multiple awards, including a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, a fellowship at the British Academy, and the 2024 Fukuoka Prize. He grew up in Singapore and lives in Connecticut.

Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. Her work has appeared in VQR, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and in the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program.

Margaret Lazarus Dean is the author of Leaving Orbit, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and a New York Times top ten book of 2015. She is also the co-writer, with Scott Kelly, of his New York Times bestselling memoir Endurance as well as the author of a novel, The Time It Takes to Fall. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Bread Loaf and has been awarded residencies with MacDowell and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, the New Yorker, and Popular Mechanics, among others; she has served as a judge for the American Academy in Berlin fellowship, the AWP Grace Paley Prize, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowships. 

Beth Nguyen is the author of the memoirs Owner of a Lonely Heart and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and the novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Book Award, and her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Essays. Nguyen is the Dorothy Draheim Professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Michael Parker is the author of eight novels – Hello Down There, Towns Without Rivers, Virginia Lovers, If You Want Me To Stay, The Watery Part of the World, All I Have In This World, Prairie Fever, and I Am the Light of This World–and three collections of stories, The Geographical Cure, Don’t Make Me Stop Now and Everything, Then and Since. His work has appeared in journals including the Georgia Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Oxford American, New England Review, Southwest Review, Trail Runner, Runner’s World and Men’s Journal. been anthologized in the Pushcart and New Stories from the South anthologies, and he is a three-time winner of the O. Henry Award for short fiction.

​Jung Yun is the author of O BEAUTIFUL, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year, and SHELTER, which was long listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Her short fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Tin House, The Massachusetts Review, The Indiana Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, among others. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of English at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and serves on the board of directors at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Her forthcoming novel is ALL THE WORLD CAN HOLD, which will be published in March 2026 by 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster.