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.

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.

Julie Wernersbach is a writer and bookseller based in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her short fiction has been published in Bennington Review, Heavy Feather Review, and other journals. She is the author of the books Vegan Survival Guide to Austin and The Swimming Holes of Texas. She has worked in books for nearly twenty years and is the co-owner of HiveMind Books, a traveling independent bookstore.

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.

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.

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.