Elisabeth Schmitz is vice president and editorial director of Grove/Atlantic Inc. where she has worked for eighteen years as an editor of both fiction and narrative nonfiction.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. He is also the author of the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies and Race and Resistance. Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Sabina Murray is the author of the novels Forgery, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, and Slow Burn, and two short story collections, the Pen/Faulkner Award–winning The Caprices and Tales of the New World. She has received many awards, including Guggenheim and NEA fellowships. She teaches in the MFA program at UMass Amherst.

Patricia Engel is the author of The Veins of the Ocean, It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, and Vida, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.