Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and an NAACP Image Award, among others. She has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Republic.

Andre Dubus III is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller House of Sand and Fog. This novel was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and it was an Oprah Book Club Selection. His memoir, Townie, and novel, Dirty Love, were both New York Times bestsellers and New York Times Editors’ Choices. Dirty Love was also listed as Notable Fiction from The Washington Post and a Kirkus Starred Best Book. Dubus has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages.

Aminatta Forna is the author of three novels, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love, and Ancestor Stones, and the critically acclaimed memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water. Her fiction has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award and the PEN Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and has been shortlisted for the Neustadt Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the IMPAC Award, the Warwick Prize, and nominated for the European Prize for Fiction. Her memoir was serialized on BBC Radio and in the Sunday Times newspaper. Forna is currently a Lannan Visiting Chair at Georgetown University.