Patricia Smith's books include Incendiary Art (2018 Kingsley Tufts winner, 2018 Pulitzer finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner), Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize winner), and Blood Dazzler (2008 National Book Award finalist). A 2014 Guggenheim fellow, two-time Pushcart Prize winner, Smith is a professor at CUNY and in Sierra Nevada College's MFA program.

Imogen Binnie is the Lambda Literary Award winning author of the 2013 novel Nevada, numerous short stories, zines, and a column for Maximum Rocknroll magazine. She was a writer for the CBS television show Doubt. She's currently working on more short stories, another novel, and a television pilot.

Chelsey Johnson received an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford. She is the author of the novel Stray City and her stories have appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, NPR's Selected Shorts, and elsewhere. She teaches at Northern Arizona University.

Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes The Sun, a NPR and New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Dennis-Benn is a Lambda Literary Award winner, and named a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award and NYPL Young Lions Award.

SJ Sindu is the author of the novel Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won a Publishing Triangle Award and was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University, and teaches at Ringling College of Art and Design.