Merritt Tierce is the author of the novel Love Me Back and writes for the Netflix show Orange is the New Black. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 author and Rona Jaffe Writers' Award winner, Tierce has been a fellow at the Yaddo, MacDowell, Willapa Bay, Omi, and Can Cab artist colonies.

Debra Monroe has written four books of fiction and two memoirs. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, Salon, Hobart, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Rumpus, and been cited in Best American Essays. She won the Flannery O'Connor Award and teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University.

Mary Anne Mohanraj is the author of Bodies in Motion (a finalist for the Asian American Book Awards), The Stars Change, and eleven other titles. She directs the Speculative Literature Foundation and DesiLit (an Asian American arts org), and is Clinical Assoc. Prof. of English at Univ. of Illinois.

Nalo Hopkinson, professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside, has received the John W Campbell Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Andre Norton Award. She was fiction coeditor of People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction. She is writing a graphic novel for the Sandman series.

Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, winner of the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Young Lions Fiction Award, and others. A Guggenheim Fellow and one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.