Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and is author of the essay collection The Reckonings, the widely-acclaimed memoir The Other Side, and Trespasses: A Memoir. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University.

V.V. Ganeshananthan's debut novel, Love Marriage, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World's Best of 2008. Her work has appeared in Granta and The New York Times, among others. She teaches at the University of Minnesota, and she was a 2014 NEA and Radcliffe Fellow.

Kiese Laymon is a black southern writer, born and raised in Jackson. He is a Professor English and Creative Writing at University of Mississippi and is the author of Long Division and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. His memoir Heavy is forthcoming from Scribner in October 2018.

Wendy S. Walters is the author of Multiply/Divide: Essays on the American Real and Surreal and two books of poetry: Troy, Michigan and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me. She is Associate Dean of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, The New School.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder & A Memoir, which received a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and the Chautauqua Prize, and was named one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, and Audible.com. She is an assistant professor at Bowdoin.