Jesmyn Ward is a two-time National Book Award winner, a MacArthur Genius, and a recipient of the Strauss Living Award. She is the author of Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, Men We Reaped, and Sing, Unburied, Sing, and editor of The Fire This Time. She teaches creative writing at Tulane University.

Whiting Award-winner Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Jackson’s honors include fellowships from Lannan Foundation, Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, NYFA, and The Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and Tin House. His newest is the nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family. He is a Clinical Associate Professor of writing in Liberal Studies at New York University.