Amy Wang (pronounced “Waung”) has been a staff editor at The Oregonian since 1997. Her current duties include covering the Oregon literary scene and editing The Oregonian’s line of coffee table books. She is a graduate of Cornell University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she won the Christopher Light Award for Editing. She is a longtime member of the Asian American Journalists Association and has received its Chapter Member of the Year and national excellence in print awards. Her journalism, essays and creative nonfiction have been published in newspapers, magazines, and literary readers, anthologies and journals.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times–bestselling memoir Wild, which became an Oscar-nominated film, and Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of her popular advice columns. In addition to her bestselling books, Cheryl hosted a New York Times podcast, “Dear Sugars,” with Steve Almond, in which she dispensed “radically empathetic” advice. Strayed’s story of survival motivates and inspires audiences of all kinds, but she especially loves talking to writers about craft, her writing process, and how she shapes her stories with grit and humor.

Danzy Senna rose to international literary fame with her extraordinary first novel, Caucasia. Since then she has become a respected literary voice who consistently challenges our culture's defined norms. Her latest book, New People, is a subversive and engrossing story of race, class, and manners in contemporary America that received widespread acclaim and was selected as a New York Times Books Review Best Book of the Year. A favorite with universities and libraries, Senna speaks about her craft as both a memoirist and fiction writer, and the timely themes that define her work.

Ariel Levy is the author of the New York Times-bestselling book The Rules Do Not Apply, a “beautifully crafted” (NYTBR) memoir about one woman’s attempt to resist society’s rules about work, love, and womanhood, and to build an unconventional life instead. In her poignant, humorous talks, Levy shares her story of fierce love and unimaginable loss, resilience and reinvention, and offers insight on the shifting forces in our culture that made her journey possible. She currently writes for The New Yorker.