Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. She is a bilingual author. Her work has been included in anthologies of Korea, Peru, Mexico, and the US. She currently coordinates Casa Octavia, a writing residency for women in El Paso, TX.

Cristina Rivera Garza is an award-winning author of novels, collections of short stories, and poetry books, and a distinguished professor of Hispanic studies and creative writing at the University of Houston. She has theorized the link between writing and community in our violent times.

Julie Carr is the author of five books of poetry, including 100 Notes on Violence, Sarah--Of Fragments and Lines, RAG, and Think Tank. Prose books include Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry and Objects from a Borrowed Confession.

Claudia Salazar-Jiménez is a Peruvian born writer and scholar. She holds a PhD from NYU. Her debut novel Blood of the Dawn was awarded the Las Americas Narrative Prize of Novel in 2014. She also received the TUMI-USA Award in 2015.