Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and 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.

Emily Raboteau is the author of a novel, The Professor's Daughter, and a work of creative nonfiction, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, winner of the 2014 American Book Award. She is a professor in the MFA program at the City College of New York, in Harlem.

Sarah M. Broom is a New Orleans native whose essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, and elsewhere. Obsessed with geographies, family, and home, she's currently at work on The Yellow House. 

Elizabeth Rush is the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. She teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.

Cinelle Barnes is the Manila-born author of Monsoon Mansion and Malaya: Essays on Freedom. Her work has received support from Kundiman, VONA, the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund, and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, and has appeared in Catapult, Literary Hub, and Buzzfeed Reader.