Steph Opitz is the literary director of the Texas Book Festival, the fiction co-chair for the Brooklyn Book Festival, and the book reviewer for Marie Claire.

Chris Abani's prose includes Song For Night, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections include Sanctificum, Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems, and Kalakuta Republic. He is a professor at the University of California Riverside and the recipient of the PEN Center USA Freedom to Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN/Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN/Hemingway Book Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of the novels Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and most recently, The Surrendered, which in 2011 won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His new novel, On Such A Full Sea, is forthcoming. His other awards and citations include the PEN/Hemingway Award, the American Book Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the ALA Notable Book of the Year Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy in Rome. He is a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.