Laurie Hertzel is the senior books editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She has been a fellow at Duke University and writer in residence at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio. She has spoken at writing conferences at Harvard and Boston University and is the author of two books published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Joshua Ferris is the author of Then We Came to the End, a finalist for the National Book Award, longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award; The Unnamed; and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, which has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is the winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Award, and has been named to the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of fiction writers worth watching. His short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Best New American Voices, The Guardian, and Best American Short Stories.

Dinaw Mengestu is the author ofThe Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air. He was named a "20 Under 40" writer by the New Yorker. Other honors include the National Book Award Foundation's "5 Under 35" Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Guardian First Book Award, and France’s Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears was named a New York Times Book Review notable book of 2007, one of Amazon.com’s Top Ten Novels of the Year, and one of Lire Magazine’s Twenty Best Novels of the Year. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1978, Mengestu moved to the United States in 1980. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University.