Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine and the story collections The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. He has received a Whiting Writers Award and was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta. He teaches at the College of New Jersey.

David L. Ulin is the author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles. His other books include The Lost Art of Reading, Labyrinth, and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is book critic of the Los Angeles Times.

Jennifer Vanderbes is the author of the novels Easter Island, Strangers at the Feast, and The Secret of Raven Point. A former Guggenheim Fellow and NYPL Cullman Fellow, she now teaches in the University of Tampa low-residency MFA program. Her writing has been translated into sixteen languages.

Marlon James is a professor of English and creative writing at Macalester College. His novel, The Book of Night Women, won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, The Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Books Critics Circle Award in fiction and the NAACP Image Award.

Roxana Robinson has written nine books. Her novel Sparta won the James Webb and MWPA Fiction Awards and was a Dublin Impac finalist. Robinson's work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Harper's, and elsewhere. She is an NEA and Guggenheim Fellow, and president of the Authors Guild.