Patrick Madden is the author of two essay collections, Quotidiana and Sublime Physick, and editor of After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays. His essays have appeared in the Best American Spiritual Writing and Best Creative Nonfiction as well as numerous journals.

David Lazar's books include Occasional Desire, The Body of Brooklyn Truth in Nonfiction. Forthcoming are Who's Afraid of Helen of Troy and After Montaigne. He has had six Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays. He is founding editor Hotel Amerika. He is a professor at Columbia College Chicago, and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow.

Phillip Lopate has written over twenty books, most recently, the essay collections Portrait Inside My Head and To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. He has also edited the anthology Art of the Personal Essay, and he directs the MFA nonfiction program at Columbia University.

EJ Levy’s debut story collection, Love, In Theory, won a Flannery O’Connor Award, a 2013 ForeWord Book of the Year Award and the 2014 GLCA New Writers Award. It was published in French. Her work appears in Best American Essays, the New York Times, Paris Review and won a Pushcart Prize.

Lina Ferreira is the author of Drown Sever Sing and currently works as a visiting assistant professor at the Ohio State University. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s creative nonfiction and literary translation programs, and her work has been featured in Arts and Letters, the Chicago Review, and Fourth Genre.