Marie Mutsuki Mockett is half-Japanese and half-American. Her memoir, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey, examines grief against the backdrop of the 2011 Great East Earthquake, and Mockett’s family temple, twenty-five miles from the Fukushima nuclear reactor.

Sunil Yapa holds an MFA from Hunter College. His work has appeared in the Margins, Hyphen magazine, the Tottenville Review, and others. He has won numerous awards, including, The Best Asian American Short Story in 2010. His debut novel is, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist.

Peter Mountford's novel A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism won the 2012 Washington State Book Award. His second novel is The Dismal Science. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Best New American Voices 2008, the Sun, and the Atlantic Monthly.

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.