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 Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a Whiting Award, and was named a "Best Young American Novelist" by Granta. He teaches at the College of New Jersey.

Stephen Burt, professor of English at Harvard, is the author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, including The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them. A new book of poems will appear next year.

Kaitlyn Greenidge is a fiction writer who holds an MFA from Hunter College. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Buzzfeed, Elle.com, the Believer, American Short Fiction, and other places. Her debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman.

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of original fiction-essays on black presences in film, literature, and visual arts. Her writing lives where genre, form, archival research, memory, race, and subjectivity intersect. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

Martha Southgate’s fourth novel, The Taste of Salt, was named a best novel of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe. Her New York Times Book Review essay "Writers Like Me," is included in Best African-American Essays 2009. She teaches fiction in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.