Kiese Laymon

Kiese Laymon

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of the genre-bending novel Long Division and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. His bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of "The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years" by the New York Times. He is the recipient of the 2020–21 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. 

Imbolo Mbue

Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been adapted into an opera and stage play and optioned for a miniseries. Her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, was named by the New York Times as “One of the 10 Best Books” of 2021. Her works have been translated into eighteen languages and published in dozens of countries. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York.

Photo credit: Kiriko Sano