Mat Johnson is the Philip H. Knight Chair of Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications include the novels Invisible Things, Loving Day, and Pym, and the graphic novels Incognegro and Backflash.

Peter Ho Davies’ most recent books are the novel A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Art of Revision: The Last Word, his first work of non-fiction. Other books include the novels, The Fortunes, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award; The Welsh Girl, long-listed for the Booker Prize, and a London Times bestseller; as well as two critically acclaimed collections of short stories. A recipient of the PEN/Malamud and PEN/Macmillan awards, his fiction has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, The Paris Review and Granta and been anthologized in O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, he now directs the Helen Zell MFA Program at the University of Michigan.

Michelle Tea is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s literature, most recently the novel Little F. She has been given awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, PEN/America, Lambda Literary and The Rona Jaffe Foundation. Tea is the creator of such cultural interventions as Sister Spit, Drag Queen Story Hour, and DOPAMINE Books, a collaboration with Semiotext(e).

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the memoirs The Chronology of Water and Reading the Waves, and the novels Thrust, The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, and Dora: A Headcase, as well as The Misfit’s Manifesto. Her Ted talk “On The Beauty of Being a Misfit” has over 4.5 million views. She founded the Corporeal Writing workshops in Portland, Oregon. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards. She plays clarinet. She is a very good swimmer.

Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North (2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022); and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Denne Michele Norris is the editor in chief of Electric Literature, winner of the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. She co-hosts the critically acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her debut novel When the Harvest Comes was a Them and Elle Best Book of the Year in 2025.

Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of nonfiction and four novels. The books of nonfiction include Husband of a Fanatic, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, and A Matter of Rats. His novel Immigrant, Montana was on the best of the year lists at The New Yorker, The New York Times, and President Obama’s list of favorite books of 2018. His next novel A Time Outside This Time was described by the New Yorker as “a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.” Kumar’s latest, My Beloved Life, was praised by James Wood as “beautiful, truthful fiction.” Three volumes of his diaries and drawings have been published by HarperCollins India. His work has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, BRICK, Guernica, and The Nation. Kumar’s awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Cullman Center Fellowship at the NYPL, and residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Lannan Foundation, and the Hawthornden Foundation.