Dr Mykaela Saunders is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, teacher and researcher, and the editor of This All Come Back Now, the Aurealis Award-winning, world-first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction (UQP, 2022). Always Will Be won the 2022 David Unaipon Award. Mykaela's novel manuscript Last Rites of Spring was also shortlisted for the Unaipon Award in 2020, and received a Next Chapter Fellowship in 2021.

Mykaela has won the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, the National Indigenous Story Award, the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Prize for creative non-fiction and the University of Sydney's Sister Alison Bush Graduate Medal for Indigenous research. Of Dharug descent, Mykaela belongs to the Tweed Goori community through her Bundjalung and South Sea Islander family. Mykaela has worked in Aboriginal education since 2003, and at the tertiary level since 2012. They are currently an Indigenous postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie University, researching First Nations speculative fiction.

Jessica Zhan Mei Yu is a writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne, where she currently teaches. But the Girl is her debut novel.

In 2020 she was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Literature Award in the Unpublished Manuscript category. Her writing has been published in Best Australian Poems, Overland, Yen, the Sydney Morning Herald, the White Review and more.

She has won various prizes and fellowships for her work, including the Felix Meyer Scholarship, Glenfern Fellowship, Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship, Young Writers Innovation Prize and the Best of Express Media Prize.

Leah Jing McIntosh is a critic, researcher and the founding editor of Liminal. Through the Liminal project, she has published an extensive collection of longform interviews and award-winning writing and art by Asian Australian artists. Working towards and advocating for a more equitable arts sector, she has produced community events, established national literary prizes, and created mentorships, residencies and workshops for racialised artists.