Marilynne Robinson was born in 1947.

Her first novel, Housekeeping (1981) received the PEN/Hemingway award for best first novel as well as being nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and Home won the Orange Prize. She lives in Iowa.

Jamel Brinkley's writing has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2018, A Public Space, Tin House and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University and lives in California. A Lucky Man is his first book.

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of the award-winning Hunger and Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her work has been translated into nine languages and has been chosen twice for The Best American Short Stories. A recent Berlin Prize winner, she has received creative writing fellowships from Stanford University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Samantha lives in Iowa City, where she is the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four previous collections of short stories.

She is professor of writing at Columbia University.