Vendela Vida is the award-winning author of six books, including Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty. She is a founding editor of The Believer magazine, and co-editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers and Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence, a collection of interviews with musicians. She was a founding board member of S26 Valencia, the San Francisco writing center for youth, and lives in the Bay Area with her family

Jess Walter is the author of Citizen Vince, a novel named as one of the year’s best by the Washington Post, NPR’s Fresh Air, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Milwaukee Sentinel, and others.

His novels include Land of the Blind and Over Tumbled Graves, a New York Times Notable Book. Walter lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family.

Kaveh Akbar has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes for his poetry, and his collection Pilgrim Bell (2022) has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry.

He has been published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, among others. Born in Tehran, he lives in Iowa.

Jennifer Haigh is the author of the New York Times bestseller Baker Towers, winnerof the 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author;and Mrs. Kimble, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and was a finalist for the Book Sense Book of the Year. Both novels were number one Book Sense picks. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, Good Housekeeping, and elsewhere. She lives in the Boston area.