Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan.

Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, won the Hopwood Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the American Library Association's Alex Award.

She is a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, The White Review, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Kevin Barry's Stonecutter and The Winter Page anthology.

Her debut novel, Conversations with Friends, was the most popular debut in the 2017 end-of-year round-ups. Rooney was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award for 'Mr Salary' and was the winner of the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award.

Victor Lodato is a playwright and the author of the novel Mathilda Savitch, winner of the PEN Center USA Award for fiction.

His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories.

He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Victor was born and raised in New Jersey and currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon, and Tucson, Arizona.