Kristen Radtke is the art director and New York editor of The Believer magazine and the film and video editor of TriQuarterly magazine. She lives in New York. Imagine Wanting Only This is her first book.

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson is the author of Negroland, which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize (formerly the Samuel Johnson) and On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.

She was for years a theatre and book critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, the Guardian, Vogue, New York magazine, and the New Republic.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Torch, the huge New York Times-bestselling memoir Wild and the collection of essays Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who's Been There.

Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Allure and The Rumpus. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in creative writing, an award given for her work on The Fact of a Body.

Other honours in support of this, her first book, include a Rona Jaffe Award, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, as well as fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center and Yaddo.

Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the New York Times, Oxford American, Salon and the anthology True Crime. She has a JD from Harvard, an MFA from Emerson and a BA from Columbia University.

Alexandria currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches memoir writing at Grub Street and teaches graduate public policy students at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Torrey Peters lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth.

She is the author of two novellas, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. 

Leslie Jamison grew up in Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has also worked as an innkeeper in California, a schoolteacher in Nicaragua, and an office temp in Manhattan.

She is currently studying for a PhD at Yale University, where she is writing a dissertation on poverty and degradation in twentieth century American writing. Her first novel, The Gin Closet, was published in 2010, and her collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, was published in 2014.

Meghan Daum is the author of five books and writes a biweekly column about culture and politics for Medium. Her most recent book is The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, which won the 2015 PEN Center USA Award for creative nonfiction. Her other books include the essay collection My Misspent Youth, and she edited the New York Times bestseller Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids. From 2005 to 2016, Daum was an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times. She has contributed to numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and Vogue. A recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she is on the adjunct faculty in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University School of the Arts.