Debra Spark has published six books of fiction, two collections of essays about fiction writing, and two anthologies, the most recent to raise money for a hunger organization. Her novels and short stories have variously addressed romantic love, marriage, the mysteries of identity, art and deception, and contemporary anti-Semitism. Her most recent novel, Discipline, uses a narrative line about three stolen paintings to explore the haves and have nots of Maine, where she now lives. Her nonfiction includes book reviews, articles on home and design, and essays about aging, parenthood, and grief. She is currently writing about international medical graduates, modernist architects, orphan diseases, baseball, and religious converts, among other topics, for a book of essays focused on coincidence stories. She is the Zacamy Professor of English at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. © photo Michael Harris

Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of After Sappho, published by Galley Beggar Press, which was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and shortlisted for both the 2023 Orwell Prize in Political Fiction and the 2023 James Tait Black Prize in Fiction. Her first book, The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives, was published by University of Michigan Press and received the 2020 Sally Banes Prize from the American Society of Theatre Research. Her novella A Life in Chameleons won the 2021 Reflex Press Novella Award. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Italian/French) from UC Berkeley.

Goldie Goldbloom grew up in Western Australia and now teaches in Chicago. A Chassidic mother of 8, she is also an LGBTQ activist. She has written three award-winning novels, The Paperbark Shoe, Gwen and On Division, as well as a collection of short stories, You Lose These. Goldie received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and her novel was selected for the NEA Big Reads list. Her essays and short stories have won many prizes and were published by Meanjin, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review and elsewhere. On Division won the Prix des Libraires for a book in translation

Arlene Keizer is a scholar, literary critic, and poet who writes about the literature, lived experience, theory, and visual art of the African Diaspora. Her poetry collection Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black—a cycle of poems about the African American artist Beauford Delaney—won the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and was published in the Wick Poetry Series in 2023. Among her other publications are the monograph Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery, contributions to scholarly volumes, and articles and poems in a range of venues including American Literature, PMLA, Poem-a-Day, African American Review, Radical Teacher, and TriQuarterly. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the Pembroke Center at Brown, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The daughter of emigrants from Trinidad, she has made Brooklyn, NY her home. She is a professor at Pratt Institute.

Taiye Selasi is an American writer and photographer of Nigerian and Ghanian origin, she describes herself as a “local” of Accra, Berlin, New York and Rome. In 2005, Selasi published “Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)“, her seminal text on Afropolitans. Her novel, Ghana Must Go, was published by Penguin in 2013. Selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013 by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, the novel has been sold in 22 countries. Selasi graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a BA degree in American Studies from yale, and earned her MPhil in international relations from Nuffield College, Oxford. She is the author of the children’s book Anansi and the Golden Pot, published in 2022.