Dr. Herman Beavers is the Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt President’s Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1989. He teaches courses in 20th and 21st Century African American Literature and Poetry Writing. He is the author of two scholarly monographs, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James A. McPherson (1995) and Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2018). His poems have appeared in numerous journals including, The Langston Hughes Colloquy, The American Arts Quarterly, The Painted Bride Quarterly, and Black American Literature Forum, among others. His  work is anthologized in Obsession: Sestinas for the Twenty- First Century, Who Speaks for America, Show Us Your Papers, and Gathering Darkness: A Cave Canem Reader. He is the author of three chapbooks, A Neighborhood of Feeling, Obsidian Blues, and The Vernell Poems. He is completing a full-length volume of poems, Even in Such Light.

Anna Badkhen is the author of seven books, most recently Bright Unbearable Reality, longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award. Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones. Essays in New York Review of Books, Granta, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Emergence, the New York Times. Fiction in AGNI, Zyzzyva, Conjunctions, The Common, Scalawag. Badkhen was born in the Soviet Union and is a US citizen.

Ken Kalfus is the author of three novels, Equilateral (2013), The Commissariat of Enlightenment (2003) and A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award and appeared in French as Un désordre américain. He has also published three collections of stories, including Coup de Foudre: A Novella and Stories, whose title story was published in French by Bloomsbury. Ken has received a Pew Fellowships in the Arts award and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has written for Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. A film adaptation of his short story, “Pu-239,” aired on HBO in 2007.

Laurence Nobécourt was born in Paris in 1968 where she began writing as a child. Her first book, La Démangeaison, was published in 1994 under the name Lorette Nobécourt. She has since published novels, stories, poetry and theater, first under the name of Lorette Nobécourt and then, since 2016, under her real identity. She left Paris in 2007 for the Drôme where she transmits – through her writing workshops – the Way of the Word which she conceived as an initiatory relationship to writing

Poet, novelist, essayist, Stéphane Lambert was born in Brussels in 1974. Interested in the creative process, he has devoted various books to artists (Nicolas de Staël, Rothko, Paul Klee, Monet, Spilliaert, Caspar David Friedrich, Van Gogh), among which Visions de Goya, l’éclat dans le désastre won the André Malraux prize for essays on art and Avant Godot, where he explores the link between painting and writing, was awarded the Roland de Jouvenel prize at the French Academy. In addition to his books, he writes fiction and documentaries for France Culture and contributes to Beaux-Arts Magazine. He has just produced a podcast for the National Chagall Museum in Nice, where he will present an exhibition designed for the 50th anniversary of the place in early 2023. In 2022, he was awarded the Victor Rossel Prize (the main literary prize in Belgium) for his story L’Apocalypse heureuse.

Photo credit : Marie Levi