Elizabeth Graver’s fifth novel, Kantika (“song”in Ladino), was inspired by her grandmother, Rebecca née Cohen Baruch Levy, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul and whose tumultuous and shape-shifting life journey took her to Spain, Cuba and finally New York.  Kantika will be published in April 2023 by Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt. Elizabeth’s novel The End of the Point was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me? won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Essays. She lives outside of Boston and teaches at Boston College

Photo credit : Adrianne Mathiowetz

Kenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods (Creative Capital Literature Award); The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights); and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He edited Staring Back: The Disability from the Inside Out, and his books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia. He was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone. He curated the “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer’ exhibit at the Schwules Museum Berlin. His current work-in-progress is Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust, excerpts of which have been in The New York Times, The Believer, and Craft, and are the basis for his video series What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940? He is a 2022 Ford Foundation/Mellon Foundation/USA Artists Disability Futures Fellow.

Photo credit : Michael Dekker

Aryn Kyle’s debut novel, The God of Animals, was an international bestseller. Aryn is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and a National Magazine Award in fiction.