Jamil Jan Kochai (he/him) is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize. His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New Yorker, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Sacramento.

Nadia Owusu (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based writer and urbanist. Her memoir, Aftershocks, was selected as a best book of 2021 by over a dozen publications, including Time, Vogue, Esquire, and the BBC, and has been translated into five languages. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick, named one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, and selected by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai for her Literati book club. Nadia is the winner of a Whiting Award in nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Granta, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, and others. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University and at the Mountainview MFA program and is the Director of Storytelling at Frontline Solutions.

porsha olayiwola is a native of chicago who writes, lives and organizes in boston, where she is the current poet laureate. olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the black, woman, and queer diasporas. she is an individual world poetry slam champion and the founder of the roxbury poetry festival. porsha olayiwola is currently teaching in her role as assistant professor of poetry at Emerson College. she is the author of i shimmer sometimes, too. her work can be found in or forthcoming from with triquarterly magazine, black warrior review, the boston globe, essence magazine, redivider, split this rock, the nba, the academy of american poets, netflix, wilderness press, the museum of fine arts and elsewhere.

Andrea Hairston (she/her) is a novelist, playwright, and L. Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor Emerita of Theatre and Africana Studies at Smith College. Novels: Archangels of Funk; Will Do Magic For Small Change, a New York Times Editor’s pick and finalist for the Mythopoeic, Lambda, and Otherwise Awards; Redwood and Wildfire, Otherwise and Carl Brandon Award winner; Master of Poisons on the 2020 Kirkus Review’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy; and Mindscape, Carl Brandon Award winner. Her short fiction appears in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future; New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color; Trouble the Waters and Lightspeed Magazine. Plays and essays appear in Lonely Stardust.