Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects.

Cristina Henríquez is the author of the novels The Book of Unknown Americans and The World in Half and of the short story collection Come Together, Fall Apart. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times Magazine.

Laird Hunt is the author of seven novels, with an eighth, Zorrie, forthcoming from Bloomsbury USA in early 2021. He is the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, The Bridge/Il Ponte Book Award, and was a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner and the Prix Femina Étranger. A former United Nations press officer, he now lives in Providence where he teaches in Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.

A lifelong Texan, Keaton Patterson is the lead buyer for Brazos Bookstore in Houston. He holds a MA in American Literature and lives with his wife and son in Pearland.