James Goodman is the author of essays, short stories, book reviews, letters, and three books, Stories of Scottsboro, Blackout, and But Where Is the Lamb? He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and Stories of Scottsboro was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, Newark, where he teaches close reading, critical thinking, and creative writing in the history department and in the MFA program in creative writing.

A Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Yunte Huang is the author of Charlie Chan, which won the Edgar Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His most recent book, Inseparable was also a finalist for the NBCC award and was named Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, NPR, and Newsweek. He has published articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Daily Beast, and others, and has been featured on NPR, CBS, C-SPAN, and others.

Hannah Oliver Depp is the owner of Loyalty Bookstores in Petworth, DC and Silver Spring, MD. Loyalty serves all readers as an intersectional feminist bookstore and programming space. She holds a Masters in English from American University. Oliver Depp is a founding member of the American Booksellers Association’s Committee on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and serves on the boards of Bookshop.org, An Open Book Foundation, and the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association.

Terry Tempest Williams is the author of sixteen books, including the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks, a New York Times bestseller; and her latest book, Erosion: Essays of Undoing. She is a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. In 2019, Terry Tempest Williams was given The Robert Kirsch Award, a lifetime achievement prize given to a writer with a substantial contribution to the American West. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is currently writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School. She divides her time between the red rock desert of Utah and Cambridge, Massachusetts.