Role: Author

C Pam Zhang was born in Beijing but is mostly an artifact of the United States; she has lived in thirteen cities across four countries and is still looking for home. She’s been awarded support from Tin House, Bread Loaf, Aspen Words, and elsewhere, and currently lives in San Francisco. In 2020 her debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, was longlisted for The Booker Prize.

Raven Leilani’s work has been published in Granta, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. Leilani received her MFA from NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence.

Naima Coster is the author of two novels. Her debut, Halsey Street, was a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. It was recommended as a must-read by People, Essence, BitchMedia, The Root, Well-Read Black Girl, The Skimm, and the Brooklyn Public Library among others.

Naima’s forthcoming novel, What’s Mine and Yours, is the story of the integration of a public high school in a small Southern city, and the resulting chain of events that bonds two families together in unexpected and complicated ways over the course of their lives. It will be published by Grand Central Publishing in March 2021.

Naima’s stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Rumpus, Aster(ix), Kweli, The Paris Review Daily, The Cut, The Sunday Times, and elsewhere. She has taught writing to students in jail, youth programs, and universities. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

K-Ming Chang was born in the year of the tiger. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a Lambda Literary Award finalist in poetry. Her debut novel Bestiary will be published by One World on September 29, 2020, and is longlisted for the Center For Fiction First Novel Prize.  Her poems have been anthologized in Ink Knows No Borders, Best New Poets 2018, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, the 2019 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. Raised in California, she now lives in New York.

Charles Yu is the author of three books, including the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (a New York Times Notable Book and a Time magazine best book of the year). He was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. He has also written for shows on FX, AMC, and HBO. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications.

Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House and ZYZZYVA, and her nonfiction in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Atavist, and was included in Best American Essays and the anthology BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex worker, a union organizer, an independent record label owner, a train hopper, a waitress, and a mother. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, he moved to New York City, where he began a career in fashion design. Shuggie Bain is his first novel. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker and Literary Hub.

Deesha Philyaw’s writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Brevity, Apogee Journal, Barrelhouse, Baltimore Review, Cheat River Review, Electric Literature, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Jacksonville, Florida, she currently lives in Pittsburgh with her daughters.