Victoria Chang is an award-winning poet whose work explores grief, identity, memory, and the complexity of language with remarkable emotional depth and formal invention. Her poetry is known for pushing boundaries while remaining intimate and accessible, earning her a reputation as one of the most distinctive and powerful voices in contemporary American literature.

Chang is the author of several acclaimed collections, including Obit, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN Voelcker Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Written in the form of newspaper obituaries, Obit reimagines the elegy, giving voice to personal loss and the quiet deaths of identity, relationships, and language. Her other works include The Trees Witness Everything, a collection composed in minimalist waka poems, and Barbie Chang, which investigates race, gender, and social exclusion with fierce clarity. Her latest book of poems, With My Back to the World (2024), received the Forward Prize for Best Collection of Poetry, was named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR

In addition to poetry, Chang writes lyric nonfiction. Her hybrid memoir Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief was widely praised for its innovative structure and emotional resonance.

A Guggenheim Fellow and former Poetry Editor of The New York Times Magazine, Chang also writes children's literature and is the Bourne Chair of Poetry at Georgia Tech, where she teaches.

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Leslie Jamison is a gifted writer whose work explores the strengths and limits of our shared humanity. Her writing has been called at once “profound” and “intellectual” and then “poetic” and “philosophical.” She’s often compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, the inheritor of a great American literary tradition.

Leslie’s collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, won the 2012 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, the New York Times, and Publishers Weekly. The Gin Closet, Leslie’s first book, was one of The San Francisco Chronicle’s best books of the year. In 2018, Leslie released The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, a book that seamlessly blends memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage. The Recovering chronicles how we tell stories about addiction, as well as the larger history of the recovery movement. Leslie’s 2019 collection of essays, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, was met with high praise and critical acclaim. Entertainment Weekly writes, “With this brilliant new collection…Leslie Jamison affirms why she’s the essayist of the moment.” In 2024, she released her memoir, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, a fascinating and sometimes harrowing exploration of motherhood, art, and new love. Leslie also completed and published the novel Peggy in 2024, continuing the legacy of her friend and fellow author Rebecca Godfrey who passed away in 2022.

A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Leslie also graduated with her PhD from Yale University. She teaches at the Columbia University MFA program and mentors through the PEN Prison Writing Program. She has worked—for various stints, in various points—as a baker, an office temp, a juice barista, a medical actor, and an innkeeper. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

He has been a recipient of many honors and awards, including a 2014 MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, a National Book Award, two Pushcart selections, eight Best American Poetry selections, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation. His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Fence, The Kenyon Review, Jubilat, Harvard Review, and Poetry. His poetry has also been featured on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Terrance Hayes earned a BA at Coker College and an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. Currently a Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, Hayes resides in New York City.

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A twelfth generation North Carolinian, David Joy grew up in the Piedmont along the Catawba River, moved away at eighteen, and has spent the last 22 years 100 miles west in the mountains of Jackson County. His work is place-driven and deeply rooted to Appalachia, and has been translated into six languages. In 2023, his debut novel was adapted to film starring Billy Bob Thornton and Robin Wright.

David Joy is a critically acclaimed author known for his raw, unflinching portrayals of life in rural Appalachia. With novels that pulse with tension, beauty, and heartbreak, Joy has established himself as one of the foremost voices in contemporary Southern literature. His works delve into the complexities of poverty, crime, family, and the human spirit, capturing both the grit and grace of a region too often misunderstood.

Joy is the author of five novels, including Those We Thought We Knew (winner of the 2023 Willie Morris Award and the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Prize), When These Mountains Burn (winner of the 2020 Dashiell Hammett Award), The Line That Held Us (winner of the 2018 Southern Book Prize), The Weight of This World, and Where All Light Tends to Go (Edgar finalist for Best First Novel). His stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in a number of publications, most recently Garden & Gun, The New York Times Magazine, and TIME. He is also the author of the memoir Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey and a coeditor of Gather at the River: Twenty-Five Authors on Fishing, a book he spearheaded to raise money for the CAST For Kids Foundation. Joy lives in Tuckasegee, North Carolina with his dog Edie Munster.

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