Eula Biss is an acclaimed essayist and poet whose work examines the intersections of culture, class, medicine, labor, and contemporary American life with unusual intellectual rigor and lyric precision. Widely admired for her ability to blend personal narrative with cultural criticism, Biss has been praised for prose that is both analytically sharp and deeply humane. Critics have frequently compared her to Joan Didion for the clarity and elegance of her writing, while also recognizing her ability to transform ordinary subjects into expansive inquiries about the way we live now.

Biss is the author of four books, including Having and Being Had (2020), a widely celebrated meditation on capitalism, homeownership, art, and economic anxiety that was named a Best Book of the Year by Time and NPR and selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her bestselling On Immunity: An Inoculation (2014) became one of the defining works of nonfiction about public health and fear in modern America, earning recognition as one of the year’s best books by numerous major publications, including The New York Times Book Review. Her collection, Notes from No Man’s Land (2009), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and established her as a leading essayist of her generation.

In addition to her books, Biss’s essays and poems have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and The Guardian. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and other awards.

A longtime educator, Biss taught at Northwestern University for fifteen years and currently teaches nonfiction writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is also a founding editor of Essay Press and continues to shape contemporary conversations about literature, art, work, and public life.

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Deesha Philyaw is an award-winning fiction writer whose work explores emotional and spiritual lives with warmth, candor, humor, and remarkable compassion. Raised in the American South, Philyaw often writes about Southern Black communities and the tensions between faith, desire, family, and personal freedom, bringing both sharp insight and deep humanity to her characters and settings. Her fiction is celebrated for its ability to hold tenderness and longing alongside questions of identity, secrecy, and belonging. Critics have praised her work as both fiercely honest and profoundly joyful.

Philyaw is the author of the acclaimed collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020), a breakout literary success that won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Story Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. The collection was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and quickly established Philyaw as one of the most exciting voices in contemporary American literature. Through nine interconnected stories, the book examines the hidden longings, private negotiations, and complicated relationships of women and girls navigating religion, sexuality, friendship, and generational expectation.

In addition to her fiction, Philyaw is a dynamic literary presence whose work extends into podcasting, collaboration, and cultural conversation. She co-hosts the podcasts Ursa Short Fiction and Reckon True Stories, projects dedicated to storytelling and the ways stories shape contemporary culture. A Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, and United States Artists Fellow, she is also developing television projects based on her work.

Philyaw’s highly anticipated novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, will be published in fall 2026, alongside a forthcoming second story collection, Girl, Look.

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Evie Shockley is an award-winning poet, scholar, and critic whose work examines Black identity, history, language, and contemporary American life through formally inventive and emotionally resonant poetry. Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Shockley often draws on Southern culture, sound, memory, and history in ways that connect deeply personal experience to larger social and political questions. Her writing is celebrated for its ability to combine intellectual rigor with lyric beauty, creating poems that are both innovative and deeply accessible.

Shockley is the author of six collections of poetry, including suddenly we (2023), semiautomatic (2017), and the new black (2011). Her collection semiautomatic—a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize—explores race, violence, and contemporary American culture through an ambitious blend of traditional forms, visual experimentation, and documentary materials. the new black received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and helped establish Shockley as one of the leading voices in contemporary poetry. Critics have praised her work for its emotional depth, formal innovation, and ability to reimagine the possibilities of the lyric tradition.

In addition to her creative work, Shockley is a distinguished literary scholar whose critical study Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry has become an important contribution to the study of Black poetry and poetics. Her poems and essays have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and The Best American Poetry.

Shockley has received numerous honors, including the Holmes National Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from Cave Canem and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is a professor of English at Rutgers University.

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