Meng Jin is the author of the novel little gods and the short story collection Self-Portrait with Ghost. Her short fiction has been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prizes, and her books have been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner, PEN/Open Book Award, NYPL Young Lions Prize, and the LATimes First Fiction Prize. She is currently writing a fake memoir, for which she received a 2021 Creative Capital Award.

Amanda E. Machado (she/they) is a writer, public speaker and facilitator with ancestry from Mexico and Ecuador. Their work has been published in The Atlantic, Guernica, The Washington Post, Adroit Journal, Slate, The Guardian, Sierra Magazine, among many others outlets.  In addition to their essay writing, Amanda also is a public speaker and workshop facilitator on issues of justice and anti-oppression for organizations around the world. She is also the founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing, a multi-week online workshop that centers the experiences of people of color in how we tell stories about the outdoors.

erica lewis lives in San Francisco. Her books include the precipice of jupiter (2009, with artist Mark Stephen Finein), camera obscura (2010, with artist Mark Stephen Finein), murmur in the inventory (2013); and the box set trilogy: daryl hall is my boyfriend (2015), mary wants to be a superwoman (2017), mahogany (2023). She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.