Paul Auster is the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among numerous other works of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. His most recent works are the biography, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (Henry Holt & Company, 2021), and a photographic collaboration with Spencer Ostrander, Long Live King Kobe: Following the Murder of Tyler Kobe Nichols (2022). He has been awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, the Prix Médicis étranger, an Independent Spirit Award, and the Premio Napoli. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Sophie Auster has released three LP’s and two EP’s over her career. Auster has carved out a unique path for herself as a songwriter, receiving several awards abroad and at home like the John Lennon Songwriting Contest Grand Prize. She has graced the cover of Cosmopolitan Spain (where she was named “Singer of the Year”), as well as those of Rolling Stone Spain, L’Officiel, Elle France, and D la Repubblica, who praised Auster for her “diva voice” drawing comparisons to “...Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Tom Waits, Fiona Apple.” Auster’s music is replete with fantasy and escapism, a sonic fusion of bluesy folk-pop with cabaret dramatics reminiscent of Lana Del Rey and Sara Bareilles. The New York Times called her "sultry and folksy,” with "soul-(and teeth-) baring lyrics...that!s drawn comparisons to Fiona Apple and Gillian Welch.” Elle Magazine dubbed her "Auster on Fire.” Auster spent the better part of 2019 putting out new music and touring the US and Europe. Her last full length album, Next Time, was released in April 2019 through BMG worldwide and the EP, History Happens at Night, came out later that year on November 1st (BMG). She spent the summer of 2019 opening for, Rock & Roll Hall of fame inductee, Bryan Ferry and then spent months in Europe on her own headlining tour. Over the past year, Auster worked on new material for her latest EP entitled, “Dancing with Strangers”, collaborating with producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, Nick Block, based in Los Angeles. He owns and engineers a state-of-the-art recording studio where he produces content for label and independent artists, and creates bespoke music for advertising, film, and TV. The first single, “Let’s Get Lost,” was released January 28th, 2022 and was followed by her second single, “Hey Girlfriend,” on March 18, 2022. The EP, “Dancing with Strangers” was released on May 6th this year to critical acclaim.

Peter Balakian is the author of eight books of poems including Ozone Journal, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and Ziggurat, both published by the University of Chicago Press. His memoir Black Dog of Fate won the PEN/Albrand Award and was a New York Times notable book, and The Burning Tigris won the Raphael Lemkin Prize and was a New York Times bestseller and New York Times notable book. He is co-translator of the Armenian poet Siamanto’s Bloody News From My Friend and Grigoris Balakian’s Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide 1915-1918 (Knopf, 2009), which was a Washington Post book of the year. Recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, he was also awarded a Presidential Medal and the Moves Khoranatsi Medal from the Republic of Armenia and the Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance and Diplomacy. He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Colgate University.

Jericho Brown is author of The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in such publications as The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the Charles Howard Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Creating Writing Program at Emory University.

James Carroll is the author of twelve novels, and eight works of nonfiction. For twenty-three years, he wrote a weekly op-ed column for The Boston Globe. He has received the National Book Award, the PEN Galbraith Award, and the Scripps Howard Journalism Award. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His most recent book is The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul (Random House, 2021). He lives in Boston, with his wife the writer Alexandra Marshall.

Cathy Caruth is a leading figure in psychoanalytically informed literary theory and humanistic approaches to trauma. She is the Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, with appointments in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (1991), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996; 2016), Literature in the Ashes of History (2013) and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience (2014), all published by Johns Hopkins University Press. She is also the editor of Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and co-editor with Deborah Esch of Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (Rutgers University Press, 1995). She has taught previously at Yale and at Emory University, where she built the Departments of Comparative Literature. As a founding figure of Trauma Theory in the Humanities, Professor Caruth focuses on the languages of trauma and testimony, on literary theory, and on contemporary discourses concerning the annihilation and survival of language.

Sarah Chayes's unusual trajectory has led her from reporting from Paris for National Public Radio and covering the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan to running a soap factory in downtown Kandahar in the midst of a reigniting insurgency. She went on to advise the topmost levels of the U.S. military. She left the Pentagon for a five-year stint at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Internationally recognized for her innovative thinking on corruption and its implications, she has uncovered the unrecognized reality that severe and structured corruption can prompt revolutions, violent insurgency, and environmental devastation. Corruption of this sort is the operating system of sophisticated networks and represents, in Sarah's view, the primary threat to democracy in our lifetime. She is the author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (2007), Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (LA Times Book Prize, 2016), and most recently On Corruption in America and What Is at Stake (2020). She lives in Paw Paw, West Virginia.

Robin Davidson is the author of the poetry collections Luminous Other, recipient of Ashland Poetry Press’s 2012 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, Kneeling in the Dojo, City that Ripens on the Tree of the World, and most recently, Mrs. Schmetterling (Arrowsmith Press, 2021), and editor of Houston’s Favorite Poems, a citywide anthology modeled on Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project. A Fulbright scholar at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland and recipient of an NEA fellowship in translation, she is co-translator with Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska of two volumes of Ewa Lipska’s poems from the Polish, The New Century and Dear Ms. Schubert (Princeton University Press, 2021). She is former Houston Poet Laureate, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and teaches literature and creative writing as professor emerita of English for the University of Houston Downtown.

Rachel DeWoskin is the author of Two Menus: Poems (The University of Chicago Press, 2020); Banshee (Dottir Press, 2019); Someday We Will Fly (Penguin, 2019); Blind (Penguin, 2014); Big Girl Small (FSG, 2011); Repeat After Me (The Overlook Press, 2009); and Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton, 2005). She is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago, and an affiliated faculty member of the Centers for East Asian Studies and Jewish Studies.

Carolyn Forché is author of five books of poetry, In the Lateness of the World (Penguin, 2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the American Book Award; Blue Hour (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Angel of History (1994), the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Poetry Selection and recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (1982), recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award; and Gathering the Tribes (1976), selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her memoir What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (2019) won the Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America and was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize in the United Kingdom. She has translated the poetry of Claribel Alegría, Robert Desnos, Mahmoud Darwish, Fernando Valverde, and Lasse Söderberg, among others. She has also edited the volumes Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (2014) and Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993). Her work has been translated into twenty-four languages. Among her many honors are Stockholm’s Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement, and the Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. She is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University and a University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In January 2022, she became a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and as of April 2023, she has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jaki Shelton Green is a 2019 Academy of American Poet Laureate Fellow, 2014 NC Literary Hall of Fame Inductee, 2009 NC Piedmont Laureate appointment, and 2003 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature. She teaches Documentary Poetry at Duke University Center for Documentary Studies and was appointed the 2021 Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence at UNC Chapel Hill. She is the author of eight poetry collections, a poetry LP and cd’s. Jaki Shelton Green is the owner of SistaWRITE providing writing retreats for women writers and currently serves as the Poet Laureate in Residence at the NC Museum of Art.

Dan Hunter is the author of Learning and Teaching Creativity: You Can Only Imagine, designed to improve individual imagination and how to develop imagination in schools. Hunter is also the inventor of H-IQ, the first assessment of individual imagination and ideation, available online at www.h-iq.com. H-IQ provides students with practice generating ideas and teaches student metacognition. H-IQ was a finalist in Reimagine Education, the world’s largest awards program for innovative pedagogies. Out of a field of 1100 applicants from all over the world, H-IQ was on the shortlist to win an award for “Breakthrough Educational Technology” in 2022. Hunter’s understanding of creativity has been learned by practicing creative work, generating a steady flow of ideas as a songwriter, playwright, columnist, and political consultant. Hunter taught creative writing and playwriting at Boston University for 17 years. Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher, and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an education consulting firm. He has served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed topical humor in song on ABC, NPR, BBC, and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). He is the author of several books of humor, including Let’s Keep Des Moines a Private Joke, Iowa?...It’s a State, and his most recent Pandemic Panacea: Laughing through Quarantine.

Siri Hustvedt is a novelist and scholar, has a PhD in English literature, and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is the author of a book of poems, seven novels, four collections of essays, and two works of nonfiction, most recently, Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays (Simon & Schuster, 2022). She has published papers in various academic and scientific journals and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, the European Charles Veillon Essay Prize, an American Academy of the Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction for The Blazing World, which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Mitchell Kaplan, a Miami Beach native, founded the independent bookstore chain Books & Books in 1982, now including five locations in South Florida and hosting more than 400 events annually. Books & Books was named “Publishers’ Weekly Bookstore of the Year” in 2015. He is the co-founder of Miami Book Fair held on the campus of Miami Dade College and presenting approximately 500 authors during one week in November. He is former president of the American Booksellers Association (ABA) and received the National Book Foundation’s prestigious “Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community” in 2011. He is the host of the podcast, “The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan” and with his partner Paula Mazur, formed the Mazur/Kaplan film production company to bring books to the screen, most recently, the release “Let Him Go” starring Diane Lane and Kevin Costner.

Jacki Lyden is a nonfiction author and former longtime NPR host and correspondent. Between 1979 and 2015, she was an award-winning Middle East and foreign correspondent, a host of shows like Weekend All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition, and a familiar NPR voice. On 9/11/01 she was NPR’s first reporter on air in New York. She is the author of Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, about growing up with her mentally ill mother, which the New York Times hailed as a “memoir classic.” Lyden is a former Benton Fellow at the University of Chicago in Middle East Studies. Past awards include The Gracie Award from American Women in Radio and TV for Best Foreign Documentary (Israel and Palestine) and also, with NPR teams, the DuPont-Columbia, the Polk, and the George Foster Peabody Awards for coverage of the First Gulf War, Afghanistan and the Second Gulf War. In 2001, with novelist and WDA founding member Paul Auster, she hosted “I Thought My Father Was God: True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project” about the stories of ordinary Americans. She is a Wisconsin native and Wisconsin Chair of Writers for Democratic Action. She lives in Wisconsin and in the Washington, DC area with her husband, the Washington Post Pulitzer-prize winning photographer Bill O’Leary.

Jill McCorkle, a native of North Carolina, is the author of four collections of short stories and seven novels, most recently Hieroglyphics (Algonquin Books, 2020). Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories multiple times, as well as The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books, and her novel, Life After Life, was a New York Times bestseller. She is core faculty in the Bennington Writing Seminars and affiliated with the MFA Program at North Carolina State University.

Askold Melnyczuk has published ten books, including four novels, a novella based on the life of Rimbaud, two volumes of translations from the Ukrainian, and a collection of short stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow (Grand Iota, 2021). These have been variously cited as a New York Times Notable and an LA Times Best Books of the Year. He also coedited From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine, the Selected Poems of Oksana Zabuzhko, and a chapbook on Father Daniel Berrigan. He received a three-year fellowship in Fiction from the Lila Wallace Foundation and the George Garrett Award, as well as the PEN Magid Award for his founding of the journal Agni. Melnyczuk is founder of Arrowsmith Press and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Jo-Ann Mort is a journalist and poet who returned to writing poetry after a nearly two- decade hiatus. Her poetry has appeared recently in Plume, The Women’s Review of Books, Stand (UK), Atlanta Review (where she was awarded two international publication awards), Upstreet, and elsewhere. An essay, Poetry as Secular Prayer, was recently in the Arrowsmith Journal. Jo-Ann lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Bella Rotker studies creative writing at the Interlochen Arts Academy. She was born in Venezuela and grew up in Miami. Bella is a 2023 Scholastic Art & Writing National Gold and Silver Medalist in Poetry and an American Voices Nominee. She also has received recognition from the YoungArts Foundation, DePaul University, and Albion College. Her work has appeared in The Lumiere Review, Full Mood Mag, Neologism Poetry Journal, Fifth Wheel Press, JAKE, and Best American High School Writing, among others. Bella is thrilled to be the 2023-24 Michigan Youth Lieutenant Governor, and is working to pass a bill she wrote in the Michigan legislature to end menstrual inequity in the carceral system. When she's not writing or fighting the patriarchy, Bella’s hanging out with her friends, watching the lakes, and looking for birds.

Tara Skurtu, a two-time Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, a Marcia Keach Poetry Prize, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, is author of the poetry collection The Amoeba Game and the upcoming Faith Farm. She is the founder of International Poetry Circle, and has served as lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University and taught incarcerated students through BU’s Prison Education Program. Tara is based in Bucharest, where she coaches writing clients around the world and is working on a collection of essays, Don’t Ask Me Why I Live Here.

Roberto Tejada is a poet, translator, editor, essayist, art historian, and cultural critic. He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston, and is of author of the poetry collections, Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022), Full Foreground (2012), Exposition Park (2010), and Mirrors for Gold (2006), and the book of essays, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (2019), a Latinx poetics on colonial settlements and cultural counter-conquest, and intersections of history and metaphor in the art and writing of the Americas. His work has been recognized with numerous fellowships, including awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, Creative Capital Warhol Foundation, Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (São Paulo, Brazil), as well as the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences of Williams College. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2021. He founded the multilingual literary journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas (Mexico-U.S., 1991-2013), co-edited with Kristin Dykstra and Gabriel Bernal Granados, and dedicated to innovative writing in its original language—English or Spanish—and concomitant translations, together with visual art and other forms of critical inquiry, available in digital form at Northwestern University’s Open Door Archive. An art historian, Tejada writes on cross-cultural media and the political imagination in books that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009), as well as catalog essays in Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011) and The Menil Collection’s Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2021).

Katherine Towler is author of the novels Snow Island, Evening Ferry, and Island Light, and the memoir The Penny Poet of Portsmouth. She teaches in the Mountainview MFA Program at Southern New Hampshire University and has published her poetry and prose in journals including Poetry International and Ploughshares. She lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014) and is the author of five collections of poetry: Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006), awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, Thrall (2012), and most recently, Monument: Poems New and Selected (2018). She is also author of Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020) and Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010). She is recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Trethewey is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2019, she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. In 2020, she received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry (for lifetime achievement) from the Library of Congress, and she is currently Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.

Doug Van Gundy directs the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, West Virginia. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, including The Guardian, Poets & Writers, Poetry, The Oxford American, and Guernica. He is co-editor of the anthology Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Contemporary Writing from West Virginia (WVU Press, 2017) and the author of a book of poems, A Life above Water (Red Hen Press, 2007). His second poetry collection is forthcoming in 2024 from the University Press of Kentucky. Doug is also a nationally-known Appalachian musician who has performed and taught throughout the United States and in Canada and Great Britain. Doug was recognized in 2017 as a Master Artist by the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. For the past 25 years he has been playing fiddle, guitar, mandolin, harmonica and banjo with Paul Gartner as the old-time string duo, Born Old.