Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the 2000 best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers is also the founder of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a literary journal; a co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia, co-founder of The Hawkins Project, and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness; and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Michelle Tea is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, sex work, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and has identified with the San Francisco, California literary and arts community for many years. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their exposition of the queercore community.
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Tod Goldberg is an American author and journalist best known for his novels Gangsters Don't Die (Counterpoint), Gangster Nation (Counterpoint), Gangsterland (Counterpoint) and Living Dead Girl, the popular Burn Notice series (Penguin/NAL) and the short story collection The Low Desert: Gangster Stories (Counterpoint).
Martin Pousson is an American novelist, poet, and professor.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Mark Sarvas is an American novelist, critic, and blogger living in Los Angeles. He is the host of the literary blog The Elegant Variation and author of the novel Harry, Revised. Harry, Revised was a finalist for the Fiction Prize of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association, and was also a 2008 Denver Post Good Reads selection.
Steven M. Lopez is an American journalist and four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist who has been a columnist for The Los Angeles Times since 2001.
Paul Gervais is an American visual artist and writer, who has also published a personal memoir. His novel, Extraordinary People, was nominated for the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1992.
Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic.
Manuel Muñoz is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.
Leslie Schwartz is an American author and teacher of creative writing. She has published two novels, Jumping the Green and Angels Crest, the latter of which was made into a 2011 film, and The Lost Chapters, a memoir of her time in jail while recovering from alcoholism.
Jeanne Córdova was an American writer and supporter of the lesbian and gay rights movement, founder of The Lesbian Tide, and a founder of the West Coast LGBT movement. A former Catholic nun, Córdova was a second-wave feminist lesbian activist and self-described butch.
Connie Spenuzza is an American author who lives in Dana Point, California also known under her pen name Cecilia Velástegui, she has been collected by libraries.
Scott Blackwood is an American novelist, short story writer, and nonfiction writer. He is the author of three books of fiction and two books of narrative nonfiction on the rise of blues and jazz and the story of the Great Migration. His most recent novel, See How Small, won the 2016 PEN USA Award for fiction.
Naomi Hirahara is an American writer and journalist. She edited the largest Japanese-American daily newspaper, Rafu Shimpo for several years. She is currently a writer of both fiction and non-fiction works and the Edgar Award-winning Mas Arai mystery series.
Erin Aubry Kaplan is a Los Angeles journalist and columnist who has written about black political, economic and cultural issues since 1992. She is a contributing writer to the op-ed section of the Los Angeles Times, and from 2005 to 2007 was a weekly op-ed columnist – the first black weekly op-ed columnist in the paper's recent history. She has been a staff writer and columnist for the LA Weekly and a regular contributor for many publications, including Salon.com, Essence, and Ms. Kaplan is also a regular columnist for make/shift, a quarterly feminist magazine that launched in 2007 and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.
Kim Heacox is an American author, photographer, musician, and environmental activist living in Gustavus, Alaska, at the entrance to Glacier Bay National Park. He was born in Lewiston, Idaho and grew up in Spokane, Washington. Heacox is best known for two of his books, The Only Kayak, a memoir, and Jimmy Bluefeather, a novel (2015), both winners of the National Outdoor Book Award, and for his opinion pieces in The Guardian that focus primarily on the climate crisis, global biodiversity loss, and threats to U.S. public lands. His most recent book, On Heaven’s Hill, is a literary novel author Kimi Eisele praised as “the kind of story the planet needs right now.”
