Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead is a 1991 American coming-of-age black comedy film directed by Stephen Herek, written by Neil Landau and Tara Ison, and starring Christina Applegate, Joanna Cassidy, Keith Coogan, John Getz, and Josh Charles. The plot focuses on a 17-year-old girl who assumes the role as head of the house when the elderly babysitter whom her mother had hired to watch over her kids while she is in Australia suddenly dies.
Lan Samantha Chang is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of The Family Chao (2022) and short story collection Hunger. For her fiction, which explores Chinese American experiences, she is a recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Berlin Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
Rigoberto González is an American writer and book critic. He is an editor and author of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and bilingual children's books, and self-identifies in his writing as a gay Chicano. His most recent project is Latino Poetry, a Library of America anthology, which gathers verse that spans from the 17th century to the present day. His memoir What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. He is the 2015 recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle, the 2020 recipient of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and the 2024 recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Aimee Phan is an American novelist and educator, of Vietnamese descent. She teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California.
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).
Peter Orner is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, two story collections and a book of essays. Orner holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He spent 2016 and 2017 on a Fulbright in Namibia teaching at the University of Namibia.
Martin Pousson is an American novelist, poet, and professor.
Lucy Corin is an American novelist and short story writer. The winner of the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters John Guare Writer's Fund Rome Prize, Corin was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023 and a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship in 2015.
Emily Rapp Black is an American memoir author. When she was six years old, she was chosen as the poster child for the non-profit organization March of Dimes, due to a congenital birth defect that resulted in the amputation of her left leg. She has written two memoirs, one that presents her life as an amputee and the other that tells the story of the birth of her son Ronan Christopher Louis and his diagnosis of Tay–Sachs disease. She is a former Fulbright scholar and recipient of the James A. Michener Fellowship. She is a professor at the University of California, Riverside, School of Medicine.
Catherine Chung is an American writer whose first novel, Forgotten Country, received an Honorable Mention for the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award, and was an Indie Next Pick, in addition to being chosen for several best of lists including Booklist's 10 Best Debut Novels of 2012, and the San Francisco Chronicle's and Bookpage's Best Books of 2012. She received a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, and was recognized in 2010 by Granta magazine as one of its "New Voices" of the year. Her second book The Tenth Muse was released to critical acclaim, and was a 2019 Finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. In 2015 Buzzfeed named her one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers.
Natalie Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Mojave American poet, language activist, former professional basketball player, and educator. She is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community and identifies as Akimel O'odham. She is currently an Associate Professor at Arizona State University.
Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author and academic.
Wendy C. Ortiz is an American essayist, creative nonfiction writer, fiction writer, psychotherapist, and poet.
Mitchell S. Jackson is an American writer. He is the author of the 2013 novel The Residue Years, as well as Oversoul (2012), an ebook collection of essays and short stories. Jackson is a Whiting Award recipient and a former winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In 2021, while an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for his profile of Ahmaud Arbery for Runner's World. As of 2021, Jackson is the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for The Atlantic, Time (magazine), The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, and other places. She was an editor at theKenyon Reviewand a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University's MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has taught creative writing at Colorado State University's MFA program, Randolph College's low-residency MFA program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kenyon College. Díaz lives in New York with her spouse, British writer Lars Horn, and is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.
Terese Marie Mailhot is a First Nation Canadian writer, journalist, memoirist, and teacher.
Christa Parravani is an author and assistant professor in creative non-fiction at West Virginia University. Her first book focuses on the death of her twin sister, Cara. Her second memoir revolves around the limited reproductive options in West Virginia and the flaws in the healthcare system in the state.
Nafissa Thompson-Spires is an African American writer. Her first book, Heads of the Colored People (2019), won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the PEN/Open Book Award, and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction.
Chelsey Johnson is an American author and former professor, known for her 2018 debut novel Stray City.
Xuan Juliana Wang is a Chinese American writer. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her 2019 short story collection, Home Remedies, won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Young Lions Fiction Award and the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. She earned her MFA from Columbia University and received a Stegner Fellowship to study at Stanford University.
