Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, and arrived in the U.S. in 1993, when his family was granted political asylum. He is the author of Deaf Republic, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf and LA Times Book Awards, and Dancing in Odessa, which won the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and Poetry magazine’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He is the editor of the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry and editor-in-chief of Poetry International. His many honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Macdowell Colony.

Erica Trabold is a Nebraska-born essayist. Her debut collection, Five Plots, was selected by John D’Agata as the inaugural winner of the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and awarded a 2019 Nebraska Book Award for nonfiction. Her essays appear in Brevity, The Rumpus, Passages North, The Collagist, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Oregon State University’s MFA program, she writes and teaches in Central Virginia, where she is a Visiting Professor at Sweet Briar College.

A Tunisian-American dual citizen, Leila Chatti is the author of Deluge and the chapbooks Ebb and Tunsiya/Amrikiya. She holds a BA from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University and an MFA from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and others.

Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 20124 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 awardee, and the author of two novels: The Vanishing Half and The Mothers, a New York Times bestseller.

Michael Torres’ debut book of poems, An Incomplete List of Names, won a National Poetry Series Prize and will be published by Beacon Press in October 2020. He was recently awarded a McKnight Artist Fellowship, fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and Bread Loaf, a Jerome Foundation Research and Travel grant, and an Individual Artist Initiative grant. He is a former Artist-in-Residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and a CantoMundo fellow. He was born and brought up in Pomona, CA, and now teaches at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Chris McCormick is the author of The Gimmicks (Harper 2020) and Desert Boys (Picador 2016), winner of the 2017 Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award. His essays and stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Tin House, and Ploughshares. He grew up in the Antelope Valley on the California side of the Mojave Desert, and earned his BA from the University of California, Berkeley. After teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he earned his MFA and won two Hopwood Awards, he’s now an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Ayse Papatya Bucak teaches in the MFA program at Florida Atlantic University. Born in Istanbul, Turkey—to an American mother and a Turkish father—she spent most of her childhood in Havertown, PA. She has earned a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Arizona State University. Her book of short stories, The Trojan War Museum and Other Stores, won the Story Prize Spotlight Award 2019-2020 and was shortlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection.

Photo by Daniel Lateulade

Kao Kalia Yang is the author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (winner of the 2009 Minnesota Book Award in Creative Nonfiction/Memoir); The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father; (winner of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award in Creative Nonfiction/Memoir); A Map into the World (a 2020 ALA Notable Children’s Book and Charlotte Zolotow Honor Book, and winner of 2020 Minnesota Book Award for Children’s Literature). She co-edited with Shannon Gabney the anthology What God is Honored Here, writings on infant loss by and for Native women and women of color. Due in 2000: Somewhere in the Unknown World, a themed collection of refugees’ stories, and two picture books: The Shared Room and The Most Beautiful Thing.