Ed Pavlic is the author of Live at the Bitter End; Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener; Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno; and other books. He is Distinguished Research Professor in the English Department and in the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia.

Evie Schockley is an American poet and author of the poetry collections a half-red sea, the new black and semiautomatic, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She is Professor of English at Rutgers University.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is a recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing and author of the novels Dust and The Dragonfly Sea.

Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden and won the Sillerman First Book Prize for The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is the author of three novels and a memoir and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies. Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award in 2014, and her previous book, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Her novel Sketchtasy, was one of NPR's Best Books of 2018. She lives in Seattle.