CAROL ANDERSON is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and chair of African American Studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955, which was awarded the Myrna F. Bernath Book Award and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award and was selected as a finalist for the Truman Book Award and the W. E. B. Du Bois Book Award.
JERICHO BROWN has published two poetry collections, Please and The New Testament, and has been the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Book Award, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. He is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta.
GARNETTE CADOGAN is editor-at-large of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (coedited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro). He is currently a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He writes about culture and the arts for various publications, and is at work on a book about walking.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT, born in Haiti and raised in New York, has written both fiction and nonfiction for adults and children. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was finalist for the National Book Award, as was her short story collection Krik? Krak! She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow.
RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH is an essayist and critic whose writing has appeared in the Believer, Rolling Stone, the Paris Review, Transition, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the National Magazine Award, and she is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Her first book, The Explainers and Explorers, examines twenty-first-century America within the context of what it means to be black, brave, and self-defined, and it will be published by Scribner in 2017.
MITCHELL S. JACKSON is the author of The Residue Years, which won the Ernest J. Gaines Award and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He is a recipient of a Whiting Award and teaches writing at NYU, where he earned an MFA in creative writing.
HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS is a poet, fiction writer, and critic. She is the author of four books of poetry and is at work on her first novel. Her fifth poetry book, in progress, The Age of Phillis, imagines the life and times of the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley, the first (known) black woman to publish a book. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, Jeffers is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, an organization to which fourteen U.S. presidents have been elected. She teaches at the University of Oklahoma.
KIMA JONES’S work has appeared in Guernica, NPR, PANK, Scratch Magazine, and The Rumpus, and she has received fellowships from PEN Center USA, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony.
KIESE LAYMON is associate professor of English and Africana Studies at Vassar College and a recent Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of the novel Long Division, which was selected as a best book of 2013 by Buzzfeed, The Believer, Salon, Guernica, Library Journal, and the Chicago Tribune, and an essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He is a columnist at The Guardian, and his forthcoming memoir, Heavy, will be published by Scribner.
DANIEL JOSÉ OLDER is the author of the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series (Roc Books, 2015 and 2016) and the Young Adult novel Shadowshaper (Scholastic, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature. He coedited the Locus and World Fantasy Award–nominated anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. You can find Daniel’s thoughts on writing, read dispatches from his decadelong career as an NYC paramedic, and hear his music at danieljoseolder.net and @djolder on Twitter.
EMILY RABOTEAU is the author of The Professor’s Daughter: A Novel and Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, winner of the 2014 American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. Her distinctions include a Pushcart Prize, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award. She is a professor of English at the City College of New York, in Harlem, where she codirects the MFA program in creative writing. Her next novel is in the works.
CLAUDIA RANKINE is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2015, the PEN/Open Book Award, the PEN Literary Award, and the NAACP Image Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in California, where she is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
CLINT SMITH is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a doctoral candidate in education at Harvard University. He was a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and has two popular TED Talks, The Danger of Silence and How to Raise a Black Son in America. His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The American Literary Review. He is the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY is the author of four poetry collections, Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia; Native Guard (which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize) and Thrall, as well as a book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Her column, “Poem,” appears weekly in the New York Times Magazine. She teaches at Emory University as the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and creative writing and has served for two terms as the United States Poet Laureate (2012–14).
WENDY S. WALTERS is the author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal; Troy, Michigan; Longer I Wait, More You Love Me; and a chapbook, Birds of Los Angeles. She is associate professor of creative writing and literature at The New School.
ISABEL WILKERSON is the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, awarded for her coverage of the 1993 Midwestern floods and for her profile of a ten-year-old boy caring for his four siblings. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2010.
KEVIN YOUNG has edited five collections of poetry and published eight poetry collections of his own, including For the Confederate Dead, Book of Hours, and Jelly Roll, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, as well as Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995–2015. He is also the author of The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, an encyclopedic nonfiction book examining through Jay Z’s The Black Album and The Beatles’s The White Album how African American culture is in many ways American culture, which won the Pen/Open Book Award and the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.