Kristen Radtke is the art director and New York editor of The Believer magazine and the film and video editor of TriQuarterly magazine. She lives in New York. Imagine Wanting Only This is her first book.

Wayne Koestenbaum is a cultural critic and academic based in New York.

ROBERT ATWAN has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986.,

Elena Passarello is an actor, writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award.

Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts, and most recently in the UK, Bluets. She teaches at University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author of twenty books of essays, fiction, poems, and nonfiction, among them the novels Mink River, The Plover, and Martin Marten. Honors for his work include the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award in Literature. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Vivian Gornick is the author of several books, including the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments, the essay collections The End of the Novel of Love, The Men in My Life, and The Odd Woman and the City.

She began her career as a staff writer for The Village Voice in 1969, and her work has since appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and many other publications.