Victor LaValle is the author of six previous works of fiction. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, the Shirley Jackson Award and the Key to Southeast Queens.

He lives in New York with his wife and children and teaches at Columbia University.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of Signal to Noise, named one of the best books of 2015 by BuzzFeed and more; Certain Dark Things, a Publishers Weekly top ten; The Beautiful Ones, a fantasy of manners; and the science fiction novella Prime Meridian. She has also edited several anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award-winning She Walks in Shadows (a.k.a. Cthulhu's Daughters). Born and brought up in Mexico, she now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Lauren Beukes is the award-winning and internationally best-selling South African author of The Shining Girls, Zoo City and Broken Monsters, among other works. Her novels have been published in 24 countries and are being adapted for film and TV. She's also a screenwriter, comics writer journalist and award-winning documentary maker. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa with her daughter and two troublesome cats.

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; Koolaids; The Hakawati; and the story collection, The Perv.

Ibi Zoboi was born in Haiti, and holds an MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her writing has been published in The New York Times Book Review, and The Rumpus, among others. She is the author of American Street, a US National Book Award finalist. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and three children.

Sofia Samatar’s (she/her) first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, won the 2014 William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. She also received the 2014 Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

Her novel The Winged Histories completed the Olondria duology, and was followed by Tender: Stories, Monster Portraits (with the artist Del Samatar), and The White Mosque: A Memoir. Sofia lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University.

Katherena Vermette is a Metis writer from Treaty One territory, the heart of the Metis nation, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Her first book, North End Love Songs (The Muses Company) won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. Her National Film Board short documentary, this river, won the Coup de Coeur at the Montreal First Peoples Festival and the 2017 Canadian Screen Award for Best Short.

The Break, her first novel, was bestseller in Canada and won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, and the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award. The Break was also shortlisted for a Governor General's Literary Award, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was a 2017 Canada Reads finalist.