Francisco Goldman has published five novels and two books of non-fiction. His books have been published in 16 languages. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the NY Public Library and a Berlin Fellow at the American Academy. He has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The Believer and many other publications. He lives in Mexico City.

Tommy Orange was born and raised in Oakland, California. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.

Tommy currently teaches at the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, the New York Times bestselling Hundred Years Trilogy.

She is also the author of several works of non-fiction and books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in Northern California.

Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African, its sequel, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls. He holds a B.A. from Yale, a M.F.A. in screenwriting from the Tisch School fo the Arts, a Master's degree in droit economique from Sciences Po, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School.

His fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, Omenana Magazine, Uncanny, and Lightspeed. His non-fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. Riot Baby is his adult fiction debut.