‘Pemi Aguda ‍ ‍is from Lagos, Nigeria. She is the author of One Leg on Earth and Ghostroots, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Awards in Fiction, the LA Times First Fiction Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and her short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, a Nommo Award for Short Story, a Henfield Prize, and the Writivism Prize. Her work has been supported by an Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship. W. W. Norton published Ghostroots in 2024, and will publish her novel, One Leg on Earth, in May 2026.

Photo credit: IfeOluwa Nihinlola

Hannah Lillith Assadi‍’s‍ ‍third novel Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, was published by Knopf in March, 2026. She is the author of Sonora (Soho 2017), which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her second novel The Stars Are Not Yet Bells (Riverhead 2022) was named a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Her third novel Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, is forthcoming from Knopf on March 17, 2026. She teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. In 2018, she was named a '5 under 35' honoree by the National Book Foundation.

Photo credit: Jordan Ledy

Michael Lowenthal‍ ‍is the author of a story collection, Sex with Strangers, and four novels: The Same Embrace, Avoidance, Charity Girl (a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” and a Washington Post “Top Fiction of 2007” pick), and The Paternity Test (an Indie Next selection and a Lambda Literary Award finalist). His shorter work has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, The New York Times Magazine, Guernica, The Southern Review, and many anthologies. The recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Mass Cultural Council, he has taught creative writing at Boston College and Hampshire College. For more than twenty years he was a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University. Lowenthal’s most recent book is a memoir-in-essays, Place Envy, published in February 2026. He lives in Boston and Pittsburgh.

Photo credit: Scott Heim