Cleyvis Natera is an award-winning author, essayist, and critic. Her debut novel, Neruda on the Park, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and winner of a Silver Medal by the International Latino Book Awards for Best First Book of Fiction. Her sophomore novel, The Grand Paloma Resort, was named a best book of 2025 by ELLE, Electric Literature, and CrimeReads. Her other writing has appeared in the Modern Love column in The New York Times, bon appetit, Kirkus, The New York Times Book Review, TIME, The Washington Post, USA TODAY, Pleiades, The Kenyon Review, Aster(ix) and Kweli Journal, among others. Natera has received awards, fellowships and artist residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, PEN America, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Hermitage Artist Retreat, among others. She was the recipient of the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference 2024 Toni Morrison Fiction Fellowship. She is currently a Fulbright Specialist. She joined Montclair State University in the fall of 2024 as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing where she currently leads the development of an M.F.A. in Bilingual Creative Writing Program. Natera is also part of the creative writing faculty at Barnard College of Columbia University and The New School M.F.A. program.

Stephen O’Connor is the author of seven books including two novels, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings and We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, and the short story collection Here Comes Another Lesson. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and his nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, Nation, Boston Globe, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Manhattan.

Sarah Wang is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, editor, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Barnard. She is the author of the novel New Skin (Little, Brown 2026). Her writing across genres focuses on mass incarceration, psychoanalysis, surveillance, colonized bodies, contemporary art, class, race, and feminism. Her fiction, cultural criticism, book reviews, essays, and profiles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, n+1, BOMB, The Los Angeles Review of Books, American Short Fiction, The Believer, McSweeneys, Joyland,Catapult, semiotext(e)’s Animal Shelter, The Shanghai Literary Review, Lux Magazine, The Southern Review, Performa Magazine, The Poetry Project’s The Recluse, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, and The Last Newspaper at the New Museum, among other publications.

Jules Wernersbach is a writer and bookseller in Brooklyn. Their debut novel, Work To Do, came out on April 7, 2026 from University of Iowa Press. Their short fiction has been published in Bennington Review, Heavy Feather Review, and other journals. They are the author of Vegan Survival Guide to Austin and The Swimming Holes of Texas. Jules is co-founder of Hive Mind Books, a queer independent bookstore and coffee shop in Bushwick, Brooklyn. They have been a bookseller for a long time and also served as literary director of the Texas Book Festival.