Fatimah Asghar is an artist who spans across different genres and themes. A poet, a fiction writer, and a filmmaker, Fatimah cares less about genre and instead prioritizes the story that needs to be told and finds the best vehicle to tell it. Play is critical in the development of their work, as is intentionally building relationship and authentic collaboration. Their first book of poems If They Come For Us explored themes of orphaning, family, Partition, borders, shifting identity, and violence.

Along with Safia Elhillo, they co-edited Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology for Muslim people who are also women, trans, gender non-conforming, and/ or queer. The anthology was built around the radical idea that there are as many ways of being Muslim as there are Muslim people in the world. They also wrote and co-created Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendship among women of color. Their debut lyrical novel, When We Were Sisters, explores sisterhood, orphaning, and alternate family building, and was published in 2022.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. It was a winner of a California Book Award. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice.

Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She is a Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College. She lives in California.

R. O. Kwon is the author of the nationally bestselling novel Exhibit and a recipient of the Lambda Literary Duggins Prize. Kwon’s bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Prize. With Garth Greenwell, Kwon co-edited the bestselling Kink. Kwon’s books have been translated into seven languages and named a best book of the year by over forty publications.

Kwon’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She is a 2025-2026 Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris. Kwon was the Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University and the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College, and has taught at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Workshop, the University of San Francisco, and the Writer’s Center. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.