Priyanka Champaneri received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts numerous times. Her debut novel, The City of Good Death, won the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and was shortlisted for the 2021 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

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Eugenia Kim’s debut novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, won the Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a Washington Post Best Historical Novel and Critic’s Pick. Her second novel, The Kinship of Secrets, was a Library Reads pick, and an Amazon Best Book of the Month. She teaches fiction and nonfiction at Fairfield University’s MFA Creative Writing Program.

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Kim Stanley Robinson is a New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt and 2312. In 2008, he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. He lives in Davis, California.

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Richard Powers is the author of thirteen novels, including The Overstory and Orfeo, and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.