Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the author of four books of creative nonfiction: the travel memoirs Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines; All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands; and the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. She also edited Best Women’s Travel Writing in 2010. Winner of a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, she has lectured around the globe, in capacities ranging from a Moth storyteller to a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department.
Airea D. Matthews
Airea D. Matthews is the author of the collections Bread and Circus (Scribner, 2023) and Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Matthews's work has appeared in Callaloo, Best American Poets 2015, Harvard Review, American Poet, and elsewhere. She was awarded a 2016 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, the 2016 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a 2015 Kresge Literary Arts award as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the James Merrill House. She is an associate professor at Bryn Mawr College and serves as Philadelphia’s sixth poet laureate.
Kirstin Valdez Quade
Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds, winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the Maya Angelou Book Award. The Five Wounds was named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, PBS News Hour, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Booklist, and Book Riot. Kirstin’s story collection, Night at the Fiestas, won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Kirstin is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship, the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at Stanford University.
Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Kirstin Valdez Quade