Avram Alpert teaches writing and comparative literature at Princeton University, where he co-directs the Public Scholarship Initiative. He is also the co-director of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program, a free program for artists, curators, and writers in New York City. His writings focus on how to live well in a damaged world. He has written three books: Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki (2019), A Partial Enlightenment: What Modern Literature and Buddhism Can Teach Us About Living Well Without Perfection (2021), and The Good-Enough Life (2022), which was translated into a half dozen languages. His next book is While We’re Here: On Belonging in This World. He also writes fiction, as well as cultural criticism and political commentary for publications such as Dissent, the Guardian, and The New York Times.

Laura Auricchio is an art historian specializing in France and the United States in the Age of Revolution. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard and her Ph.D. from Columbia. Her scholarship has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Whiting Foundation, and others. Her books include The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered (Alfred A. Knopf), winner of the American Library in Paris book award. She has taught at Connecticut College, Fordham University, and Parsons School of Design, and served as the Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, Dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies at The New School, and Vice Provost for Curriculum and Learning at The New School. In 2024, she joined the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as Vice President.

Joshua Cohen is the author of six novels, one collection of short fiction, and one collection of nonfiction. Called "a major American writer" by The New York Times, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded the 2013 Matanel Prize, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. The Netanyahus won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Ted Conover is the author, most recently, of Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge, a New Yorker best book of 2022. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, an account of his ten months spent working as a corrections officer at New York’s Sing Sing prison, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other books include Rolling Nowhere, Coyotes, Whiteout, The Routes of Man, and Immersion. He has written for publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s. Twice his work has been an answer on “Jeopardy!” Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Marshall Scholarship, he is professor emeritus at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Ann Fabian is Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at Rutgers University, where she also served as Dean of Humanities. She is the author of Card Sharps, Dreams Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in 19th- Century America; The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America; and The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead, and co-editor with Mia Bay of a collection on Race and Retail. Her writing and reviews have appeared in the Journal of American History, William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of the Early Republic, The Chicago Tribune, Raritan Quarterly, The Yale Review, The National Book Review and elsewhere. Supporters of her work include the American Antiquarian Society, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She was president of the Society of American Historians and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and has served on the board of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Council of the American Antiquarian Society and on Pulitzer Prize juries for history and for general non-fiction.

D.D. Guttenplan is a writer, editor, and broadcaster. He is currently special correspondent for The Nation, a magazine he edited from 2019 until 2025. He was also editor of the Jewish Quarterly and produced the film Edward Said: The Last Interview. He is the author of four books: The Next Republic: The Rise of a New Radical Majority; The Holocaust on Trial; The Nation: A Biography; and American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone, which was awarded the Sperber Prize for biography. His radio work for the BBC includes War, Lies and Audiotape (a documentary about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the origins of the American war in Vietnam) and Archive on 4: Remembering Christopher Hitchens.

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, Reading to You; seven novels, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, The Sorrows of an American, The Summer Without Men, The Blazing World, and Memories of the Future, as well as six essay collections, Yonder; A Plea for Eros; Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting; Living, Thinking, Looking; A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women; Mothers, Fathers, and Others and several works of nonfiction including The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves and Ghost Stories, published in May 2026. Hustvedt has a PhD from Columbia University in English Literature and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction (2014). In 2019, she was awarded the European Essay Prize from the Charles Veillon Foundation for The Delusions of Certainty, an essay on the mind/body problem, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, The Sigourney Award for Psychoanalysis, and the Princess of Asturias Award in Spain for the body of her work. Her books have been translated into over thirty languages.

Daniel Kehlmann is a novelist and playwright whose works include the novels Measuring the World, Tyll and The Director, as well as the TV show Kafka.

Shane McCrae is the author of 10 full-length books of poetry, most recently New and Collected Hell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025). He has edited a volume of John Berryman's uncollected Dream Songs, titled Only Sing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), and is the poetry editor for Image. McCrae's awards include a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Writer's Award, and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Erroll McDonald is Vice President and Executive Editor at Alfred A. Knopf. In his decades-long career, he has published four winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Kazuo Ishiguro, Toni Morison, and Wole Soyinka. Other writers he has published include: Toni Cade Bambara, Romare Bearden, Harold Bloom, Italo Calvino, Patrick Chamoiseau, Sandra Cisneros, Julio Cortazar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Margo Jefferson, Randall Kennedy, Laila Lalami, Fran Lebowitz, Wangari Maathai, Jay McInerney, Albert Murray, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Richard Pryor, Manuel Puig, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Lucy Sante, Nina Simone, Robert Farris Thompson, Henry Threadgill, Colm Toibin, and John Edgar Wideman. McDonald is a recipient of the American Book Award for Editor/Publisher and of the Distinguished Leadership in Literacy Award from Literacy Partners. McDonald has served as chair of the board of directors of the Center for Fiction, and as a trustee of PEN America, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Brearley School and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She has been awarded translation grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and English PEN, a residency from the Hawthornden Foundation, and the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. Her other translations and co-translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and Kaoru Takamura. As co-organizer and co-host of the Translating the Future conference, she helped to draft the Manifesto on Literary Translation. She is a founding member of the translator collectives Cedilla & Co. and Strong Women, Soft Power, is on the steering committee of the Literary Translators Division for the National Writers Union, and maintains the database Japanese Literature in English. She has taught literary translation at Hunter College (CUNY).

Clay Risen is a reporter at The New York Times and the author of several books on American history, including, most recently, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America (2025), which was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune. He also writes frequently on the history of American whiskey, both for The Times and in books like American Whiskey, Bourbon and Rye: A Guide to the Nation's Favorite Spirit. He is a member of the Society of American Historians. A graduate of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and the University of Chicago, he lives with his family in Brooklyn.

Wendy S. Walters is the author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal; Troy, Michigan; Longer I Wait, More You Love Me, and the forthcoming, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint. For The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she co-curated the exhibition Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast which was called “a masterclass in presenting complicated, troubling art.” She also co-edited the volume Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux's Why Born Enslaved! Reconsidered. Her work has recently received support from Creative Capital; NYSCA and The Architectural League of New York; and Mass MoCA. She has written for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Yale Review, Harper’s and others, on subjects ranging from local history to objects to books and opera. Walters is an associate professor of nonfiction in the Writing Program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

Matt Weiland is a Vice President and Senior Editor at W. W. Norton & Company. Authors he has worked with include André Aciman, Andrea Barrett, Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, John Lanchester, Robert Macfarlane, Mary Norris, Joe Sacco, Shankar Vedantam, and Adelle Waldman. He previously worked at Ecco, Granta, the Paris Review, the Baffler, and NPR’s documentary radio unit, American RadioWorks. Weiland is the co-editor of three anthologies: State by State and The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup (with Sean Wilsey), and Commodify Your Dissent (with Thomas Frank). He has contributed the introductions to the NYRB Classics reissues of Names on the Land by George R. Stewart and to Akenfield by Ronald Blythe. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, Bookforum, Slate, and elsewhere.