Tre Johnson is an author and freelance writer known for his work on race, culture, and politics, with recent bylines in publications like The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Vox, and The New York Time…
Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor i…
George Saunders was born December 2, 1958 and raised on the south side of Chicago. In 1981 he received a B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He worked at…
bell hooks (deliberately in lower-case; born Gloria Jean Watkins) was an African-American author, feminist, and social activist. Her writing focused on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender…
Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d’études mondiales in Paris. He is the author of numerous prize-…
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS is the author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, and Quiet Dell. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bunting Fellow…
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers was born in 1967 and grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. Her work examines culture, religion, race, and family. Her first book, The Gospel of Barbecue (200…
Ben H. Winters is the author most recently of the novel The Quiet Boy (Mulholland/Little, Brown, 2021). He is also the author of the novel Golden State; the New York Times bestselling Underground Airl…
Jesmyn Ward is the author of Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, and Men We Reaped. She is a former Stegner Fellow (Stanford University) and Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Miss…
ANGELA FLOURNOY is the author of The Wilderness. Her debut novel, The Turner House, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The novel won the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize and was also a finalist f…
OYINKAN BRAITHWAITE is a graduate of Creative Writing and Law from Kingston University. Following her degree, she worked as an assistant editor at Kachifo, a Nigerian publishing house, and has been fr…
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with t…
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibriu…
Addie E. Citchens was born in the Mississippi Delta and lives in New Orleans. A graduate of Jackson State University, she studied at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her work has appeared in Th…
Michiko Aoyama was born in 1970 in Aichi Prefecture, Honshu, Japan. After university, she became a reporter for a Japanese newspaper based in Sydney before moving back to Japan to work as a magazine e…
Pittsburgh native Damon Young is the editor-in-chief of VerySmartBrothas (VSB) and a professional Black person. He enjoys selfies with his infant daughter, getting hurt playing pick-up basketball, and…
Andrea Long Chu is a writer, critic, academic living in Brooklyn. Her first book, published by Verso, is Females. As an essayist, her work has appeared in n+1, Boston Review, The New York Times, New Y…
Roy Wood Jr. is a two-time Emmy-nominated writer and producer. The comedian, actor, and podcaster is primarily known for his stand-up comedy and work as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily S…
Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American author and screenwriter from California. Described as “the funniest, most poignant novel of the year” by Vogue, her debut novel Disorientation was a New York …
Jamison Shea was once a flautist, violist, anthropologist, linguist, choreographer, dancer, professional fire alarm puller, digital producer, and account executive—but they've always been a writer.
