Kristen is the author of the New York Times-bestselling novel Mostly Dead Things and the award-winning collection Felt in the Jaw. A queer writer based in Florida, she has written for The New York Times, Guernica, McSweeney's, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and a winner of the Ninth Letter Literary Award in Fiction and the Coil Book Award.

Kai is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who has published biographies of John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Ames-and now The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. He has also authored a memoir about his childhood in the Middle East. He is the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His next book is a biography of Roy Cohn. His biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, co-authored with the late Martin J. Sherwin, is the inspiration for Christopher Nolan's film, Oppenheimer.

James is an accounting professor emeritus from the University of Southern Mississippi. He has held various types of teaching and administrative positions at six universities including Ole Miss. Crockett is a CPA and he has published several accounting-related articles and monographs. The University Press of Mississippi published four of his books: Operation Pretense, Hands in the Till, Power Greed Hubris and Rulers of the SEC. Nautilus published his latest book When Mississippi Schooled America in Baseball. He and his wife Dorothy live in Madison where they are active members of First Baptist Church. The Crocketts have two sons four grandchildren and a great grandson. Jim is a huge baseball fan and attempts to golf occasionally. These days his primary activities are reading and writing.

Beth Ann has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, all with W. W. Norton. She is also the author of 3 books of prose: Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs; Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother, a collection of essays; and The Tilted World, a novel co-authored with her husband Tom Franklin. Beth Ann's poetry has been in over fifty anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Poets of the New Century, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year.

Melissa is the author of the poetry collections Doll Apollo and Dear Weather Ghost, the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City, and three poetry chapbooks, Arbor, Double Blind, and Apollo. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Image, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Fence, Southwest Review, and other magazines. Originally from Houston, Texas, Melissa studied poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Mississippi and serves as Associate Editor of Tupelo Quarterly. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Tiffany is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of YA novels Monday's Not Coming, Allegedly, Let Me Hear A Rhyme, Grown, White Smoke, Santa in The City, The Weight of Blood, and co-author of Blackout. A Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe New Talent Award-winner and the NAACP Image Award-nominee, she received her bachelor of arts in film from Howard University and has over a decade in TV/Film experience. The Brooklyn native is currently splitting her time between the borough she loves and the south, most likely multitasking.

Aimee is the author of the New York Times bestselling illustrated collection of nature essays World of Wonders, chosen as Barnes & Noble's Book of the Year and as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She has published four award-winning poetry collections and is the poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the storytelling branch of the Sierra Club. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family and is a professor of English and creative writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.