John Wray is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Right Hand of Sleep and Canaan's Tongue. He was named one of Granta magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2007. The recipient of a Whiting Award, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Marlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1970. His first novel, John Crow's Devil (Akashic Books, 2005) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was a New York Times Editors' Choice. The novel will be published in the United Kingdom and Italy in 2008. A new novel, The Book of Night Women will be published by Riverhead Books, also in 2008.

He graduated from The University of the West Indies in 1991 with a B.A in Literature, and Wilkes University in 2006 with an M.A. in Creative Writing. At Wilkes he was awarded Norman Mailer's Norris Church Mailer Scholarship for Creative Writing. His short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Iron Balloons (2006), Bronx Noir (2007) and Silent Voices (2007) for which he received a Pushcart Prize nomination. His non-fiction has appeared in the Caribbean Review of Books.

He has taught at the Calabash International Literary Festival Workshop in Kingston Jamaica for two years. More recently he has taught at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City and was a judge for the PEN Beyond Margins Award.

Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009). He is a graduate of NYU's Graduate Creative Writing Program, and received a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. Wilson held a National Research Council Ford Foundation fellowship, a winter residency with the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and summer residencies with Djerassi, and Yaddo. He teaches creative writing and African American poetics at Mount Holyoke College.