Anton Bogomazov (he/him) is the adult book buyer at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC. He has been with the store since 2011 and has worked as a floor bookseller, supervisor, inventory manager, and P&P branch store buyer. He is originally from Toronto, Canada. He reads across all genres, but his particular favorites are horror, speculative fiction, and art biographies and essays. His books, dogs, and sky photos can be found on Instagram @genrebending.

Philomena Polefrone (she/her) is Advocacy Associate Manager at ABA, where she is a point person for free expression advocacy, manages the @ABFEFreeExpression Instagram and Facebook accounts, and led the creation of the "ABA Right to Read Toolkit." She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where she taught courses in writing, literature, and political philosophy. When she's not reading or advocating for free expression, diverse books, and LGBTQ+ rights, Philomena prefers to be found knitting in Brooklyn flanked by her beloved cats, Starbuck and Boomer.

LaDarrion Williams is a playwright, filmmaker, author, and screenwriter whose goal is to cultivate a new era of Black fantasy, providing space and agency for Black characters and stories in a new, fresh and fantastical way. He is currently a resident playwright/co-creator of The Black Creators Collective, where his play UMOJA made its West Coast premiere in January 2022 and produced North Hollywood's first Black playwrights festival at the WACO Theater Center. Blood at the Root is his first novel.

Matt Banker is the Founder & Lead Strategist of Banker Creative, a "words-first" website design agency. He is a certified StoryBrand Guide and uses the StoryBrand framework to help businesses write websites that are clear with their messaging and position the customer as the hero in the story that the business is telling. His approach to marketing focuses on empathy, authenticity, and clarity while avoiding salesy gimmicks and fads. You can learn more at bankercreative.com

Angela Cooper serves as Communications Director for the ACLU of Kentucky. She works to determine messaging and strategy to promote the ACLU of Kentucky’s brand, litigation, and advocacy work. Angela lives in Old Louisville with her husband and dogs. She is a lifelong lover of books and is passionate about making her beautiful city and state a better place for her adult son to live by protecting civil liberties.

Martin has over 30 years in HR Management including the last 13 years as a HR Consultant. He has extensive experience in developing compensation and benefit structures, conducting HR Audits and employee investigations, creating employee handbooks, conducting employee and management training, creating job descriptions and working with wage and hour issues. He currently leads a team of 14 highly experienced HR consultants, 4 leave administration specialists and a talent acquisition specialist.

As head of brand strategy for the storied ad agency Goodby and Silverstein, Bonnie Wan has helped the world's most iconic brands align with their essential virtues using a tool called a creative brief. When she found herself on the precipice of her own deep dissatisfaction and doubt, Wan turned that same tool inward. What emerged was The Life Brief, a profound, strategic practice for connecting deeply to the things that create meaning, spark joy, and make life worth living.

Dr. Nicolas Williams is an Associate Professor of Economics in Carl H. Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati. He received his BA from the University of Michigan, and his MA and PhD in Economics from Northwestern University. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Leicester and a visiting professor at Yale University. His research has focused on econometrically investigating job mobility and wage determination, and the employment effects of the minimum wage. Published papers appear in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Labour Economics, Applied Economics, and others.

Alua Arthur is a death doula, a recovering attorney and the founder of Going with Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization. Her TED Talk from April 2023 has received nearly 1.3 million views. She lives in Los Angeles, land of the Chumash and Tongva people.

Zoë Bossiere (they/she) is a writer, editor, and teacher from Tucson, Arizona. They are the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and co-editor of the anthologies The Best of Brevity and The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins. Bossiere currently lives in Oregon with her partner and child. Read more at zoebossiere.com.

adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E. Butler scholarship, and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author of Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, We Will Not Cancel Us, Holding Change, Fables and Spells, and the Grievers novels.

Vanessa Chan was born and raised in Malaysia. Her short stories have been published in Electric Lit, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, and more. She was the 2021 Stanley Elkin scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference and has also received scholar awards to attend the Bread Loaf and Tin House writers’ conferences. The Storm We Made is her first novel.

Caroline Cleveland is a labor and employment lawyer. A native South Carolinian, Caroline grew up in the Lowcountry and earned her Juris Doctorate degree from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1991. When Cicadas Cry is her first novel.

Betty Corrello is a writer, comedian, and proud Philadelphian. Despite her hardened exterior, she is biologically 95% marshmallow. Her greatest passion is writing stories where opposites attract, but love is chosen. When she’s not writing, she can be found fretting about niche historical events most have forgotten­­ — or petting her very tiny dog. Summertime Punchline is her first novel.

Leif Enger grew up in Osakis, Minnesota, and worked as a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio before writing his bestselling debut novel Peace Like a River, which won the Book Sense Award for Fiction. His second novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, was also a national bestseller, a Midwest Booksellers Honor Book, and won the High Plains Book Award for Fiction. His third novel Virgil Wander was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and named a best book of the year by Library Journal. He lives with his wife in Duluth, Minnesota.

Madeline Claire Franklin is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults (VCFA WCYA). When she is not writing strange fiction for young adults, she is probably attempting to dismantle white supremacy and/or practicing witchcraft. She is a queer, Jewish, invisibly disabled woman living in sin in Buffalo, New York, with her partner, two dogs, three cats, and two Roombas, in a little yellow house called Cluckleberry Farms.

Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, a New York Times Critics' Choice; the novella Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize; two chapbooks; and the novel True Love. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Granta, The Baffler, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies. She lives in Denver.

Iman Hariri-Kia is a writer, editor, and author born and based in New York City. A recipient of the Annabelle Bonner Medal and a nationally acclaimed journalist, she covers sex, relationships, identity, and adolescence. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Teen Vogue, Cosmo, Nylon, Bustle, and more.

Erik Larson is the author of six national bestsellers: The Splendid and the Vile, Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and Isaac’s Storm, which have collectively sold more than 10 million copies. His books have been published in nearly 20 countries.

Margaret Juhae Lee is former literary editor of The Nation magazine. She has been the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University, and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korean Foundation. She was a Tin House scholar, and has been awarded residencies at the Mesa Refuge, Anderson Center, and Mineral School. In 2020, she was named "Person of the Year" by the Sangcheol Cultural Welfare Foundation in Kongju, South Korea, for her work in honoring her grandfather, Patriot Lee Chul Ha.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of Brooklyn Crime Novel and twelve other novels. His stories and essays have been collected in six volumes, and his writing has been translated into over thirty languages. He lives in Los Angeles and Maine.

Born in Billings, Montana, Tim O'Leary is the author of Warriors, Workers, Whiners, & Weasels; Dick Cheney Shot Me in the Face, Men Behaving Badly, and, forthcoming, The Corona Verses, to be released in 2024. He graduated from the University of Montana and received his MFA from Pacific University. Tim and his wife Michelle and their yellow lab Pinchot split their time between the Columbia Gorge in Washington state, and Santa Ynez, California.

Ryan Elizabeth Penske is a mix of a Midwest and Southern California upbringing, where she discovered her love for snowy Halloweens in Michigan and the everlasting California sun, but most importantly her love for reading in her early teens. Now, after writing her debut YA novel The Dreamers, she looks forward to completing her MA in English Literature. Between moments of writing and her academic pursuits, Ryan spends her days with her best buddy Indy, her Australian Shepherd.

Erica Ivy Rodgers lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband, two children, and one very lovable, frenetic pit bull mix. When she isn’t writing or driving kids around, you can usually find her starting another DIY home project in the woods, rock climbing, or beneath an ever-growing pile of bookish quilting fabric.

Rainbow Rowell is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eleanor & Park and the Simon Snow Trilogy, as well as several other award-winning novels, short stories, and comics. Rainbow lives in Omaha, Nebraska, just like most of her characters.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and Professor of Practice in Journalism at Denison University. Her favorite job title is Grandma. She is the author of a collection of essays, Life Happens, and a political memoir, ...and His Lovely Wife. Her first novel, The Daughters of Erietown, was a New York Times bestseller in 2020. Schultz lives in Cleveland with her husband, Sherrod Brown, and their two rescue dogs, Franklin and Walter, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Lola's pup, Tank.

Phuc Tran is an award-winning writer, tattooer, and Latin teacher (for which he has won no awards). Cranky is his first children’s book. His memoir Sigh, Gone received the New England Book Award, the Maine Literary Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, Audible, and others. “Phuc” is pronounced like “Luke” but with an F.

Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Over the past decade she has authored 15 young adult books, which have collectively sold more than a million copies. She received a Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor for Piecing Me Together and high praise for 1619 Project: Born on the Water. Watson is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is a member of the Academy of American Poets' Education Advisory Council. Renée splits her time between New York City and Portland, Oregon.

Bill Weir is an award-winning anchor, writer, and producer, and CNN's first Chief Climate Correspondent. He is the host of CNN's original series "The Wonder List with Bill Weir", now streaming on Discovery+. In his network career, Weir reported from all 50 states and more than 100 countries, covering breaking news, and uncovering global trends, earning an Emmy Award for his CNN Special Report: "Eating Planet Earth: The Future of Your Food". This is his first book.

Paul Yamazaki has been the principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers, the legendary San Francisco bookstore and publisher founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin, for more than 50 years. A champion for national and global literature, writers, publishers, and independent bookstores, Yamazaki was the recipient of the National Book Foundation's 2023 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. He has mentored generations of booksellers across America.