Emily St. John Mandel’s five previous novels include The Glass Hotel, which has been translated into twenty-five languages, and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, was the basis of a limited series on HBO Max, and has been translated into thirty-seven languages. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

Credit: JiaHao Peng

Charles Yu is the author of four books, including Interior Chinatown, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, and Wired, among other publications. He lives in Southern California with his wife, Michelle, and their two children.

Ruth Dickey has spent over twenty-five years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art, now as executive director of the National Book Foundation. Dickey previously had the pleasure of leading organizations in Washington, DC; New Orleans; Cincinnati; and, most recently, in Seattle, as executive director of Seattle Arts & Lectures. An ardent fan of dogs and coffee, she served as a fiction judge for the 2019 National Book Awards and holds an MFA in poetry from UNC Greensboro, as well as a BS in foreign service and an MA in Latin American studies from Georgetown University.