Derrick D. Barnes is from Kansas City, MO. He is a graduate of Jackson State University with a BA degree in Marketing. He is the author of the critically acclaimed picture book CROWN: An Ode To The Fresh Cut (Denene Millner Books/Agate Bolden) which won a multitude of literary awards, making it one of the most decorated picture books in the history of children's literature.

Shane Bauer is a senior reporter for Mother Jones. His most recent book, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment was named one of the 10 best books of 2018 by the New York Times and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, memoirist, and lawyer. His writing grapples with the central role of incarceration to the American experience. His next collection of poetry, Felon, will be published in 2019 by Norton. His previous collection, Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015) received the 2016 PEN New England Award in Poetry.

Alex Bergman works primarily in three-dimensional media including fibers, alternative photography, and functional ceramics. Bergman is a frequent poet at Columbia’s OneMic poetry events, as well as a guest poet at Columbia College’s Night of Unity. Bergman’s fine art has been exhibited in solo and group shows across Boone County since 2015.

Grant H. Blackwell A.K.A BWELL or Eddy English, is a visual artist, poet, novelist and scholar born in the Saint Louis 80s. He is the author of Ant Life and Marie. Blackwell is a founding member of IndyGround Entertainment and the Big Black Lies (BBL) art crew. As a graduate of the University of Missouri--Columbia, BWELL is a father on necessity's path for a daughter and life to emulate.

Jenna Blum is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of THOSE WHO SAVE US, THE STORMCHASERS, and THE LOST FAMILY. She is one of Oprah’s Top 30 Women Writers and interviewed Holocaust survivors for the Stephen Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.

Blaire Briody is an award-winning journalist and the author of The New Wild West (St. Martin's Press/Macmillan), which tells the story of North Dakota's oil boom and how a small town suddenly became the new frontier of U.S. energy independence.

Wesley Brown is the author of three published novels, Tragic Magic, Darktown Strutters, Push Comes to SHOVE; a short story collection, Dance of the Infidels; four produced plays, Boogie Woogie and Booker T, Life During Wartime, A Prophet Among Them, and Dark Meat on a Funny Mind.

Based in Chapel Hill, NC, Milbre Burch is a GRAMMY-nominated spoken word recording artist and an internationally known storyteller. A produced and published playwright, she has performed and taught across the US, Europe and Asia.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli is author of What Runs Over with YesYes Books, which was a 2017 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in transgender poetry and a finalist for the American Book Fest’s Best Book Award. Their second collection, All the Gay Saints, won the 2018 Saturnalia Book Contest and is forthcoming in Spring 2020.

Christopher Castellani's fourth novel, Leading Men, is forthcoming from Viking in February 2019. He is also the author of The Art of Perspective, a collection of essays on point of view in fiction, and three other novels. Christopher works as artistic director of GrubStreet, was a Guggenheim fellow, and is on the faculty of the MFA program at Warren Wilson and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Kate Christensen is the author of seven novels, including The Great Man, which won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and, most recently, The Last Cruise. She is also the author of two culinary memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir.

Aaron Coleman is the author of Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018) and his chapbook, St. Trigger, was selected by Adrian Matejka for the 2015 Button Poetry Prize. A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem Fellow, Aaron’s poems have appeared in journals including Boston Review, Callaloo, and New York Times Magazine.

Garrard Conley is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Boy Erased, which has been translated in over a dozen languages and is now a major motion picture. Conley is also a creator and producer of the podcast UnErased, which explores the history of conversion therapy in America through interviews, historical documents, and archival materials provided by the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C.

Poet and community builder Kevin Coval is the author of 10 books, including A People’s History of Chicago, co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and co-writer of the play This is Modern Art, which premiered at Steppenwolf Theater in 2015. Additionally, he is the Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors — winner of a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions and founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, and co-host of the WGN Radio podcast The Cornerstore.

Miranda S. Craig is a poet and comedienne, born in Kansas City, Missouri and raised practically everywhere else. Her influences are rooted in mysticism, religiosity, spacetime and in attempts at understanding how humans are a part of all this in the first place.

Jocelyn Cullity is the author of Amah & the Silk-Winged Pigeons, winner of the 2018 Best Book Awards in Historical Fiction. The Envy of Paradise will be published in 2019. Jocelyn’s short fiction and essays have been published in the United States, Canada, India, and England; her award-winning documentary set in China, Going to the Sea, aired in Canada and in Europe.

Farah El-Jayyousi is a Palestinian american poet and artist from Columbia, MO. By day, she is the Social Media Director for LaunchGood, the world's largest crowdfunding platform for Muslims. In her free time, she can be found volunteering for the high school youth group at the Islamic Center and abandoning art projects halfway through.

Monica Ferrell is the author of three books of fiction and poetry, most recently the collection You Darling Thing (Four Way, 2018). Her novel The Answer Is Always Yes (Dial Press/Random House) was named one of Booklist's Top Ten Debut Novels of the Year. Her first collection of poems, Beasts for the Chase, was a finalist for the Asian American Writers Workshop Prize in Poetry and won the Sarabande Books Kathryn A. Morton Prize.

Donna Gaines has written for Rolling Stone, MS, the Village Voice, Spin, Newsday and Salon. Her work has been published in underground fanzines, numerous trade and scholarly collections, professional journals and textbooks. Subjects have included music, tattoos, youth, guns, pornography, TV talk shows, suburbia, spirituality, gender culture, technology and intergenerational love.

Sarah Gambito is the author of the poetry collections Loves You (Persea Books), Delivered (Persea Books) and Matadora (Alice James Books). She is Associate Professor of English / Director of Creative Writing at Fordham University and co-founder of Kundiman, a non-profit organization serving writers and readers of Asian American literature.

V.V. Ganeshananthan’s debut novel, Love Marriage, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and chosen one of Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2008, as well as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Atlantic, among others.

Jennifer Haigh is a novelist and short story writer. Her sixth book, the novel Heat and Light, won a 2017 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NPR. Previous books have won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in fiction, and have been published in eighteen languages.

Kristin Hoganson’s newly-released The Heartland:  An American History is her fourth book, proceeded by Fighting for American Manhood, Consumers’ Imperium, and American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.

Randall Horton's past honors include the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and most recently GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction for Hook: A Memoir, published by Augury Books/ Brooklyn Art Press.

Walidah Imarisha is an educator, writer, public scholar and spoken word artist. She has co-edited two anthologies including Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements. Imarisha’s nonfiction book Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption won a 2017 Oregon Book Award. She is also the author of the poetry collection Scars/Stars, and is currently working on an Oregon Black history book, forthcoming from AK Press.

Marcel Jaentschke is a Graduate Student at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Mizzou. He has published two poetry collections in Spanish: Sobre el desasosiego, and Dilatada República de las luces. In 2015 he published his first novel: Anotaciones a la Banana Republic.

Lynda Cohen Loigman received a B.A. in English and American Literature from Harvard College and a law degree from Columbia Law School. Lynda wrote The Two-Family House while she was a student of the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College.

Joanna Luloff’s short story collection The Beach at Galle Road was published by Algonquin Books (2012) and was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her novel Remind Me Again What Happened, also with Algonquin, came out in June, 2018. Her stories and essays have appeared in several journals, including The Missouri Review, Western Humanities Review, The Cincinnati Review and New South.

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novel The Great Believers, short-listed for the 2018 National Book Award and ALA Carnegie Medal, as well as The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime -- four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories.

Bobbie Ann Mason is best known for Shilo and Other Stories and the novels In Country and The Girl in the Blue Beret. Her many awards include the PEN/Hemingway Award; the Arts and Letters Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Southern Book Critics Circle Award; and the Kentucky Book Award. Her memoir, Clear Springs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio, CantoMundo and the Knight Foundation, and awards from Independent Publisher Book Awards and the Academy of American Poets. She is poetry editor at The Missouri Review and fiction editor at Pleiades.

Sarah McCoy is the New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of Marilla of Green Gables; The Mapmaker's Children; The Baker's Daughter, a 2012 Goodreads Choice Award Best Historical Fiction nominee; the novella "The Branch of Hazel" in Grand Central; The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico; and Le souffle des feuilles et des promesses (Pride and Providence).

Marc McKee is the author of one chapbook and four full-length collections of poetry: What Apocalypse?, Fuse, Bewilderness, Consolationeer, and the forthcoming Meta Meta Make-Belief, all from Black Lawrence Press. His poetry appears widely in online and print journals.

Joan Morgan is an award-winning cultural critic, feminist author and a pioneering hip-hop journalist. Morgan coined the term “hip-hop feminism” in 1999, when she published the groundbreaking book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down. Her most recent book is She Begat This: 20 Years of the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

Natalie Y. Moore is a reporter at WBEZ-Chicago. Natalie is the author of The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, winner of the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and a Buzzfeed best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation.  

Mary Morris is the author of sixteen books - eight novels, including most recently Gateway to the Moon (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2018), three collections of short stories, and four travel memoirs, including the travel classic, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone (Houghton Mifflin, 1988), and an anthology of travel literature.

James Mustich began his career in bookselling at an independent bookstore in Briarcliff Manor, New York, in the early 1980s. In 1986, he co-founded the acclaimed book catalog, A Common Reader, and was for two decades its guiding force. He subsequently has worked as an editorial and product development executive in the publishing industry. He lives with his wife, Margot, in Connecticut.

Phong Nguyen is the author of a novel, The Adventures of Joe Harper (Outpost19, 2016), and two story collections: Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History (Queens Ferry Press, 2014) and Memory Sickness and Other Stories (Elixir Press, 2011), winner of the Elixir Press Prize for Fiction. His individual stories have appeared in more than 50 national literary journals.

José Orduña was born in Córdoba, Veracruz and immigrated to Chicago when he was two years old. His work explores the ways power has determined his and others' existence as racialized subjects of the United States. His first book, The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement was published in 2016 by Beacon Press.

Joanna Rakoff is the author of the memoir My Salinger Year, an international bestseller—which is currently being adapted for film by Oscar-nominated director Philippe Falardeau--and the novel A Fortunate Age, which won the Goldberg Prize for Fiction. Her new memoir, The Fifth Passenger, is forthcoming from Little, Brown.

A Mississippi native, Treasure Shields Redmond is a published poet, master educator, community arts organizer, and successful entrepreneur. Treasure was raised in the federal housing projects, and went on to be signed to M.C. Hammer’s label as a hip hop artist and writer. She is the author of chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie lou hamer (2015).

Steven Rowley is the bestselling author of LILY AND THE OCTOPUS, currently in development as a feature film by Amazon Studios. His new novel, THE EDITOR (April 2019), has already been optioned for a feature film by Fox2000 and he is writing the screenplay for director Greg Berlanti. Prior to becoming a novelist, Rowley worked as a freelance writer, newspaper columnist and screenwriter.

The recipient of a 2006 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (“Genius” Award), George Saunders is the author of a novel, four collections of short stories, a novella, a book of essays, and an award-winning children’s book. His long-awaited novel and most recent book, Lincoln in the Bardo, was published in 2017.

Paula Saunders’ first book, The Distance Home, was long-listed for The Center for Fiction’s 2018 First Novel Prize. She lives in California with her husband.

Jay Sexton is the inaugural Kinder Institute Chair in Constitutional Democracy and Professor of History. Sexton wrote his most recent book right here in CoMo, in between walks with his dog on the MKT trail. A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic Books, 2018) argues that international forces have shaped the course of U.S. history during its greatest moments of transformative change.

Stuart Smith is a third generation Hickman High School graduate. He graduated from Mizzou with a degree in English and an emphasis in creative writing for poetry, and then spent time in New York City and Portland, Oregon. Now back again in Columbia, he is working on a memoir, helps coach high school sports teams, and also works as a substitute teacher and bartender.

Javaka Steptoe won the 2017 Caldecott Medal for his picture book biography Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (Little, Brown). The book won many other honors, including the 2017 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award. His debut picture book, In Daddy’s Arms I Am Tall: African Americans Celebrating Fathers, earned him a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, in addition to a nomination for Outstanding Children’s Literature Work at the 1998 NAACP Image Awards.

Natalia Sylvester’s work has appeared in Bustle, Catapult, Electric Literature, Latina magazine, and the Austin American-Statesman. Natalia’s first novel, Chasing the Sun, was named the Best Debut Book of 2014 by Latinidad. Her latest novel, Everyone Knows You Go Home, won an International Latino Book Award and has been named one of the Best Books of 2018 by Real Simple magazine.

Whitney Terrell’s most recent novel, The Good Lieutenant (FSG) was selected as a best book of 2016 by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and Refinery 29. It was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. He is also the author of The Huntsman, a New York Times notable book, and The King of Kings County.

Laura van den Berg is the author of two short story collections and two novels, most recently The Third Hotel. Her honors include the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an O. Henry Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.

Chris Ware is an award-winning spoken word artist, actor and musician. When not onstage, he works as a teaching artist, aiding children in discovering their own artistic talents. Chris also teaches computer-aided design and machining classes at the MADE in STL Maker Space, giving others the tools to create what they may.

Crystal Wilkinson is the award-winning author of The Birds of Opulence (winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence), Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in the Oxford American and Southern Cultures.

Karma Wilson has had more than 30 books accepted for publication. Her books have received numerous state and national awards, been translated into dozens of languages, and a few have made an appearance on the New York Times bestseller list.

Cherise Wolas’s highly acclaimed debut novel, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, was published in August 2017. The Family Tabor, her second novel, was published in July 2018 in the US and in August 2018 in the UK.

Jacqueline Woodson is one of the most beloved writers of children’s literature working today. She has won just about every available award and prize (including, to name just a few, the Caldecott Medal, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Newbery Honor Medal and, ahem, a NATIONAL BOOK AWARD.) She is also the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate, and this year the Library of Congress appointed her National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

Deborah Zemke has written and/or illustrated more than fifty books for young readers. These range from the popular Doodles drawing books to the acclaimed Bea Garcia chapter book series. Her newest book, Bea Garcia: The Tree and Me, comes out this May. Deborah is a frequent contributor to Ranger Rick magazine and the designer of the ITC Zemke Hand font.