Glaydah Namukasa is a midwife and writer and a member of the Uganda Women Writers’ Association, FEMRITE. Her young adult novel, Voice of a Dream, won the Macmillan Writers Prize for Africa-Senior Prize. Her novel The Deadly Ambition won her the Michael and Marilee Fairbanks International Fellowship to attend the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. Her short stories have been published in anthologies in Uganda, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. She has written three books for children, all published under Pan African, Macmillan. She has been a visiting writer in residence at City of Asylum Pittsburgh and Ledig House International Writers’ Residence.

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian short story writer, novelist, and journalist based in New York. She is a senior correspondent for the Arabic daily al-Araby al-Jadeed. She has published two novels in Arabic, Sariq al-Nawm (The Sleep Thief, 2011) and Sifr al-Ikhtifaa (The Book of Disappearance, 2014), whose English translation, by Sinan Antoon, is forthcoming from Syracuse University Press in 2019. Some of her writings have been translated and published in French, German, and English in several anthologies and journals. She is working on her third novel and pursuing an MA in Social Work from NYU’s Silver school.

Amir Ahmadi Arian is an Iranian novelist and journalist. He has written two critically acclaimed novels and a book of nonfiction in Farsi. In English, his short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Guernica, Witness magazine, Lithub, Asymptote, Massachusetts Review, and more. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Queensland, Australia, and an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. He currently teaches literature and creative writing at City College in New York.

Silvana Paternostro is a Colombian-born author and journalist who resides in New York City. She is the author of In The Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture, translated into Spanish and Portuguese; My Colombian War: A Journey Through The Country I Left Behind; and Soledad & Compañía: Un retrato oral de Gabriel García Márquez, forthcoming in English in a translation by Edith Grossman.