Corinne Sullivan is the Senior News Editor at Cosmopolitan, where she covers celebrity and entertainment news. She graduated from Boston College in 2014 with a degree in English and creative writing. She went on to receive her MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her stories have appeared in literary magazines such as Night Train, Knee-Jerk, and Pithead Chapel, among other publications, and her 2018 debut novel, Indecent, was included on several “best of” lists. Corinne lives with her family in Jersey City, NJ.

Judy Batalion is a New York Times bestselling author of award-winning nonfiction and fiction. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vogue, among others. Judy has a BA in the History of Science from Harvard, a PhD from the University of London, and has worked as a museum curator and university lecturer. She lives in New York City with her husband and three children.

Garrett Curbow is the author of the Daughter of Light trilogy, which was short-listed for the Publishers Weekly Selfies Award. He lives in Savannah, Georgia. For more information, visit www.garrettcurbow.com

PATRICIA HENLEY taught in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Purdue University for 26 years. She is the author of three novels, five collections of stories, two chapbooks of poetry, and a stage play. Her first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for the National Book Award and The New Yorker Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and other journals. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and other anthologies. Her new collection of stories, Apple & Palm, was published by Cornerstone Press. She currently resides in Kingston, Washington. Learn more at patriciahenleyauthor.com

Sarvat Hasin is a novelist and dramaturg from Pakistan. She has a masters in creative writing from the University of Oxford. Her first novel, This Wide Night, was published by Penguin Random House India and longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her second book, You Can’t Go Home Again, was published in 2018 and featured in Vogue India's and The Hindu's best of the year lists. Her third novel, The Giant Dark, was a runaway critical success, won the Mo Siewcharran Prize, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award. Strange Girls is her US debut.

Mimi Nichter is an award-winning cultural anthropologist and a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Arizona. She is the author of four anthropology-related books and the recipient of the Margaret Mead Award for a book that appeals to a wide public audience. Her latest book, Hostage: A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience was a finalist for the 2026 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, HuffPost, and Brevity.

Ellen Meeropol is the author of the forthcoming Sometimes an Island, a mosaic novel featuring a group of older women facing rebuilding after a climate disaster that changes everything. Her previous books include the climate fiction title Kinship of Clover, as well as the novels The Lost Women of Azalea Court, Her Sister’s Tattoo, On Hurricane Island, and House Arrest. She is guest editor for the anthology Dreams for a Broken World. Essay and story publications include Ms. Magazine, Lilith, The Writer Magazine, The Boston Globe, Solstice Magazine, Guernica, and LitHub. Her work has been a finalist for the Sarton Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and selected by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads. Ellen lives in western Massachusetts, where she is a founding mother of Straw Dog Writers Guild and a member of the WriteAnglesWriters Conference planning committee.

Jennifer Murphy holds an MFA in painting from the University of Denver and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington. She is the recipient of the 2013 Loren D. Milliman Scholarship for creative writing and was a contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference from 2008 through 2012. In 2015, her acclaimed debut novel, I Love You More (Doubleday, 2014), won the prestigious Nancy Pearl Fiction Award. Her love of art led her to start Citi Arts, a public art and urban planning company that has created public art master plans for airports, transit facilities, streetscapes, and cities nationwide. Her most recent book is The Ghost Women.