Valerie Boyd was the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Georgia, where she founded and directed the low-residency MFA in narrative nonfiction, opening doors for women and people of color and establishing a community of writers and editors that continues to flourish. The New York Times called her “an electrifying essayist and an energizing mentor.” A scholar of the Black archive, she was author of the critically acclaimed Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston and editor of Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker. Boyd was formerly arts editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and senior consulting editor at the Bitter Southerner. She wrote for the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Bon Appétit, ESSENCE, and the Oxford American, among many others.
Alice Walker is the acclaimed author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. In 1983, she became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel The Color Purple, which also won the National Book Award. Among her other books are The Temple of My Familiar, Meridian, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, edited by Valerie Boyd.
Kiese Laymon is a Black Southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of the novel Long Division, the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the New York Times best-selling Heavy: An American Memoir.
Deesha Philyaw’s debut story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020 / 2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
Jason Reynolds is an award-winning and New York Times best-selling author of many books, including Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, a collaboration with Ibram X. Kendi; Long Way Down; Look Both Ways; and the Track series.
Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation and Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, winner of the 2019 Bograd-Weld Biography Prize from the Pen America Foundation. She is also the author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation; and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago, lives outside Philadelphia with her two sons.
Emily Bernard is the author of Black Is the Body, winner of the Los Angeles Times–Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. She is a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont.
Destiny O. Birdsong is the author of the poetry collection Negotiations, which was published by Tin House Books in 2020 and longlisted for the 2021 PEN / Voelcker Award, and the triptych novel Nobody’s Magic, which was published by Grand Central in 2022.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is a two-time Emmy nominee, as well as a Golden Globe, Critics Choice, BAFTA, and Oscar nominee. Her essays appear in TIME and EBONY, and on CNN. She is the coauthor, with her sister, of the forthcoming graphic novel Neshoba, published by Amistad / HarperCollins. She lives proudly somewhere in backwoods Wi-Fi Never Works, Mississippi.
Karen Good Marable is an Atlanta-based writer whose byline has been featured in books and magazines including the New Yorker, the Bitter Southerner, and ESSENCE. She is particularly proud of the essay in this anthology. In late July 2020, while originally penning “Joyride” for the Oxford American, her family contracted Covid. Through phlegm, short breath, no taste, and worry, still she wrote—and is grateful to tell the tale.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of five books of poetry, including The Gospel of Barbecue and The Age of Phillis, and one novel, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois. A native southerner, Jeffers now lives on the prairie and teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma.
Khadijah Queen, PhD, is the author of six books, most recently Anodyne, published by Tin House Books in 2020 and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, published by YesYes Books in 2017. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech.
