Miguel Syjuco is a Filipino writer, civil society advocate, and professor at New York University Abu Dhabi. His debut novel, Ilustrado, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Palanca Awards Grand Prize, his country’s top literary honor. He has worked as a contributing opinion writer for The International New York Times, written for many of the world’s most respected publications, and spoken on Philippine politics and culture at the World Forum for Democracy and the World Economic Forum. He serves on the advisory councils of both the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, an arts residency program, and the Resilience Fund, a project by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime to empower communities most threatened by criminality.
Cody Caetano is a writer of Anishinaabe and Portuguese descent and an off-reserve member of Pinaymootang First Nation. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto, where he wrote this memoir under the mentorship of Lee Maracle. Excerpts of Half-Bads in White Regalia earned him a 2020 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose.
Deborah Levy is the author of seven novels, including Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved, Billy and Girl, Swimming Home and Hot Milk, and two volumes of memoir, Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living. Both Swimming Home and Hot Milk were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her short story collection, Black Vodka, was nominated for the International Frank O’Connor short story award and was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, as were her acclaimed dramatizations of Freud’s iconic case studies, Dora, and The Wolfman. Levy has written for The Royal Shakespeare Company, and her pioneering theater writing is collected in Levy: Plays 1. Deborah Levy is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
Marjorie Celona’s debut novel, Y, won France’s Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Héroïne and was nominated for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her work has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, The Sunday Times, and elsewhere. Born and raised on Vancouver Island, Marjorie teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Oregon.
Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is a writer and scholar from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His second book of poetry, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, was longlisted for Canada Reads 2020. A recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and an Indspire Award, Belcourt is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at UBC.