Authors

Megan Abbott is the author of 10 novels, including Give Me Your Hand, You Will Know Me, The Fever, Dare Me, and The End of Everything. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Guardian, and The Believer, among others. In The Turnout: A Novel (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), Dara and Marie Durant have been dancers since they can remember. Growing up, they were home-schooled and trained by their glamorous mother, the founder of the Durant School of Dance. After their parents died in a tragic accident nearly a dozen years ago, the sisters began running the school together, along with Charlie, Dara’s husband and once their mother’s prized student. Marie, warm and soft, teaches the younger students; Dara, a precise dancer, trains the older ones; and Charlie, sidelined from dancing after years of injuries, rules over the back office. Circling one another, the three have perfected a dance that keeps the studio thriving. But then a suspicious accident occurs, an interloper arrives, and the delicate balance is threatened.

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a poet, the editor of The Book of Ramallah: A City in Short Fiction, and a contributor to A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Irish Times, and Literary Hub. She is also the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, which seeks to encourage reading in Palestinian communities. In You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions), translated by Fady Joudah, the ordinary and profound moments of life under Israeli occupation include art, garlic, taxis, sleepy soldiers at checkpoints, the smell of trash on a winter street, lovers who don’t return, making beds, cleaning up vomit, and reading recipes. Here, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strange moments. “It matters to me,” writes Abu Al-Hayyat, “what you’re thinking now / as you coerce your kids to sleep / in the middle of shelling.” You Can Be the Last Leaf offers a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority.

Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian American writer and political activist. She is the author of Mornings in Jenin and The Blue Between Sky and Water. Born to refugees of the Six Day War of 1967, she moved to the United States as a teenager, graduated college with a degree in biomedical science, and established a career in medical science. In July 2001, she founded Playgrounds for Palestine, a nongovernmental children’s organization dedicated to upholding the right to play for Palestinian children. In Against the Loveless World: A Novel (Washington Square Press), a young Palestinian woman fights for a better life for her family, traveling as a refugee throughout the Middle East. Born in Kuwait in the 1970s to Palestinian refugees, Nahr dreamed of finding the perfect man, marrying, raising children, and possibly opening her own beauty salon. Instead, the man she thinks she loves jilts her after a brief marriage, her family teeters on the brink of poverty, she’s forced to prostitute herself, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq makes her a refugee, as her parents had been. After making a temporary home in Jordan, she lands in Palestine, where she finally makes a home, falls in love, and her destiny unfolds under Israeli occupation.

Chantel Acevedo is the author of adult novels, including The Distant Marvels, a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the middle-grade novel Muse Squad: The Cassandra Curse. She was born in Miami to Cuban parents. In the middle-grade mystery The Curse on Spectacle Key (Balzer + Bray), Frank Fernandez never stays in one place for long. His parents renovate unusual buildings and turn them into homes, so the family moves a lot – which makes it hard for bookish Frank to make friends. So when his parents announce they’re moving to Florida’s Spectacle Key to live in a lighthouse, and for good, he’s thrilled. But the place isn’t the perfect forever home they’d imagined. The lighthouse is falling apart, and there are knocks on the door and mysterious sighs and sniffles, but no one is ever there. There’s even a creepy doll that seems to move on its own. Is Spectacle Key haunted? Then Frank meets a girl in old-fashioned clothes. She has no memory of who she is. But she does know that the island is under a curse – and she needs Frank’s help to figure out how to lift it.

Elliot Ackerman is the author of several novels, including Red Dress in Black and White. His writing often appears in Esquire, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and his stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Travel Writing. He is both a former White House fellow and a Marine who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. Ackerman left the military 10 years before the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August 2021, but found himself pulled back into the conflict. Afghan nationals who had worked closely with the American military and intelligence communities now faced brutal reprisal, and Ackerman joined an effort by a group of journalists and other veterans to arrange flights and secure the safe evacuation of hundreds. The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan (Penguin Press) documents the weight of 20 years of war bearing on a single week, the week the war ended. It is a play in five acts, beginning with the initial invasion after 9/11 and ending in a tragic fifth act, a prelude to Afghanistan’s dark future.

Andrés Acosta (Chilpancingo, Guerrero, México, 1964) Narrador, poeta, escritor de libros para niños y jóvenes y periodista. Estudió Derecho en la UNAM. Ha coordinado talleres de creación literaria y lectura para la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), la Universidad Iberoamericana, la Asociación de Escritores de México (AEM), la Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana y para otras instituciones. Ha sido artista residente en Colombia, Canadá y Austria. Ingresó al Sistema Nacional de Creadores Artísticos de México en 2011. Su trabajo como creador de ficciones se dirige tanto al público adulto como a los lectores infantiles y juveniles. En su producción para jóvenes sobresalen novelas como El complejo de Faetón (SM, 2006); el díptico conformado por Olfato (SM, 2009), ganadora del Premio Gran Angular México, y Subterráneos (SM, 2012); Tristania (El Naranjo, 2014), distinguida con el Premio Fundación Cuatrogatos; Escalera al cielo (SM, 2015); El país de la oscuridad (El Naranjo, 2017); #YoSoy Bosco (Premio Internacional de Novela Juvenil (FOEM 2018) y Clandestino (SM, premio El barco de vapor 2019). Ha publicado también la antología de cuentos de humor negro Si ya está muerto, sonría (SM, 2014). Para niños ha dado a conocer los relatos La lavadora de culpas (Conaculta, 2006), Agua en polvo (Norma, 2010); El club de los fracasados (Edebé, 2017) y La sirena y el halcón (Norma, 2021), y el poemario El libro de los fantasmas (Fondo Editorial del Estado de México, 2015; Premio Internacional de Literatura Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz). Acosta llega a nuestra cita literaria anual con Su fantasmática presencia, novela histórica publicada por Horson Ediciones en 2021, en la que recrea la vida y la época en que vivió el escritor Gustav Meyrink, autor de El Golem. También interviene en 9.º. Seminario de Literatura infantil y Lectura en la mesa Retos de escribir para jóvenes.

Rafael Agustin was a writer on the award-winning CW show Jane the Virgin. He is a Sundance fellow for his TV family comedy Illegal, based on his life as a formerly undocumented American. Agustin co-created and co-starred in the national touring and award-winning autobiographical comedy N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk, which received acclaim from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Denver Post, and won awards for its advancement of social justice in the arts. In Illegally Yours: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing), Agustin writes about having his world turned upside down when he tried to get his driver’s license during his junior year of high school. His Ecuadorian parents were then forced to reveal his immigration status. The family bonded together to navigate Rafa’s school life, his parents’ work lives (doctors in their home country, they were reduced to working menial jobs in the U.S.) – and their shared secret life as undocumented Americans. An alternatingly hilarious and touching exploration of belonging and identity, Illegally Yours asks a simple question: What does it mean to be American?

Meenakshi Narula Ahamed was born in Calcutta (Kolkata), India. She’s enjoyed a varied career working as a development consultant, journalist, and the foreign correspondent for New Delhi Television (NDTV), based in London. Since returning to the U.S. in 1996, her op-eds and articles have been published in The Asian Age, Seminar, Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. She divides her time between the U.S. and India. In 1951, President Truman told Ambassador Chester Bowles that he “thought India was pretty jammed with poor people and cows wandering around the streets, witch doctors and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges, but I did not realize that anybody thought it was important.” It has been a long journey. Following Indian independence, India and the U.S. were caught in a dysfunctional cycle of resentment and mistrust for decades. In A Matter of Trust: India U.S. Relations from Truman to Trump (HarperCollins India), Ahamed draws on a trove of presidential papers, newly declassified documents, memoirs, and interviews to reveal the prejudices, insecurities, and political imperatives that so often have cast a shadow over this vital relationship.

Claire Ahn grew up in Seoul, Korea, and still considers it her home. She moved to New York to attend university and now lives in Long Island City. She writes about transcultural experiences and the traditions, values, and legacies that shape who we are. In her debut novel, I Guess I Live Here Now (Viking Books for Young Readers), we meet Melody, who, following a tiny transgression after school one day, discovers that her parents have decided to move her and her mom out of New York City to join her father in Seoul – immediately. Melody barely has a chance to say goodbye to her best friend before she’s on a plane, and she’s resentful and homesick. But she soon finds herself settling into their super-luxe villa, meeting cool friends at school, and discovering the fascinating aspects of living in Korea: trendsetting fashion, delectable food, her dad’s black card, and a cute boy to come with her as she explores the city. Life in Seoul is terrific – until cracks begin to form on its shiny surface.

Mustafa Akyol is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, where he focuses on the intersection of public policy, Islam, and modernity. He is the author of Why, As A Muslim, I Defend Liberty; The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims, and Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. He also has been a frequent opinion writer for The New York Times, covering politics and religion in the Muslim world. In Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance (St. Martin’s Essentials), Akyol diagnoses “the crisis of Islam” in the modern world and offers a way forward. Diving deeply into Islamic theology while sharing lessons from his own life story, he explores how Muslims lost the universalism that once made them a great civilization. He argues that values often associated with Western Enlightenment – freedom, reason, tolerance, and an appreciation of science – had Islamic counterparts, which sadly were cast aside in favor of more dogmatic views, often for political ends. Here, he offers a new Muslim worldview on a range of sensitive issues from human rights and equality for women to freedom from religion.

Kemi Alabi’s poems and essays appear in The Atlantic, Poetry, Boston Review, Catapult, Guernica, them, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2, Best New Poets 2019, and elsewhere. As cultural strategy director of Forward Together, they’ve built political power with cultural workers of color through programs like Echoing Ida, a home for Black women and nonbinary writers, and annual art campaigns like Trans Day of Resilience. They co-edited The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press) with Cynthia R. Greenlee and Janna Zinzi. Against Heaven (Graywolf Press), Alabi’s debut collection, reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born. Instead of turning to predetermined salvation, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest. It’s a collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit’s capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing – the highest power there is.

Cristian Alarcón es escritor y periodista. Desde comienzos de los noventa se dedicó al periodismo de investigación y a la escritura de crónicas en los diarios Clarín, Página 12, Crítica de la Argentina y en las revistas TXT, Rolling Stone y Gatopardo. En sus libros Cuando me muera quiero que me toquen cumbia (2003) y Si me querés, quereme transa (2010) cruza la literatura con la etnografía urbana convirtiendo relatos urgentes en novelas de no ficción. En el libro Un mar de castillos peronistas (2013) escribe crónicas de viaje y perfiles de personajes disidentes, subalternos y marginales. En el año 2012 fundó la revista Anfibia y el sitio Cosecha Roja. Desde entonces ha liderado un proceso de mutación permanente de la crónica latinoamericana. Sus libros han sido traducidos al inglés, francés, alemán y polaco.

Melissa Albert is a former bookseller, YA lit blogger, and The New York Times and indie bestselling author of the Hazel Wood series (The Hazel Wood, The Night Country, Tales from the Hinterland). Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages and included in The New York Times list of Notable Children’s Books. On the way home from a party, 17-year-old Ivy and her soon-to-be ex nearly run over a nude young woman standing in the middle of a tree-lined road. It’s only the first in a string of increasingly eerie events and offerings in Our Crooked Hearts (Flatiron Books). There’s also a dead rabbit in the driveway, a bizarre concoction buried in the backyard, a box of childhood keepsakes hidden in her parents’ safe, and, most unsettling, corroded recollections of Ivy and her enigmatic mother’s past resurfacing with the help of the boy next door. Is there more to her mother than meets the eye? Are the supernatural forces she messed with coming back to haunt Ivy and her friend? The darkness is closing in. Our Crooked Hearts is a contemporary fantasy full of secrets, lies, bad choices, and dangerous magic.

Steve Almond is the author of 10 fiction and nonfiction books, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and other periodicals. His short stories have been selected for several anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and Best American Mysteries. In All the Secrets of the World: A Novel (Zando), Lorena Saenz and Jenny Stallworth are paired for a school project by a teacher hoping to unite two girls from starkly different backgrounds. Jenny is pretty and popular, and her family lives a picture-perfect suburban lifestyle – from the outside. In reality, her glamorous mother, Rosemary, is needy, while her father, Marcus, spends his days teaching and his nights wandering the desert, researching the scorpions of Death Valley. For Lorena, that life is a seemingly far cry from her own, living in a small apartment with her single mother. But when Marcus disappears, Tony, Lorena’s troubled older brother, becomes the prime suspect. For Lorena, it’s the beginning of an odyssey into the desert, the secrets and lies of the Stallworths, and the dark heart of America’s criminal justice system.

B. B. Alston lives in Lexington, South Carolina. His debut novel, Amari and the Night Brothers, is a New York Times and Indie bestseller. In Amari and the Great Game (Balzer + Bray), the second in the Supernatural Investigations trilogy, Amari Peters is sure that her first summer as a junior agent for the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs will be a breeze. After all, she recently found her missing brother and saved the entire supernatural world. But there’s a fearsome new anti-magician agenda, fierce junior agent rivalries, and her brother Quinton’s curse is steadily worsening. Amari’s plate is full! So when the secretive League of Magicians offers her a chance to be its new leader, she declines; she’s got enough to worry about. But her refusal means someone else steps forward – and it’s a magician with dangerous plans for the League.

Carlos Manuel Álvarez is the author of the short story collection La tarde de los sucesos definitivos and the novel Los caídos. He is co-founder of the online magazine El Estornudo and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, El Malpensante, Letras Libres, Gatopardo, La Nación, Clarín, México, GQ, Vice, and on HuffPost. In The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba (Graywolf Press), translated by Frank Wynne, Álvarez uses the “crónica” form – a Latin American writing genre that blends reportage, narrative nonfiction, and novelistic techniques – to illuminate a particularly turbulent period in Cuban history, from the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the United States and the death of Fidel Castro to the convulsions of the San Isidro Movement. The Tribe shows a society in flux. It features athletes in exile, artists, nurses, underground musicians, and household names, dissident poets, the hidden underclass at a landfill, migrants attempting to make their way across Central America, fugitives escaping the FBI, dealers in the black market, revelers, and police officers, in the noisy Havana night.

Claudia Alvarez is a Miami-Dade Public Schools educator.

Jonathan Ames is the author of the novels I Pass Like Night, The Extra Man, and Wake Up, Sir!, as well as the nonfiction books The Double Life Is Twice as Good: Essays and Fiction, What’s Not to Love?, My Less Than Secret Life, I Love You More Than You Know, and most recently, You Were Never Really Here (adapted into the film starring Joaquin Phoenix). He’s the creator of two TV series, Blunt Talk and Bored to Death, and fought two amateur boxing matches as “The Herring Wonder.” Happy Doll, the title character of A Man Named Doll: A Novel (Mulholland Books), is a charming if occasionally inexpert private detective living beneath the Hollywood sign. A veteran of both the Navy and LAPD, Doll supplements his meager income as a P.I. by working at a local Thai spa that offers its clients “special services.” Armed with his 16-inch steel telescopic baton and biting dry humor, he protects the women who work there from clients who don’t understand the word “no.” But he’s out of his depth with one violent patron – and then an old friend from his days as a cop shows up at his door with a bullet in his gut.

Suad Amiry is a writer and an architect. She is the author of six works of nonfiction, including Sharon and My Mother-in-Law and Golda Slept Here. Amiry received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and is the founder of the RIWAQ Centre for Architectural Conservation in Ramallah, where she lives. Based on a true story, Mother of Strangers (Pantheon) follows the daily lives of two Jaffa teenagers: Subhi, a 15-year-old mechanic, and Shams, the 13-year-old student he hopes to marry one day. But it’s also a story about Jaffa, the “Mother of Strangers,” a prosperous and cosmopolitan port city full of improbable charac­ters and welcoming to outsiders; it’s a place where Muslims, Jews, and Christians live peacefully together. But once the bombardment of the city begins in April 1948, Jaffa becomes unrecognizable as neighborhoods are flattened, families are removed from their homes and separated, and those who remain are in constant danger of arrest and incarceration. Mother of Strangers is a devastating ac­count of a key moment in the history of the Middle East that marked the beginning of the end of Palestine. Jaffa was irrevocably changed, and Subhi and Shams would never see each other again.

Liz Amore is the editor for South Florida on the Cheap, a lifestyle website. She has worked in communications and public relations for more than 20 years, and is a former executive director of media relations at the University of Miami. She also worked at UM’s Medical campus with UM-Humana’s Health Services Research Center and the Diabetes Research Institute, where she helped to coordinate research studies. Before that, she handled media communication, marketing, and advertising at the Lowe Art Museum. Amore will be at Miami Book Fair 2022 in conversation with E. Lockhart, author of The New York Times bestseller We Were Liars and Family of Liars: The Prequel to We Were Liars (Delacorte Press).

Félix Anesio (Guantánamo, Cuba, 1950) Poeta y narrador. Vive en Miami desde 2000. Ingeniero de profesión. Ha publicado los libros de relatos Crónicas aldeanas y su versión en inglés A Tale of Two Villages (Voces de Hoy, Estados Unidos, 2011 y 2012) y los poemarios La cosecha (Entre Líneas, Estados Unidos, 2013), El ojo de la gaviota (Entre Líneas y Betania, España, 2015 y 2016, respectivamente), Los cuervos y la infamia (Betania y Entre Líneas, 2018), País sin moscas y otros poemas (Primigenios, Estados Unidos, 2020) y Altar de nadie (Oxeda, México 2022). Sus cuentos y poemas han sido publicados en revistas de Estados Unidos (Linden Lane Magazine, Conexos y Nagari), España (Crear en Salamanca), Chile (Altazor, Chonchón Fanzine y Casa Bukowski), Perú (Santa Rabia Magazine), Cuba (El Caimán Barbudo) y México (Hiedra), entre otras. Sus poemas han aparecido en las antologías: Bojeo a la isla infinita, Puede parecer un bosque y Antología: Poetas del siglo XXI. Ha obtenido dos premios editoriales Carmenluisa Pinto en narrativa y poesía, así como la distinción Pluma de Plata y el Florida Book Award (medalla de bronce). Aparece reseñado en el Diccionario de escritores guantanameros. Anesio comparte con el público de la feria País sin moscas, publicado por la Editorial Primigenios en 2021, un cuaderno de versos que busca la luz donde parece no existir, descubriéndola finalmente en los territorios de la poesía.

Deb Aoki is the creator of Mangasplaining and the comic strip Bento Box, which appears in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. She works as a freelance writer, artist, illustrator, and consultant, providing content to Sony, eBay, Google for Education, PayPal, and many others. As a writer, Aoki crafts articles and reviews about manga and independent comics for Publishers Weekly, Anime News Network, Graphic Novels Reporter, Honolulu Advertiser, and Honolulu Weekly. She will be at Miami Book Fair 2022 to moderate a conversation between Helen McCarthy, Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (Stone Bridge Press), and Alex Dudok de Wit, translator of Miyazaki’s manga classic, Shuna’s Journey (First Second).

Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki is a poet, fiction writer, and video game producer. Her debut poetry collection, Breakpoint (Tebot Bach), was a 2019 National Poetry Series finalist. Dedicated to “all the women in tech making it happen,” Breakpoint combines intense lyrical free verse with found Python “code poems” to explore the modern technological and societal landscape. Aoki brings the reader into her world of polygons and fractals, Japanese folklore and family stories, computational language and robot factories, and the timeless yearning to be seen clearly. The machines speak in this book, but more strongly, the voices of women in tech rise in the rooms where they are creating the future.

Abby Apé serves as the director of outreach for the Brickell Homeowners Association and is a strong advocate for community and bringing people together. She, along with her family, also serves as a leader at Christ Fellowship Church in downtown Miami.

Katherine Applegate is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of books for young readers, including Home of the Brave, Crenshaw, Wishtree, Willodeen, and The One and Only Ivan, for which she won the Newbery Medal. She is also the author of the Animorphs series and the beginning reader series Doggo and Pupper, illustrated by Charlie Alder. Odder (Feiwel & Friends), a playful sea otter, spends her days off the coast of central California, practicing her underwater acrobatics and spinning the quirky stories for which she’s known. She’s a fearless daredevil and curious to a fault. But when Odder comes face-to-face with a hungry great white shark, her life takes a dramatic turn, challenging everything she believes about herself and the humans who hope to save her. The story was inspired by the true story of a Monterey Bay Aquarium program that pairs orphaned otter pups with surrogate mothers. It’s a poignant and humorous tale told in free verse that examines bravery and healing through the eyes of one of nature’s most beloved and charming animals.

Elena Armas is the author of The Spanish Love Deception: A Novel, a self-confessed hopeless romantic, and a book hoarder. After years devouring HEAs and talking – OK fine, yelling – nonstop about them, she’s taken the leap and decided to create her own. Rosie Graham, the main character in The American Roommate Experiment: A Novel (Atria Books), has a problem. A few, actually. She just quit her well-paid job to focus on her secret career as a romance writer, hasn’t told her family, and now has terrible writer’s block. Then, the ceiling of her New York apartment crumbles on her. She has her best friend Lina’s spare key while she’s out of town but then finds that Lina has already lent her apartment to her cousin, Lucas. Rosie has been stalking Lucas on Instagram for the last few months. He seems intent on coming to her rescue, has a distracting grin, an irresistible accent, and he cooks. Lucas lets Rosie stay with him – and then he proposes an experiment to bring back her literary muse and meet her deadline: He’ll take her on a series of experimental dates meant to jump-start her romantic inspiration. Rosie has nothing to lose. So, why not?

Julia Armfield is the author of the story collection salt slow. Her work has been published in Granta, Lighthouse, Analog Magazine, Neon Magazine, and Best British Short Stories. Our Wives Under the Sea: A Novel (Flatiron Books) follows Leah, a marine biologist. She left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time, her submarine sank to the sea floor. Now Leah is changed. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was she was supposed to be studying before she and her crew were stranded, Leah carried part of it onto dry land and into their home. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp. Our Wives Under the Sea explores the unknowable depths within each of us and the love that compels us nevertheless toward one another.

Kristen Arnett is the author of With Teeth (Riverhead Books), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction; The New York Times bestselling novel Mostly Dead Things, which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award; and the story collection Felt in the Jaw. She was awarded a Shearing Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize recognizing mid-career writers of fiction. A queer writer based in Florida, she has written for The New York Times, Guernica, BuzzFeed, McSweeney’s, The Guardian, Salon, and elsewhere. She will be at Miami Book Fair 2022 to moderate a conversation with author Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea: A Novel (Flatiron Books).

Fatimah Asghar, the author of If They Come for Us, is a poet, filmmaker, educator, and performer. They are the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series highlighting friendships between women of color. Along with Safia Elhillo, they are the editor of Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender-nonconforming, and/or trans. In When We Were Sisters: A Novel (One World), Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. The youngest, Kausar, grapples with the incomprehensible loss of their parents as she also charts out her understanding of gender; Aisha, the middle sister, spars with her “crybaby” younger sibling as she desperately tries to hold on to her sense of family in an impossible situation; and Noreen, the eldest, does her best in the role of sister-mother while also trying to create a life for herself, on her own terms. When We Were Sisters examines the bonds and fractures of sisterhood, the perils facing Muslim American girls alone against the world, and show how those who’ve lost everything might still make homes in one another.

Reza Aslan, a writer and scholar of religions, is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot, No God but God, and editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. In An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville (W. W. Norton & Company), Aslan explores the story of Howard Baskerville, a student of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton. Baskerville is a believer in the gospel of Jesus – and Wilson’s, by which constitutional democracy is the birthright of all nations. Rather than follow his father’s path, a small-town minister in South Dakota, Baskerville volunteered for missionary service in Persia. Tabriz, in 1907, was a hotbed of democratic revolution, and some of his students at the Presbyterian school were both firebrands and devoted friends. He lectured on freedom; they dedicated their lives to it. Soon, he joined them on the battlefield. Was Baskerville the “American Lafayette” of Iran or a naive “white savior” stumbling into Persian affairs? His story raises a critical question: How seriously do we take our ideas of constitutional democracy, and whose freedom do we support?