Authors

LANA LIN is a writer, artist, and filmmaker based in New York and Connecticut. She is the author of the book Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer, and film and video works that include The Cancer Journals Revisited. Her various works and collaborative projects (with Lan Thao Lam as “Lin + Lam”) have exhibited at festivals and art and educational spaces throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and New Museum, New York; and The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Having had three years of psychoanalytic training before dropping out, she sometimes still dreams of becoming a psychoanalyst one day.

TOBY LLOYD is the author of Fervor, which was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize and two National Jewish Book Awards. It was also longlisted for the Wingate Prize, and has been translated into five languages. His writing has appeared in The Fence Magazine, Somesuch Stories, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Prospect. He lives in London and teaches writing at City Lit.

E. LOCKHART is The New York Times bestselling author of the Liars novels: We Were Liars, adapted into an original series on Amazon Prime Video; Family of Liars; and We Fell Apart (Delacorte Press). Her other books include Again Again, Genuine Fraud, and The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. She has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Award, and an honoree for the Printz Award.

PATRICIA LOCKWOOD is the bestselling author of the Booker Prize finalist and Dylan Thomas Prize-winning book No One Is Talking About This: A Novel, which was named one of the 10 best books of 2021 by The New York Times Book Review and one of The Atlantic’s great American novels of the past 100 years. Her other books include Priestdaddy: A Memoir, named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, as well as two poetry collections. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.

SILVIA LÓPEZ is a first-generation Cuban American. She holds a bachelor’s in English, a specialist’s degree in educational technology, and a master’s in library science. For more than three decades, she served as a children’s librarian in Miami. She is the author of 15 books for children, including two Florida Book Award winners: Just Right Family: An Adoption Story and Queen of Tejano Music: Selena, which is also a Junior Library Guild selection. She invites you to visit her online at silvialopezbooks.com.

JAYSEA LYNN was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. After graduating from college, she purchased and lived aboard a 35-foot sailboat for eight years, during which she found success with Hell’s Belles, her comedy/drama skit series on TikTok (@Sea.Ya.Later), and gained the confidence to share her lifelong passion of writing. She can often be found with her nose in a book, going for walks, embarking on random adventures, or trying to make the perfect cup of coffee (with mixed success).

FABIAN LYON is a media strategist, public relations coordinator, media event host, legal professional, and journalist with the Miami Herald for the past 25 years. He also hosts the Game Changers with Fabian Lyon podcast, which highlights global thought leaders, innovators, and cultural icons. His interviews include the late NBA superstar Kobe Bryant, sprint icon Usain Bolt, Haitian American comedian Sejoe, Nandi Mandela – granddaughter of Nelson Mandela – and Dr. Julius Garvey, the honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a champion of Pan-Africanism.

Born in Shanghai, YIMING MA is the debut author of These Memories Do Not Belong to Us: A Constellation Novel (Mariner Books). He holds an MBA from Stanford University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was the Carol Houck Smith Scholar. Ma spent a decade in the tech and finance world working in New York, Toronto, London, and South Africa before writing his first book. His stories and essays appear in The New York Times, The Guardian, and elsewhere. His story Swimmer of Yangtze won the 2018 The Guardian and 4th Estate Short Story Prize.

DAINERYS MACHADO VENTO es escritora, editora e investigadora literaria. Es autora de los libros de cuentos Las noventa Habanas y Retratos de la orilla, y de los ensayos literarios Los muchachos en Trumplandia y El estruendo de Ciclón. La nueva revista cubana. Dainerys es Doctora en Estudios Literarios, Lingüísticos y Culturales por la Universidad de Miami y tiene una Maestría en Literatura Hispanoamericana por El Colegio de San Luis, A.C., México. Sus relatos han formado parte de antologías publicadas en varios países, y traducidos al portugués, inglés e italiano.

Born and raised in Kolkata, India, New York Times bestselling author MEGHA MAJUMDAR is a 2022 Whiting Award winner. Her novel A Burning was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was also named one of the best books of the year by various media outlets, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and Time. She holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins.

Born and raised in Kolkata, India, New York Times bestselling author MEGHA MAJUMDAR is a 2022 Whiting Award winner. Her novel A Burning was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was also named one of the best books of the year by various media outlets, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and Time. She holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins.

THOMAS MALLON is the author of 11 novels, including Henry and Clara: A Novel, Dewey Defeats Truman: A Novel, Fellow Travelers: A Novel, Watergate: A Novel, Landfall: A Novel, and Up With the Sun. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. In 2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. Mallon has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D.C.

PEPE MAR was born in Mexico and lives and works in Miami. He received his BFA from California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco, and received his MFA from Florida International University. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire (2026), among others. His work has been exhibited widely and is included in major collections, including the Seattle Art Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Miami, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas, City Missouri, among others. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, ARTnews, Art in America, The Artnewspaper, Bomb, Burnaway, Panorama, and others.

JOSEPHINE MARCOTTY is an environmental journalist who has spent her life in the Midwest. As a reporter for what's known today as the Minnesota Star Tribune, she covered complex, science-based topics. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband.

DAVID MARGOLICK is a longtime contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he writes about culture, the media, and politics. He served as national legal affairs editor at The New York Times, where he wrote the weekly At the Bar column for seven years. He is the author of Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink and Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday and the Biography of a Song. He lives in New York.

JAVIER MARÍN es propietario de medios de comunicación en español en Estados Unidos desde que emigró de Venezuela con su esposa y sus dos hijos en el año 2000. Es Fundador de Tiempo Company, con sede en Washington, D. C., que gestiona diversas marcas como Tiempo News, El Tiempo Latino y El Planeta. Entre 2016 y 2024, fue inversionista en la tienda oficial de futbol de Univision. Marín es egresado del programa opm de la Harvard Business School y actualmente vive con su esposa Carolina en Maine.

ROSA MARQUETTI TORRES (La Habana) es licenciada en Filología por la Universidad de La Habana. Especialista en propiedad intelectual, historiógrafa musical, docente, activista y productora, Marquetti creó en 2014 el blog Desmemoriados, Historias de la música cubana. Además, es autora de los libros Chano Pozo, La vida (1915-1948) y El Niño con sus tres, Andrés Echevarría Callava, Niño Rivera, con ediciones en Cuba, Colombia y Estados Unidos, así como de Celia en Cuba (1925-1962).

WES MARSHALL, PH.D., P.E, is a professor of civil engineering with a joint appointment in urban and regional planning at the University of Colorado, Denver. He is also director of the CU Denver Transportation Research Center and co-director of the Active Communities/Transportation (ACT) research group. He received his professional engineering license in 2003 and focuses on transportation teaching and research dedicated to creating a more sustainable and resilient world, particularly in terms of road safety. Having spent time in the private sector, he has been addressing these issues for more than 25 years. With more than 80 peer-reviewed publications, he was also the winner of the Campus-wide University of Colorado Denver Outstanding Faculty in Research Award.

GABI MARTINEZ is a Spanish writer, screenwriter, and journalist. He is considered one of Spain's leading travel writers, with works such as Los mares de Wang, En la Barrera, and Voy. He has also written novels and nonfiction books, including Sólo para gigantes, Sudd, and Las defensas, and his writing has received multiple awards.

MARIA MARTINEZ-CAÑAS was born in Havana. She received a BFA in photography from the Philadelphia College of Art and an MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. An artist who works with innovative, nontraditional photographic media, she has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad, with 51 one-person exhibitions and more than 300 group exhibitions. She is the recipient of the Oolite Arts Michael Richards Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation photography fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation visual arts fellowship, a Cintas fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts award; and a Fulbright-Hays Grant, among others. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Walker Art Center, among many others. Her works are represented by Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami. She has lived and worked in Miami since 1986.

JOHN MASOURI is a British author and music journalist renowned for his writings about reggae, dancehall and their various offshoots. Over the past 35 years he’s interviewed and written about many of the genre’s best-known names, chiefly for Echoes (UK) and publications in France, Germany, and Japan. His books include the bestseller Pressure Drop: Reggae in the Seventies and two previous titles for Omnibus Press – Steppin' Razor: The Life Of Peter Tosh and Wailing Blues: The Story of Bob Marley's Wailers. He’s also a regular speaker at reggae and literary events, and a contributor to all forms of reggae media.

KWAME MBALIA (he/him) is a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author and the publisher of Freedom Fire, an imprint of Disney Hyperion devoted to stories about the Black diaspora by Black creators. His debut middle-grade novel, Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, was awarded a Coretta Scott King Author Honor, and it was followed by Tristan Strong Destroys the World and Tristan Strong Keeps Punching. He is currently working on the next Jax Freeman adventure. For more information, go to www.KwameMbalia.com.

DIANA MCCAULAY is a Jamaican environmental activist and writer. The founder of the Jamaica Environment Trust, which she led until her retirement in 2017, she has received many awards for her environmental work, including the Norman Washington Manley Award for Excellence. She has written several short stories and six novels – including her most recent, A House for Miss Pauline, published by Algonquin Books (U.S.) and Dialogue Books (U.K.) in February 2025 – and received a Gold Musgrave Medal for literature from the Institute of Jamaica in 2022.

DAVID MCCLOSKEY is the author of the novels Damascus Station, Moscow X, and The Seventh Floor, and is co-host of the podcast The Rest Is Classified. A former CIA analyst, he worked at Langley and in field stations across the Middle East.

From Richmond Heights, Florida, ARSIMMER MCCOY is an internationally recognized poet and interdisciplinary artist. She earned the 2024 Marjory Stoneman Douglas Poetry Award and the 2025 Arts & Environment Award from the Arts and Business Council of Miami-Dade. Her work has appeared in Artsy, Venice Magazine, Rootwork Journal, and others. Performances span from the Pérez Art Museum Miami to the Venice Biennale. Through poetry, performance, and film, she explores memory, Black life, and landscape, earning acclaim for blending personal narratives with collective histories.

CONOR MCCREERY is the swashbuckling Canadian wordsmith behind the Kill Shakespeare series (IDW), an action-adventure take on the Bard’s characters that spawns six volumes, a stage play, and a board game. McCreery has told stories for brands like Adventure Time, Regular Show, Assassin’s Creed, and more. His latest projects include Fela: Music is the Weapon, the young adult adventure The Last Witch (BOOM!Box), the coming-of-age tale Status (Scholastic), and the horror-comedy Trickster (Twisted Publications!). He is also the co-creator of Embreate Productions' transmedia Science Fiction story-world, Future Now. He lives in France with his wife and three children.

EVELYN MCDONNELL is a professor of journalism and an expert on music, gender, and politics. She has written or co-edited eight books, from Rock She Wrote: Women Write about Rock, Pop and Rap to The World According to Joan Didion. A longtime journalist, she has been a pop culture writer at the Miami Herald and a senior editor at The Village Voice. Her award-winning writing on music, poetry, theater, and culture has appeared in publications and anthologies including The New York Times, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Ms., Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Review of Books, Travel & Leisure, Billboard, Interview, and Option.

CAMPBELL MCGRATH is the author of 11 books of poetry, most recently Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems, and XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, which was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. His writing has been recognized with a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Witter Bynner fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a United States Artists fellowship. McGrath lives with his wife in Miami, where he teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University.

Environmentalist and author BILL MCKIBBEN is the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice, and he helped found 350.org – the first global grassroots climate campaign – which has organized protests on every continent for climate action. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from The New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors.