Authors

DAN FESPERMAN served as a foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, based in Berlin. His coverage of the siege of Sarajevo led to his debut novel, Lie in the Dark, which won Britain’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award (now known as the ILP John Creasey First Novel Dagger) for best first crime novel. His subsequent books have won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller, the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers, the Barry Award for best thriller, and selection by USA Today as the year’s best mystery/thriller novel. He lives near Baltimore.

DAN FESPERMAN served as a foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, based in Berlin. His coverage of the siege of Sarajevo led to his debut novel, Lie in the Dark, which won Britain’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award (now known as the ILP John Creasey First Novel Dagger) for best first crime novel. His subsequent books have won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller, the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers, the Barry Award for best thriller, and selection by USA Today as the year’s best mystery/thriller novel. He lives near Baltimore.

Lifelong best friends SHANA FESTE and Jen Besser met as 11-year-olds in California and have been collaborating ever since, beginning with writing, directing, producing, and starring in many regrettable middle school talent shows. Dirty Diana first launched as a podcast starring Demi Moore, debuted at No. 1 on Apple Podcasts, was nominated for podcast of the year, and won the Ambie for Best Fiction, Screenwriting. Today, Feste is the award-winning screenwriter and director of several feature films, including Country Strong and Run Sweetheart Run, while Besser is a fiction editor and publisher. They now live thousands of miles apart but still talk every day.  

DR. EDDA L. FIELDS-BLACK, PH.D., a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center. A descendant of Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, South Carolina, and a USCT soldier (her great-great-great grandfather) from Beaufort County who fought in the Combahee River Raid in June 1863, she has written extensively about the transnational history of West African rice farmers. She was a co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories, which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She consulted for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture's permanent exhibition, "Rice Fields in the Low Country of South Carolina." She is also the executive producer and librettist of Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice, a widely performed original contemporary classical work by celebrated composer John Wineglass. Her book, Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press), has been named winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History; the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Institute Lincoln Prize; the Society of Civil War Historians 2025 Tom Watson Brown Award; the South Carolina Historical Society 2024 George C. Rogers Jr. Award; and the Association for Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society’s 2024 Marsha M. Greenlee History Award. In addition, Combee was also named to several best-of lists in 2024, including by The New Yorker.

ANGELA FLOURNOY is the author of The Turner House: A Novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection; an Indie Next pick; and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives in New York.

KATE FOLK is the author of the short story collection Out There: Stories and Sky Daddy: A Novel (Random House). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Zyzzyva. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she’s also received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, and Willapa Bay AiR. She lives in San Francisco.

DENIS FORTÚN BOUZO (La Habana, 1963). Poeta y narrador. Reside en Miami. Ha publicado los poemarios Zona desconocida (Editorial Itinerante Paradiso 2007), Serio divertimento (Neo Club Ediciones 2016), Noticia en desarrollo (Editorial Exodus 2019) presentado en la 37 Feria Internacional del Libro en Miami, Coordenadas ilícitas (CAAW Ediciones 2023), y Alma vieja (CAAW Ediciones 2024). En narrativa El libro de los Cocozapatos (Cuentos. Editorial Silueta 2011), Diles que no me devuelvan. Crónicas del aeropuerto (Crónicas. Alexandria Library 2013), la novela 324 Mendoza (Editorial CAAW 2018), presentada ese mismo año en la 35 Feria Internacional del Libro en Miami, y el libro de cuentos Los hijos de Sobek (Editorial Exodus 2024).

ALEX FOSTER received his MFA from New York University, where he served as fiction editor of Washington Square Review. Previously, he studied economics at the University of Chicago and conducted research for the U.S. government and for the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab in West Africa. He also works at Henry Holt & Company, an imprint of Macmillan, on New York Times-bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning books. Circular Motion (Grove Press) is his first novel.

ROB FRANKLIN is a writer of fiction and poetry, and a co-founder of Art for Black Lives. Born and raised in Atlanta, he was a Kimbilio fiction fellow and finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer Award. He has published work in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus, among other publications. He teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts. Great Black Hope: A Novel (S&S/Summit Books) is his first novel.

CAROLINE FRASER is the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and the Plutarch Award for Best Biography of the Year. She is also the author of God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, and her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications.

TOM FRIEDEN, M.D., MPH, served as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and commissioner of the New York City Health Department. His work made New York’s tuberculosis control program and overall health department models for the world; established effective programs in India; and improved morale, effectiveness, and impact at the CDC. Frieden is a physician with advanced training in internal medicine, infectious disease, public health, and epidemiology.

REBECCA FRIEDMAN is the founder and director of the Public Humanities Program at Florida International University. She is a 2024 Academic Studies Press author (Masculinity, Autocracy and the Russian University, 1804-1863) and her monograph Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Modern Russia: Time at Home explores the connections between time and culture, as shaped by history, geography, and social norms. She is widely recognized for using humanistic disciplines like poetry, art, and philosophy to engage with the public, making scholarly ideas accessible through public programming.

OSCAR FUENTES, known as The Biscayne Poet, is a Miami-based multidisciplinary artist, curator, and author of 11 poetry and prose collections. Born in New York City to Honduran immigrant parents, his work explores themes of family, memory, and legacy. His typewriter poetry was recently featured on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Miami, and he serves as poet-in-residence at 1 Hotel South Beach. He is currently promoting Poetry City: Ciudad Poesía (Indie Earth Publishing), a new poetry collection inspired by Miami. In 2023, he received the inaugural Miami-Dade Mayoral Poetry Commendation.

JAVIER FUENTES is a Spanish American writer whose debut work of fiction, Countries of Origin: A Novel (Vintage), won the 2024 PEN/Hemingway award. He has received fellowships from Columbia University, Lambda Literary, and the Ucross Foundation. Fuentes has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, and Bard College, where he was the inaugural Paris Review visiting professor of literature at the Bard Prison Initiative. Born in Barcelona, he lives in New York.

MALU FURCHE ROSSÉ (Temuco, 1988) escritora y guionista. Es autora de Islas de calor (La Pollera Ediciones, 2022), libro ganador del premio Municipal de Santiago y Mejores Obras Literarias del Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio en Chile. En 2025 publicó su primera novela Reina del Tamarugal (La Pollera Ediciones). Como guionista destaca su trabajo en el documental Robar a Rodin (2017), la serie Zander (2021), la película Oro Amargo (2024) y el cortometraje Petra y el sol (2025).

ANDREW FURMAN is a professor of English at Florida Atlantic University and teaches in its MFA program in creative writing. His fiction and creative nonfiction frequently engage with the Florida outdoors, but he has also written about Maine, Jewish identity, basketball, lighthouses, swimming, and cast-iron cookware. His essays and stories have appeared on Terrain.org and in such publications as Prairie Schooner, Oxford American, The Southern Review, Santa Monica Review, Ecotone, Willow Springs, Poets & Writers, Flyway, and The Florida Review. He is the author, most recently, of the environmental memoir Of Slash Pines and Manatees: A Highly Selective Field Guide to My Suburban Wilderness (University Press of Florida, 2025), and The World That We Are (Regal House Publishing, 2025). Other books include Jewfish (Little Curlew Press, 2020), Goldens Are Here (Green Writers Press, 2018), and Bitten: My Unexpected Love Affair with Florida (University Press of Florida, 2014), a finalist for the ASLE Environmental Book Award.

JULIA GAFFIELD is associate professor of history at William & Mary. She is the author of Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution.

GLENDA GALÁN es una escritora y periodista dominicana radicada en Miami. Realizó una Licenciatura en Comunicación Publicitaria en UNIBE, Diploma en Periodismo Digital de University of Miami (KC) y Maestría en Estudios Avanzados en Literatura Española e Hispanoamericana de la Universidad de Barcelona. Ha trabajado como periodista y productora en América TeVe, Miami y actualmente es directora de la Revista Cultural Dominicana en Miami. En años recientes, se ha dedicado a la enseñanza del idioma español en Our Lady of Lourdes Academy. Sus relatos y poemas han sido publicados en varias revistas literarias. Reconocimientos: Premio Emmy (2011) como Productora. Nominación Premio Emmy (2011) como Guionista. Medalla de Plata, Florida Book Awards (2018). Primera finalista en el concurso "Nuevos valores de la poesía hispana” auspiciado por el Centro Cultural Español de Cooperación Iberoamericana en Miami y la Revista Literaria Baquiana (2010). Publicaciones: Mar de fugas (2011) Guayabas y fresas (2012). Tsunami (2014) Ventanas: Ventanas: Entrevistas de Glenda Galán a escritores latinoamericanos (2018) Medalla de plata, Florida Book Awards.

JOAQUÍN GÁLVEZ (La Habana, 1965). Poeta, ensayista y periodista. Reside en Estados Unidos desde 1989. Se licenció en Humanidades en la Universidad Barry y obtuvo una maestría en Bibliotecología y Ciencias de la Información en la Universidad del Sur de la Florida. Ha publicado los poemarios Alguien canta en la resaca, El viaje de los elegidos, Trilogía del paria, Hábitat, Retrato desde la cuerda floja (poemas escogidos 1985-2012) y Desde mi propia isla. De 2009 a 2024, coordinó la tertulia La Otra Esquina de las Palabras y en la actualidad dirige Insularis Magazine, revista de literatura, arte y pensamiento.

JAMIE GANGEL is an award-winning veteran correspondent at CNN. She reports for the network’s digital and television platforms, and regularly appears on CNN’s AC360, The Lead with Jake Tapper, and The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.

ROMINA GARBER is a New York Times and international bestselling author whose books include Lobizona, Cazadora, and the Zodiac quartet. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and raised in Miami, Florida, Garber landed her first writing gig as a teen with College She Wrote, a weekly Sunday column for the Miami Herald that was later picked up for national syndication, and she hasn’t stopped writing since. She is a graduate of Harvard College and a Virgo to the core.

LUIS GARCÍA FRESQUET nació en Regla, La Habana. Graduado de la Escuela de Dibujo Publicitario y de Periodismo en cursos para periodistas de la Facultad Julio Antonio Mella del Vedado. Su libro, Yo, Tú, Él y el humor, publicado por la Editorial de Prelo de Portugal y Pluma en Ristre de Cuba, 1970, fue considerado como «un éxito del humorismo cubano de vanguardia». En 2016, la tercera edición fue presentada en la Feria Internacional del Libro de Miami. Fresquet ha sido director artístico de revistas y periódicos en Cuba, España y Estados Unidos. Reside en Miami y trabaja como diseñador freelance y ha publicado los libros: El humor gráfico y la caricatura en la prensa cubana, El arte del cartel al servicio de una ideología, Mi encuentro con el arte, Recuerdos que se bifurcan y se pierden en la memoria, entre otros. Junto con su esposa, Nury A. Rodríguez, publicaron una Colección de Libros Infantiles Interactivos que ha sido elogiada por la crítica.

CALEB GAYLE is an award-winning journalist and the author of We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power. A professor at Northeastern University, he is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and his work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Time, The Guardian, Guernica, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.

IDDO GEFEN is an author and a Ph.D. student in cognitive neuroscience at Columbia University, currently based in New York. His research explores the intricate relationship between narrative understanding, human memory, and decision-making. His debut short story collection, Jerusalem Beach: Stories, won the 2023 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. One of the stories from the book is currently being adapted into a film by General Admission, actor Ryan Gosling’s production company.

LESLIE GELRUBIN BENITAH is a journalist, filmmaker, and third-generation Holocaust survivor dedicated to preserving memory and fighting denial through storytelling. She holds a Ph.D. in journalism from Sorbonne University and began her career as an executive producer at TF1, shaping primetime programming for millions of viewers. After moving to Miami in 2006, she directed a major French-language publication before returning to film, creating acclaimed documentaries across Europe and the U.S. Co-founder of The Last Ones, a global survivor-testimony series used in schools, Gelrubin Benitah speaks widely, championing education as the most powerful defense against misinformation and hate.

NELSON GEORGE is an author, filmmaker, and lifelong resident of Brooklyn, New York. His books include the five novels in his D Hunter mystery series: The Accidental Hunter, The Plot Against Hip Hop: A Novel, The Lost Treasures of R&B, To Funk and Die in LA, and The Darkest Hearts. His many nonfiction works are The Death of Rhythm & Blues, Hip Hop America, and The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture & Style. As a filmmaker, he has directed the documentaries Brooklyn Boheme, Finding the Funk, and A Ballerina’s Tale: The Incredible Rise of Misty Copeland.

MEGAN GIDDINGS is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. Her book Lakewood: A Novel, was one of New York Magazine’s 10 best books of 2020, one of NPR’s best books of 2020, a Michigan Notable Book for 2021, a nominee for two NAACP Image Awards, and a finalist for the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction category. Her second book, The Women Could Fly: A Novel, was named one of The Washington Post’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy novels of 2022 and one of Vulture’s Best Fantasy books of 2022, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her work has received support from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and Hedgebrook. She lives in Minneapolis.

Dr. JERRY M. GILLES, M.D., is a maternal-fetal medicine specialist and educator whose career bridges high‑risk obstetrics, research, and Haitian cultural scholarship. A Columbia University graduate with a medical degree from Stony Brook University, he later co‑directed the Division of Maternal‑Fetal Medicine at the University of Miami and served as a principal investigator with the U.S. Public Health Service. He has published in journals including The New England Journal of Medicine and the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, with his work on miscarriage management cited widely in medical references. In 1997, Guinness World Records recognized his role in enabling a heart transplant for a newborn performed just 45 seconds after birth. Beyond medicine, Gilles edits Literati Boukmann – founded by his late wife, Ivwoz S. Jil – and co‑developed Sèvis Ginen: Rasin, Rityèl, Respè nan Vodou while curating the mobile Lakou Lasyans museum in Pestèl, Haiti. His scholarship engages Africa‑in‑the‑Americas legacies and family lineages (Banbara, Kongo, Mede). He now advises clinicians and teaches residents across South Florida, advancing culturally responsive, evidence‑based perinatal care.

ARACELIS GIRMAY is a teacher and poet. She is the author of the poetry collections the black maria, Kingdom Animalia: Poems, and Teeth. She is the editor of So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth and is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. Recent collaborations include work with book artist Valentina Améstica and picture books with Ariana Fields and Diana Ejaita. Currently, she is working on an experiment for the stage commissioned by The Authors Guild. Her new poetry collection, Green of All Heads: Poems (BOA Editions) was published in September 2025.

HOLLY GLEASON’s work has appeared in Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Library of Congress’ National Registry of Sound Recordings, among other outlets. She was the Los Angeles Press Club’s Entertainment Journalist of the Year and the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Association’s Independent Journalist of the Year. A former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame/Case Western Reserve Fellow, she’s the creator of Belmont Book Award-winning Woman Walk The Line, and co-authored Miranda Lambert’s New York Times bestseller Y’all Eat Yet? as well as Prine on Prine: Interviews & Encounters.