BREAKING FREE: NOT JUST SURVIVING, BUT THRIVING

JOSEPH EARL THOMAS is a writer from Frankford, Pennsylvania, whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Virginia Quarterly Review, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from the University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of Thomas’ critically acclaimed book Sink: A Memoir won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He is currently writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach. He is an associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, as well as the director of programs at Blue Stoop in Philadelphia. Thomas is also the inaugural nonfiction fellow of the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowships program, a residency during which he wrote Sink.

KRISTAL BRENT ZOOK is an award-winning journalist and author of four books including The Girl in the Yellow Poncho, a coming-of-age story about being biracial in America, searching for her missing white father, and finding one’s authentic identity. A former contributor to The Washington Post and Essence, her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Life, and The Guardian, among others.