Speakers and Authors

Sin Blaché (she/they) is a Black Irish musician and author. They have been writing horror and sci-fi stories all their life. Prophet is their first novel. Born in California, they live in the North West of Ireland and can be found obsessing over obscure folk instruments, being a reluctant savior to feral cats, and playing too many video games.

Landis Blair is the author and illustrator of The Envious Siblings and Other Morbid Nursery Rhymes, as well as the illustrator of the New York Times bestseller From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty and the graphic novel The Hunting Accident by David Carlson, which won the 2021 Fauve d'Or and the 2020 Quai des Bulles. He has published illustrations in numerous print and online periodicals including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Chicago, VQR, and Medium.

Melissa Broder is the author of the novels Milk Fed and The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today, and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. She has written for The New York Times, Elle.com, VICE, Vogue Italia, and New York Magazine’s “The Cut.” Her poems have appeared in POETRY, The Iowa Review, Tin House, and Guernica, and she is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry. She lives in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter @SoSadToday and @MelissaBroder and Instagram @RealMelissaBroder. Death Valley is her most recent work.

Keah Brown is a journalist, screenwriter, and author of The Pretty One and Sam’s Super Seats. She is the creator of #DisabledAndCute. Her other work has appeared in Teen Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire UK, and The New York Times, among other publications. She has been featured in anthologies including the New York Times-bestselling You Are Your Best Thing edited by Brené Brown and Tarana Burke. To learn more, check out keahbrown.com.

Patti Callahan Henry is the New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of several novels, including Surviving Savannah and Becoming Mrs. Lewis. She is the recipient of the Christy Award, the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year Award, and the Alabama Library Association Book of the Year. She is the cohost and cocreator of the popular weekly online live web show and podcast Friends and Fiction. A full-time author and mother of three, she lives in Alabama and South Carolina with her family. Find out more at PattiCallahanHenry.com.

J.C. Cervantes is a New York Times bestselling author of books for children and young adults. Her books have appeared on national lists, including the American Booksellers Association New Voices and Barnes and Noble’s Best Young Reader Books. She has earned multiple awards and recognitions, most recently the 2021 New Mexico Land of Enchantment Readers’ Choice Award.

J.T. Ellison is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than 25 novels, and the EMMY® award winning co-host of the literary show A Word on Words. With millions of books in print, her work has won critical acclaim, prestigious awards, and has been published in 28 countries. She lives in Nashville with her husband and twin kittens.

Alisha Fernandez Miranda serves as Chair and former CEO of I.G. Advisors, an award-winning social impact intelligence agency. A graduate of Harvard University and the London School of Economics, her writing has been featured in Vogue, Business Insider, Romper, and Huffington Post. Originally from Miami, Alisha currently lives in Scotland with her husband and twins.

Tim Fite is a musician, singer-songwriter, and multimedia artist who likes to sing, draw, and consider himself a pebble in the shoe of iniquity. Visit him at TimFite.com.

Maurene Goo is the author of several acclaimed books for young adults, including I Believe in a Thing Called Love and Somewhere Only We Know. She’s also written for Marvel’s Silk series. She lives and writes in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and cats.

Vashti Harrison is the #1 New York Times bestselling creator of Little Leaders, Little Dreamers, and Little Legends, and the illustrator of Lupita Nyong’o’s Sulwe, Matthew Cherry’s Hair Love, Andrea Beaty’s I Love You Like Yellow, and Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic’s Hello, Star, among others. She earned her BA in studio art and media studies from the University of Virginia and her MFA in film/video from CalArts, where she rekindled a love for drawing and painting. Vashti lives in Brooklyn, New York, and invites you to visit her at vashtiharrison.com or on Instagram and Twitter @vashtiharrison.

Deborah Hemming is the author of Throw Down Your Shadows, which was a finalist for the 2021 ReLit Novel Award. She studied English at McGill University and the University of King’s College, and Information Studies at Dalhousie University. She lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, with her partner and son.

Nancy Horan is the New York Times bestselling author of Loving Frank and Under the Wide and Starry Sky. Loving Frank remained on the NYT list for over a year, has been translated into sixteen languages, and received the The Society of American Historians 2009 Prize for Historical Fiction. A native Midwesterner, Horan was a teacher and journalist before turning to fiction. She lived for 25 years in Oak Park, Illinois, where she raised her two sons, and she now lives with her husband on an island in Puget Sound.

Leah Johnson always wanted to be a superhero, but she became a writer instead, which she thinks is the next-best thing. Her bestselling debut novel, You Should See Me in a Crown, was a Stonewall Honor Book, the inaugural Reese’s Book Club YA Pick, and named one of Time’s 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time. Leah lives in Indianapolis, where she writes books about Black girls with big hearts, plays fetch with the best dog in the world, and talks about Miles Morales to anyone who will listen. Ellie Engle Saves Herself is her middle grade debut. You can find Leah online at ByLeahJohnson.com and on Instagram and Twitter @ByLeahJohnson.

Jason June (it’s a two-name first name, like Mary-Kate without the hyphen or the Olsen twin) loves to create flamboyant and heartfelt picture books, as well as queer young adult novels full of love and lust and hijinks. His works include the YA queer rom-coms Jay’s Gay Agenda and the finstant New York Times best-seller Out of the Blue. Up next in 2023 are Never Forget Eleanor, a moving picture book about Alzheimer’s, Riley Weaver Needs a Date to the Gaybutante Ball, a YA contemporary about how gender and sexuality labels can both limit and liberate us, and The Spells We Cast, a YA rivals-to-lovers fantasy about an elf-descended gay cowboy!

Lydia Kiesling is the author of The Golden State, a 2018 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a contributing editor at The Millions and Zyzzyva, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, and The Cut, among other outlets. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Jessica Knoll is the New York Times bestselling author of Luckiest Girl Alive, which is a major motion picture from Netflix starring Mila Kunis. She has been a senior editor at Cosmopolitan and the articles editor at Self. She grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and graduated from The Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and her bulldog, Beatrice. Bright Young Women is her third novel.

Jason Landsel is a New York-based writer and illustrator with a lifelong fascination with the history of social and religious radicalism. He is a regular contributor to Plough Quarterly and a member of the Bruderhof, an Anabaptist community movement that traces its roots to the Radical Reformation.

Cynthia Leitich Smith is the New York Times best-selling, award-winning author of Hearts Unbroken, the Tantalize series, and the Feral trilogy. An NSK Neustadt Laureate and the author-curator of Heartdrum, a Native-focused imprint at HarperCollins Children’s Books, she was named the inaugural Katherine Paterson Chair on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. A citizen of the Muscogee Nation, Cynthia lives in Austin, Texas.

Fran Littlewood has an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. Before her MA, she worked as a journalist, including a stint at the Times. She lives in London with her husband and their three daughters. Amazing Grace Adams is her debut novel.

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene has been published in Guernica, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and Granta. An Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, she is a MacDowell Fellow, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award winner and a Caine Prize honoree. Makhene leads Love As A Kind of Cure, a social enterprise working to dismantle white supremacy. She lives in New York.

Sarah Maslin Nir is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter for the New York Times and the author of the adult memoir, Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman and a World in Love with an Animal. The Flying Horse is her debut novel for young readers and the first book in the Once Upon a Horse series, published by Cameron Kids. The Jockey and Her Horse: Inspired by the True Story of the First Black Female Jockey, co-written with Raymond White, Jr., will follow in Fall 2023. Sarah lives in New York City.

Kiyash Monsef is an Emmy Award-nominated producer and director; a writer of short stories, videos, comic books, and games; and a designer of innovative conversational and voice interface experiences. Once There Was is his first novel.

Janika Oza is the winner of the 2022 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction, and the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications such as The Best Small Fictions: 2019 Anthology, Catapult, The Adroit Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Anomaly, and The Malahat Review, among others. A chapter of her debut novel, A History of Burning, was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize and published in Prairie Schooner. She is a Features reader for The Rumpus and a 2020 Diaspora Dialogues long form fiction mentee. She lives in Toronto.

Lincoln Peirce has been drawing the Big Nate comic strip for over 30 years. Born in Ames, Iowa, Peirce grew up in Durham, New Hampshire. As a kid, he began creating his own strips in the sixth grade. Peirce taught high school in New York City and has created several animated pilots for Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his family.

Thien Pham is a graphic novelist, comic artist, and educator based in Oakland, California. He is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Sumo and did the art for the middle-grade graphic novel Level Up, written by Gene Luen Yang, and is an ongoing comic contributor to Eater SF. Currently Pham is working on his next graphic novel, teaching, and eating. A lot. Follow Thien on Twitter and Instagram.

Kiley Reid earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship and taught undergraduate creative writing workshops with a focus on race and class. Her short stories have been featured in Ploughshares, December, New South, and Lumina. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Elizabeth Rusch is the author of more than two dozen award-winning children’s books, including Mario and the Hole in the Sky, winner of the AAAS/Subaru Prize for Excellence in Children’s Science Picture Books, the Green Earth Book Award, the Cook Prize, and the Golden Kite Award. In her newest book, All About Nothing encourages kids to look at the world differently — to see what might be hidden in the space around things and appreciate how important that space can be. Elizabeth lives in Portland, Oregon.

Terah Shelton Harris is a collection development librarian based in Alabama and a freelance writer. She has been published in Women’s Health, Natural Solutions, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Backpacker, Draft, and Women’s Adventure.

Sharon Sochil Washington, a cultural anthropologist and creator of White Space, a newsletter on Substack that explores the meaning between the words we use, has written for the Dallas Times Herald, New York Newsday, and the Akron Beacon Journal. She received degrees from Columbia University and The New School in New York City, and speaks regularly at universities and conferences on issues of social justice, race, economic insecurity, education, and media influences. The Blue Is Where God Lives is her debut novel. She lives in Houston.

Laura Spence-Ash’s fiction has appeared in One Story, New England Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Her critical essays and book reviews appear regularly in the Ploughshares blog. She received her MFA in fiction from Rutgers–Newark, and she lives in New Jersey.

Lambda Literary Fellow Jen St. Jude (she/they) grew up in New Hampshire apple orchards and now lives in Chicago with her wife and dog. She holds degrees in creative writing from Colby College and Harvard University Extension School, and has served as an editor for Chicago Review of Books, just femme & dandy, and Arcturus Magazine. When she’s not reading or writing, you can find her cheering on the Chicago Sky and Red Stars. If Tomorrow Doesn't Come is her first novel. jenstjude.com @jenstjude

Emma Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of five books for grown-ups, including This Time Tomorrow, All Adults Here and Modern Lovers. Her novels have been published in fifteen languages. Her shorter fiction and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and Elle. Emma and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn. They have two kids and two cats.

Megan Tady is a writer and editor who runs the company Word-Lift. When she’s not scrutinizing copy, she can be found stocking her free neighborhood library, challenging anyone to a dance-off, or stewing over how Portlandia stole all of her jokes. She’s a corn-fed Nebraska gal who now lives in a quaint New England town with her husband and two kids.

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and novelist. He is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Deep Down Dark, as well as The Last Great Road Bum, The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. He is also a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion pages and an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine. He has written for The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and his short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, L.A. Noir, ZYZZYVA, and Slate. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, Tobar is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his family.

Neely Tubati Alexander is the author of women’s fiction with rom-com feels you can escape into with a smile. Originally from the Seattle area, she currently resides in Arizona with her husband and two elementary-aged children. If she’s not tucked away at the little desk in her bedroom writing, you can find her at some kiddo activity, drinking wine, or watching reality television, usually the last two together.

Abraham Verghese is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of books including My Own Country and The Tennis Partner. His most recent book, Cutting for Stone, spent 107 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 1.5 million copies in the US alone. Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2016. He lives and practices medicine in Stanford, California where he is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. A decade in the making, The Covenant of Water is his first book since Cutting for Stone.

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.