Emma Copley Eisenberg is the nationally bestselling author of the novel Housemates, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize, as well as the nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl, a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared widely including in The Yale Review, Granta, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Cut, TIME, The New York Times Review of Books, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts, and is a 2026 Pew Foundation fellow. She’s received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Tin House and others, and has taught creative writing at Wesleyan University, Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, Temple University and independently. Her next book of fiction, Fat Swim, which includes the Pushcart Prize-winning title story, was published by Random House on April 28, 2026.

Megha Majumdar is the author of the novel A Guardian and a Thief, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award and Kirkus Prize, and winner of the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal, as well as named a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. Her debut novel, the New York Times bestseller A Burning, was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, among other honors. Born and raised in Kolkata, India, and educated at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, she now lives in New York.

Matthew Quick is the New York Times bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook—which was made into an Oscar-winning film—and eight other novels, including We Are the Light, a main selection of the Book of the Month Club. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, received a PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention, was an Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a #1 bestseller in Brazil, a Deutscher Jugendliteratur Preis 2016 (German Youth Literature Prize) nominee, and selected by Nancy Pearl as one of Summer’s Best Books for NPR. The Hollywood Reporter has named him one of Hollywood’s 25 Most Powerful Authors. Matthew lives with his wife, the novelist Alicia Bessette, in Beaufort, South Carolina.