Oral Florist

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last Of Her Name, which won the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut short story collection, a California Book Award silver medal, and a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award. She is also a finalist for the 2020 National Magazine Award, Northern California Book Award, and CLMP Firecracker Award. Mimi is also the founding director and executive editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights & oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program. Born and raised in the UK, Mimi lived and worked in China as a visual artist, writer, and educator before moving to the US, where she is currently based.

Joanna Ruocco is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Week, Field Glass, written with Joanna Howard, and Dan. Her novel, Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. She also writes historical romance under noms de plume. The Duke Undone, written as Joanna Lowell is forthcoming from Berkley Books in Spring 2021. She is an associate professor in the English Department at Wake Forest University and chair of the board of directors of the independent, author-run press Fiction Collective Two. 

Dougie Poole is a singer-songwriter based in Brooklyn, New York. His music has been described as an "intersection of experimental pop and outlaw country". Poole's second album, The Freelancer's Blues, was released in June 2020.

Jennifer S. Cheng is the author of MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize and named a “Best Book of 2018” by Publishers Weekly and Entropy magazine; House A, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize; and Invocation: An Essay, an image-text chapbook. She is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and has received awards and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas, Hong Kong, and Connecticut, she currently lives in rapture of the coastal prairies of northern California.

Hilary Leichter is the author of the novel Temporary, which was shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her writing has appeared in n+1, The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, and New York Magazine's The Cut. She teaches fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Jesse Ball’s work focuses on problems of knowledge and status. His absurd texts have been published in twenty languages.

Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and The Entire Predicament as well as a novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. Writings have appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, Ploughshares, Bomb, Tin House Magazine, and the most recent New American Stories anthology from Vintage. She was an American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize winner and an NEA fellow in literature. The Swank Hotel, her second novel, is forthcoming from Graywolf in October of 2021. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Léonie Guyer makes paintings, drawings, site-based work, and books. Her work is characterized by idiosyncratic shapes that are deployed in a variety of spaces. Guyer's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and held in numerous public collections including the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Reed College Art Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, and others. Guyer has collaborated on book projects with poets Franck André Jamme and Bill Berkson. She was born in New York, NY and lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Ismail Muhammad is a writer and critic based in Oakland, where he works as a story editor at The New York Times Magazine. Until recently he was the criticism editor at The Believer. His work has appeared in the Times Book Review, Paris Review, Catapult, The Nation, Bookforum, and other venues. He's currently working on a novel.

Alexandra Kleeman is the author of Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2020, she was awarded the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize. She is an Assistant Professor at the New School and her second novel, Something New Under the Sun, is forthcoming from Hogarth Press.