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Benjamin Booker is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He has recorded two albums: Benjamin Booker (2014) and Witness (2017). He cites The Gun Club, Blind Willie Johnson and T. Rex as influences. His music was described by the Chicago Tribune as "a raw brand of blues/boogie/soul," by The Independent as "frenzied guitar-strumming and raw, soulful vocals that are hair-raising in intensity" and by SPIN as "bright, furious, explosive garage rock."

Born in Beijing, C Pam Zhang is mostly an artifact of the United States. She is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature and nominated for the Booker Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics' Circle John Leonard Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award, among others. Zhang's writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, McSweeney's Quarterly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree.

Catherine Lacey is the author of four works of fiction: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States, and Pew. She is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2016 Whiting Award, and earned an artists' fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Granta Magazine named her one of their "Best of Young American Novelists" in 2017, and she has been longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award, NYPL's Young Lions Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and others.

Christine Schutt is the author of three short story collections, Nightwork; A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer; and most recently, Pure Hollywood, a New York Times notable book for 2018 and winner of the Katharine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her first novel, Florida, was a National Book Award finalist; her second novel, All Souls, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.  A third novel, Prosperous Friends, was noted in The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2012. Schutt has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and New York Foundation of the Arts grant.  She has twice won the O.Henry Short Story Prize, and her stories have been anthologized.