Deborah Baker is the author of the acclaimed, unconventional biographical studies The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award, and A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, as well as of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly. She is a recipient of a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, and her essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere.

Writer, activist, artist, and queer critic Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reads from her memoir, THE END OF SAN FRANCISCO (City Lights), at Wesleyan University on November 19, 2013. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of two novels and editor of five nonfiction anthologies, including WHY ARE FAGGOTS SO AFRAID OF FAGGOTS?, NOBODY PASSES, and THAT'S REVOLTING! QUEER STRATEGIES FOR RESISTING ASSIMILATION. www.mattildabernsteinsycamore.com

Organized and introduced by Professor Margot Weiss and sponsored by American Studies; the Center for the Americas; English; Writing at Wesleyan; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and QueerWes.

Fred Moten works at the intersection of performance, poetry, and critical theory. His books of poetry include Hughson's Tavern, B. Jenkins, and The Feel Trio. He is also the author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition and The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (with Stefano Harney). He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

Robert Gluck is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist, and a collection of stories, Denny Smith. He co-edited the anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Gluck has served as co-director of Small Press Traffic and director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State. In 2014, Semiotext(e) will publish his collection, The Greatness of Kathy Acker, and Other Essays.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic and the author of the memior The Beautiful Struggle. Coates lives in New York with his wife and son. His work for The Atlantic received the 2012 Sydney Hillman Prize for journalism about social justice and issues of public policy. His essay "Fear of a Black President" won the National Magazine Award.

Dr. Fins will describe how conversations with patients' families, as well as the process of writing, have contributed to research and raised broader ethical questions such as what society owes patients at the edge of consciousness. His new book, Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics & The Struggle for Consciousness, is forthcoming in 2014. Dr. Fins is a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College and a Governor of the American College of Physicians.

Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), Angle of Yaw (2006), and Mean Free Path (2010). His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won The Believer Book Award and was widely regarded as one of the best books of 2011. His second novel is forthcoming from Faber/FSG. Recent prose can be found in Art in America, The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Paris Review. He is a 2013-14 Guggenheim Fellow.

Salvatore Scibona's novel, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, The New Yorker, and was among The New Yorker's list of "20 Under 40" writers to watch. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he is a Visiting Writer in the English Department.

Tonya Foster's first collection of poetry, A Swarm of Bees in High Court, is out this fall from Belladonna/Futurepoem Books. She is also co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art. The recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship and a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, she is an associate at the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College and is currently a Visiting Writer in Wesleyan's English Department.

Yusef Komunyakaa is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and the author of twenty books of poetry. He received a bronze star for his service as a journalist in the Vietnam War and is a professor and senior distinguished poet in the graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University. Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker (Wesleyan) and Love in the Time of War (Robin Price, Printer & Pubisher) are releasing in fall 2013.