Hemley, Robin: - Robin Hemley is Director of the George Polk School of Communications as well as Parsons Family Chair in Creative Writing, University Professor and Co-Chair of the MFA in Writing at LIU-Brooklyn, USA. He is also Professor Emeritus at The University of Iowa, USA, and a graduate of The Iowa Writers' Workshop where The Digital Storytelling Lab was recently dedicated in his honor. He is the award-winning author of 16 books of fiction and nonfiction, including most recently the autofiction, Oblivion, An After-Autobiography (2022), The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, co-authored with Xu Xi (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood (2020, Penguin SE Asia, 2021). His new collection of essays is How to Change History: A Salvage Project (2025). His work has been published and translated widely and he has received such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, three Pushcart Prizes in both nonfiction and fiction, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, The Independent Press Book Award for Memoir, among others. He is the Founder of the international nonfiction conference, NonfictioNOW and was the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa for nine years, inaugural director of The Writers' Centre at Yale-NUS, Singapore, and is a graduate of The Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is co-editor with Leila Philip of Speculative Nonfiction.

Wilkins, Joe: - Joe Wilkins is Associate Professor of English at Linfield College, USA. His memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry won the GLCA New Writers Award for non-fiction and his work has appeared in Georgia Review, Harvard Review and Slate among many other periodicals.

XI, Xu: - Xu Xi is a prolific Indonesian Chinese novelist and author from Hong Kong and New York. Her recent books include This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (2019), a memoir Dear Hong Kong: Elegy for a City (2017) and the novel That Man in Our Lives (2016). She is Faculty Co-Director of the International MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, USA, where she previously served as faculty chair for their MFA in writing. She also established and directed Asia's first low-residency MFA at the City University of Hong Kong.

Prentiss, Sean: - Sean Prentiss is Associate Professor of English at Norwich University, USA. He is author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave (2015), which won the National Outdoor Book Award for Biography/History. He is also co-editor of The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre (2014).