Helen Ellis is the author of Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light, Southern Lady Code, American Housewife, and Eating the Cheshire Cat. Her latest book, Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge, will be released in 2023. Raised in Alabama, she lives with her husband in New York City. You can find her on Twitter @WhatIDoAllDay and Instagram @HelenEllisAuthor.

David Grann is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City Of Z. His forthcoming book, The Wager, will arrive in April 2023. Killers of the Flower Moon was a finalist for The National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of The White Darkness and the collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Grann’s storytelling has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award.

Kevin Kwan is the author of Crazy Rich Asians, the international bestselling novel that has been translated into more than 30 languages. Its sequel, China Rich Girlfriend, was released in 2015, and Rich People Problems, the final book in the trilogy, followed in 2017. For several weeks in 2018, the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy commanded the top three positions of the New York Times bestseller list—an almost unprecedented single-author trifecta, and the film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians became Hollywood’s highest grossing romantic comedy in over a decade. In 2018, Kwan was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. His latest novel, Sex and Vanity, was published in 2021.

Jane Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three bestselling and critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction books. She co-authored Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988, with Doyle McManus, and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, with Jill Abramson, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, was named one of The New York Times’s Top 10 Books of the Year and won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Goldsmith Book Prize, the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. For her reporting at The New Yorker, Mayer has been awarded the John Chancellor Award, the George Polk Award, the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, and the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence presented by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard.

Bill Thomas is Executive Vice President, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief of Doubleday.

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which in 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, the National Book Award, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His novel The Nickel Boys won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction as well as The Kirkus Prize and The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. He is also the author of The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. Whitehead is a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. His latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, was published in 2021, and his forthcoming novel, Crook Manifesto, will be published in 2023.

Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City and is the author of The People in the Trees, A Little Life, and To Paradise.

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than 45 countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize; The Year of the Flood; MaddAddam; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and began to write stories while he was a student. Over his life he produced more than 30 books and 150 short stories, poems, plays, and essays across a wide range of genres. His most famous creation is the detective Sherlock Holmes, who he introduced in his first novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887). This was followed in 1889 by the historical novel Micah Clarke. In 1893 Conan Doyle published The Final Problem in which he killed off his famous detective so that he could turn his attention more toward historical fiction. However, Holmes was so popular that Conan Doyle eventually relented and published The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901. The events of The Hound of the Baskervilles are set before those of The Final Problem, but in 1903, new Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear that revealed that the detective had not died after all. He was finally retired in 1927.

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is the author of the classic novels Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Devils of Loudun, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, Huxley died in Los Angeles, California.

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (co-written with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and an AT&T Audience Network original television series). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, and Doctor Sleep are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. King is the recipient of the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

David Rakoff (1964 – 2012) is the author of four New York Times bestsellers: the essay collections Fraud, Don’t Get Too Comfortable, and Half Empty, and the novel in verse Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish. A two-time recipient of the Lambda Literary Award and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, he was a regular contributor to Public Radio International’s This American Life. His writing frequently appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Wired, Salon, GQ, Outside, Gourmet, Vogue, and Slate, among other publications. An accomplished stage and screen actor, playwright, and screenwriter, Rakoff adapted the screenplay for and starred in Joachim Back’s film The New Tenants, which won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short.

Upton Sinclair (1878 – 1968) began writing dime novels at the age of fifteen, and by his death, he had completed more than eighty books, twenty plays, and hundreds of articles dealing with virtually every social problem in the United States. He had helped establish the League for Industrial Democracy, gone to jail fighting for a miner’s right to free speech, started the California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, and almost won the governorship of that state by running on the platform “End Poverty in California.” But Upton’s Sinclair’s fame rests on his muckraking novel The Jungle, an exposé of Chicago’s meatpacking industry, which led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Sinclair continued his attack on industrial evils and called for further reforms in The Metropolis, The Moneychangers, King Coal, and Oil!. His eleven-volume opus, Lanny Budd, dramatized world history from 1913 to 1949. For the second novel in this series, Dragon’s Teeth, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Throughout his life he remained a staunch Socialist and committed humanitarian, saying of his work “My efforts are to find out what is righteousness in the world, to live it, and try to help others to live it.”