Wajahat Ali is a columnist at the Daily Beast and Senior Fellow at the Western States Center and Auburn Seminary. His essays, interviews, and reporting have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The New York Review of Books. Ali appears frequently on CNN and MSNBC and lectures around the world.

Zeshan B is a singer-songwriter whose debut album, Vetted, hit #8 on Billboard's Top 10 Albums (World Music), peaking at #1 on iTunes’ World Music chart. He has performed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and for two U.S. Presidents: Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. In 2020, he released the single “Brown Power” with a music video that included the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rep. Ilhan Omar, Dr. Cornel West, Hasan Minhaj, Nina Turner, and was followed by the critically acclaimed album Melismatic. In 2021, Zeshan teamed up with Stephen Colbert, Ben Stiller, Sara Bareilles, and more for a music video of Billy Joel’s classic anthem “New York State of Mind.” Zeshan will be an artist-in-residence at Lincoln Center starting February 2022.

Preet Bharara served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 to 2017. He oversaw the investigation and litigation of all criminal and civil cases and supervised an office of over 200 Assistant U.S. Attorneys. In 2017, Bharara joined the NYU School of Law faculty as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence. He is the co-founder of CAFE Studios and the host of Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network's Stay Tuned with Preet, focused on issues of justice and fairness. Bharara graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and from Columbia Law School, and is the author of Doing Justice: A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law.

Cathy Park Hong is the author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Foundation Award for Autobiography and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She was recently featured on the cover of Time magazine, named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Hong is the poetry editor of The New Republic and full professor at the Rutgers University–Newark MFA program in poetry.

Ismael Loutfi is a stand up comedian, writer, and actor from Central Florida. He has performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Bill Burr Presents: The Ringers, and This Week at the Cellar. He wrote for the critically acclaimed Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on Netflix, as well as NPR’s Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! He’s acted in multiple episodes of Ahamed’s Ramadan Diaries on Comedy Central, and starred in the Comedy Central digital series Resolutions, which he also wrote. In 2021 he taped a Comedy Central Half Hour Special.

Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award and a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her writing has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, One Story, The New York Times Book Review, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2019, she was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame. She is at work on her third novel, American Hagwon, and a nonfiction work, Name Recognition.

Aparna Nancherla is a New York City-based comedian who has appeared on Conan, Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail, and @midnight, and has written for Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell and Late Night with Seth Meyers. She has performed at SXSW, OutsideLands, in her own half hour special on Netflix’s The Standups, and is regularly featured on Wait, Wait... Don’t Tell Me! and Too Hot for Radio. Nancherla’s television credits include Inside Amy Schumer; Night Train with Wyatt Cenac; Love; Crashing; BoJack Horseman; Corporate; Master of None; Two Woke Gurls; Bob’s Burgers; You’re Not a Monster; Mythic Quest; Space Force; and Mira, Royal Detective. Her comedy album, Just Putting It Out There, was released in 2016.

The Asian American Writers' Workshop is dedicated to publishing and amplifying Asian American literary culture. Since their founding in 1991, they have worked to cultivate a radically inclusive community of Asian and Asian diasporic writers and readers to mobilize for a more just future.