Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of City of Girls, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Eat Pray Love, and seven other books of fiction and nonfiction. She began her career writing for magazines, including The New York Times Magazine and GQ, and was a three-time finalist for a National Magazine Award. Her story collection Pilgrims was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and The Last American Man was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novel The Signature of All Things was named a Best Book of 2013 by The New York Times, O Magazine, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The New Yorker. Gilbert’s 2009 TED Talk, “Your Elusive Creative Genius,” remains among their most viewed talks. She is the founder of both the Onward Book Club, a space created to support and celebrate the work of Black female authors, and the Letters From Love project on Substack.

Heather Alicia Simms was last seen on Broadway in the Tony-nominated hit Purlie Victorious as Missy Judson. She was also a member of the original cast of the Pulitzer Prize–winning production Fairview, which premiered at Soho Rep and later at Theatre for a New Audience. Simms is proud of her time at Signature Theatre under Lynn Nottage’s residency with the plays Fabulation and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, for which she won a 2019 Obie Award. Her additional notable appearances include the world premiere of Barbecue at The Public Theater; born bad at Soho Rep; Richard III with the New York Theatre Workshop; Trouble in Mind at Hartford Stage; Breath, Boom at Playwrights Horizons; The Correspondent with Rattlestick; The Exonerated with The Culture Project; and on Broadway, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and A Raisin in the Sun. Her film and television credits include The Kings of Napa, Swarm, Single Drunk Female, Marvel’s Luke Cage, Bull, High Maintenance, The Last O.G., Broad City, Seven Seconds, Law & Order, Vampires vs. The Bronx, Red Hook Summer, The Nanny Diaries, and Broken Flowers. Simms is an award-winning voiceover artist whose work can be heard in numerous commercials and audiobooks.

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the historic winner—first woman and first Black American—of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2017 and Salvage the Bones in 2011. She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi. Let Us Descend was published in paperback on September 3rd.