Dylan Baker is an actor whose many film and television credits include Dream Scenario; LaRoy, Texas; The Resort; Inside Man; Hunters; Happiness; The Hot Zone: Anthrax; The Good Fight and The Good Wife; Homeland; Little Women; Spider-Man 2 & 3; Selma; Confirmation; Kings; Damages; and The Americans. His extensive theater credits include La Bete, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award, Corruption at Lincoln Center, The Audience with Helen Mirren, the Broadway revival of The Front Page, Bernhardt/Hamlet, and Medea at BAM. In addition to his acting credits, he directed the 2014 film 23 Blast. Baker is also an audiobook narrator and was honored with the Audie Award for his reading of Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections and is the voice of Doctor Doom in Marvel’s Wastelanders: Doom. Upcoming projects include 10-13, On a String, Floating Carousel, and Northbound.

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection, including The Candy House; Manhattan Beach, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Keep; the story collection Emerald City; Look at Me, a National Book Award Finalist; and The Invisible Circus. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New York Times Magazine.

Mira Jacob is a novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic. Her graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book. Her novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick and named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus Reviews, The Boston Globe, and Goodreads. Jacob is a professor at The New School and a founding faculty member of the MFA in Writing at Randolph College.

Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Pachinko was voted a 100 Best Books of the Century by both The New York Times Book Review and Times Readers. In 2022, Lee received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. 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. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. In 2023, Lee served as the Editor of Best American Short Stories. Her personal essays and literary criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, and The Times of London. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College. Lee is at work on her third novel, American Hagwon, and a nonfiction work, Name Recognition.

Wesley Morris is a critic-at-large at The New York Times and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, where he writes about popular culture and hosts the podcast Still Processing with J. Wortham. For three years, Morris was a staff writer at Grantland, where he wrote about movies, television, and the role of style in professional sports, and co-hosted the podcast Do You Like Prince Movies, with Alex Pappademas. Before that, he spent 11 years as a film critic at the The Boston Globe, where he won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. In 2021, he was awarded a second Pulitzer in criticism for his writing at the Times. Morris is from Philadelphia, lives in Brooklyn, and is a graduate of the Yale class of 1997.

The New York Times proclaimed Ernesto Quiñonez's debut novel, Bodega Dreams, a “new immigrant classic.” Raised in Spanish Harlem and a proud product of public education, from kindergarten at PS 101 to the City College of New York, Quiñonez is a Sundance Writer’s Lab Fellow and recently appeared in the “Blackout” episode of PBS' American Experience. He teaches at a snotty ivy league in Ithaca, New York.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.