Esther Allen is a writer and translator. She is a professor at Baruch College, City University of New York, where she directs the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. and in the Ph.D. Programs in  French, Comparative Literature, and Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at CUNY Graduate Center. Allen has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and a Biography Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, working on her forthcoming One Vast Question: The Life and Afterlife José Martí. Among her many books, her translation of Zama, by Antonio Di Benedetto, won the 2017 National Translation Award; she has subsequently translated DiBenedetto's The Silentiary and The Suicides. She co-founded the PEN World Voices Festival and guided the work of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund in its first seven years. For PEN International and the Institut Ramon Lull, she edited To Be Translated or Not To Be, published in English, Catalan, and German. Her essays, translations and interviews have appeared in  the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, Words Without Borders, Bomb, LitHub, the New Yorker and other publications. 

Sarah Arvio, a poet, translator and memoirist, has published three books of poetry, Visits from the Seventh, Sono: Cantos, and Cry Back My Sea, which Booklist called “an ode to love.”  A fourth, night thoughts: 70 dream poems and notes from an analysis, is a hybrid book of poetry, essay and memoir.  Her works also include an ample new edition, in her translation, of poetry and a play by Federico García Lorca, titled Poet in Spain.  She has published her poems widely, in such places as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and The Paris Review. Her honors include the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Bogliasco and Guggenheim Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.  She worked for the United Nations as a translator for many years, in New York and Switzerland.  A lifelong New Yorker, she studied at the Columbia University School of the Arts. 

Carmen Boullosa is the author of a dozen volumes of poetry (Harmatia on translation by Lawrence Schimel), has published nineteen novels (the most recent ones, The Book of Eve and The Book of Anna (translated by Samantha Schnee), as well as books of essays and plays (some staged). She is a Distinguished Lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY, was a Guggenheim and a Cullman Center Fellow, and has received multiple literary awards (in Madrid, Casa de America de poesía, in Germany, LiBeratur and Anna Seghers Prize; in Mexico the Jorge Ibargüengoitia Prize, the Villarrutia, the Excelencia en las Letras José Emilio Pacheco, and the Bellas Artes de Literatura Inés Arredondo, among others). The NYPL holds her archive (to 2016).

Elizabeth Colomba, born in France and raised in Épinay-sur-Seine to Martinican parents, lives and works in New York City. She holds a degree in applied art from the Estienne School of Art and honed her drawing skills at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. After graduating, she moved to Los Angeles to paint and contribute to films by Baz Luhrmann, Tom Ford, Andrew Dominik. Colomba's detailed paintings draw on Old Master techniques to reclaim mythological, historical, and allegorical narratives in portraiture, celebrating the Black figure often omitted from these narratives. Her work challenges conventional beauty standards and addresses the historical marginalization of women of color in art history. In 2021, Colomba co-wrote and illustrated the graphic novel "Queenie: The Godmother of Harlem," shedding light on Stephanie St. Clair's life. The book was published in Europe and the US, earning widespread acclaim for its powerful storytelling. Her work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, Park Avenue Armory, CAAM and more. Her art is part of permanent collections like The Met, The Studio Museum in Harlem, PAFA, etc… Her work graced the cover of the New Yorker for Juneteenth 2022 and featured in Vogue's December 2023 issue.

Jeremy Eichler is a writer, scholar and critic, and the author of Time's Echo, an acclaimed new book on music, war and memory that was named “History Book of the Year” by The Sunday Times and hailed as “the outstanding music book of this and several years” by The Times Literary Supplement. Chosen as a notable book of 2023 by The New York Times, The New Yorker and NPR, it won three National Jewish Book Awards including “Book of the Year” and was a finalist for the UK’s Baillie Gifford Prize, whose jury described it as “a masterpiece of non-fiction writing.” Eichler’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times and many other national publications, and he serves as the chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe. He earned his PhD in modern European history from Columbia University and is the recipient of fellowships from the NEH and Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In the 2024-25 season, he will serve as the first ever Writer-in-Residence of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She earned a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Yale. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), The Ferrante Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), and The Personality Brokers (Doubleday: New York, 2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and informs the CNN/HBO Max documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist (Cambridge: MIT, 2018), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Liveright, 2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Norton, 2021). She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Two Futures for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press) and writing a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits (Norton US / Harper Collins UK). She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books to New Literary History,PMLA, American Literature, American Literary History,and Modernism/modernity. In 2019, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2021, she was awarded the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. Her work has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Quebec, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. She has judged the International Booker Prize, the Story Prize, the Whiting Foundation Grant, and other major prizes and awards. She currently serves on the boards of Words Without Borders, the Hawthornden Foundation, and Connecticut Humanities.

James Goodman is the author of essays, short stories, and three books, Stories of Scottsboro, Blackout, and But Where Is the Lamb? Imagining The Story of Abraham and Isaac. His work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, and since 1997, Rutgers University-Newark, where he is a Distinguished Professor, teaching history and creative writing. He is currently working on two books. One is about aphorisms about history, how they sometimes help us understand what history is (and what it is good for) and how they often lead us astray. He received a NYPL Cullman Center Fellowship for 2024-25 to work on the other, tentatively titled No Way Out, on Sidney Poitier, for the Significations series at Penguin Random House.

James Marcus is the author of Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. He edited and introduced Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage and has translated seven books from the Italian, the most recent being Giacomo Casanova's The Duel. His essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, VQR, The American Scholar, and many other publications. He is also the former editor of Harper's Magazine, and currently teaches at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Julian Lucas is a staff writer at The New Yorker, an editor at The Dial, and an editor-at-large at Cabinet. His writing focuses on literature and the arts, and particularly the representation of history across media. He was a contributing writer at the The New York Times Book Review, and his work has appeared in Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. He was a finalist for the 2020–2021 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

Deborah Lutz is the author of five books, and her sixth one, forthcoming in 2026, is a biography of Emily Brontë. A previous book, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, was shortlisted for the PEN/Weld Award for Biography. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and has twice been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. She teaches Victorian literature and culture at the University of Louisville as the Thruston B. Morton Endowed Chair. Past honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Cabinet Magazine, and many other venues, and she is the editor of two Norton Critical Editions—Jane Eyre and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Parul Sehgal is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, she was a book critic at the New York Times, where she also worked as a senior editor and columnist. She has won awards for her criticism from the New York Press Club, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. She teaches in the graduate creative-writing program at New York University.

Michael Strevens, born and raised in New Zealand, is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, where since 2004 he has taught and thought about the nature of science, complex systems, the psychology of philosophy, the role of physical intuition in scientific discovery, and the nature of explanation and understanding, among other things. In his recent general-audience book The Knowledge Machine (Liveright) he explains why science is so successful at creating knowledge and why it took so long for humans to figure out how to do it right.

Gene Seymour is a journalist, editor & critic who spent thirty years in newspapers, beginning with the Hartford Courant and continuing with the Philadelphia Daily News and New York Newsday. Since leaving the business in 2008, he has been a regular contributor to CNN Opinion & has also written essays and reviews to The Nation, The New Republic, BookForum, The Washington Post, ArtForum, and The Baffler. He lives in Philadelphia.

James Traub is a journalist, author and scholar. He worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1993 to 1998, as a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine from 1998 to 2011, as a columnist and contributor for foreignpolicy.com from 2009 to 2022. Since 2010 he has been teaching classes on American foreign policy and on intellectual history at NYU Abu Dhabi and at NYU. He has written extensively about foreign affairs, national politics, urban affairs, and education. His most recent book, True Believer: Hubert Humphrey's Quest For A More Just America, was published earlier this year. His previous works include What Was Liberalism? The Past, Present and Promise of  A Noble Idea; John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit; and Judah Benjamin: Counselor To The Confederacy. He is currently writing a book about the role of the schools in preparing students to be citizens at a moment of grave democratic peril. He is a fellow of the Center on International Cooperation and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Rosanna Warren taught in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago from 2012 to 2023 (now Emerita).  Her book of criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, came out in 2008. Her most recent books of poems are So Forth (2020), Ghost in a Red Hat (2011), and Departure (2003). Her biography of Max Jacob, Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters appeared in October 2020. She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New England Poetry Club, among others. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Caroline Weber is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College and Columbia University, where she specializes in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century French literature and history. Educated at Harvard and Yale, she has also held visiting professorships at Princeton and the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. A frequent reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, she has also contributed essays to the London Review of Books, Town & Country, Vogue, and the Washington Post, among many other publications. Her academic honors include a Guggenheim, a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, and a writer’s residency at Edith Wharton’s the Mount. Her latest book, Proust’s Duchess (Knopf 2018), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and won the French Heritage Society Book Award. The French government recently named her a Chevalier in the Ordre des arts et des lettres.