The Power of Perspective

Julia Phillips lives in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, Disappearing Earth, has been published in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Poland, and China, and was shortlisted for the 2019 US Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her Pushcart-nominated fiction has been widely published in literary journals and her nonfiction has appeared in publications including The Atlantic and Slate. She spent a year as a Fulbright fellow in Russia's Kamchatka peninsula, where Disappearing Earth is set.

Joan Silber is the author of eight books of fiction. Her 2013 novel Fools was long-listed for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and her 2019 novel, Improvement, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Joan lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad grew up in Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and the American South. He has received fellowships in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and currently splits his time between Bangkok and Brooklyn. Bangkok Wakes to Rain is his first novel, and was shortlisted for the 2019 US Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Jo Case is an Adelaide-based writer, editor and bookseller, and the author of Boomer and Me: A memoir of motherhood, and Asperger’s. She works at Imprints Booksellers and Wakefield Press.