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With the publication of her debut book, The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio  became the first undocumented finalist for a National Book Award. Her book was also named by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2020 and was long listed for the Porchlight Business Book Award. The Undocumented Americans was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, The New York Public Library, Book Riot and the Library Journal. It was also named one of the ten best books of the year by Vulture.

Karla has written about immigration, music, beauty, and mental illness for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Glamour, Elle, Vogue, n+1, and The New Inquiry, among others. She lives in New Haven with her partner and their dog. She is a graduate of Harvard University and a doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at Yale. She was an Emerson Collective fellow.

Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Blue Metropolis Words to Change Prize and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Named a notable book of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post and a best book of the year by close to a dozen publications, the novel has been translated into eleven languages, adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a movie. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York City.

Alan Lightman is an award-winning novelist and nonfiction writer, an essayist, physicist, and educator. Currently, he is Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

As both a distinguished physicist and an accomplished novelist, Lightman is one of only a small number of people who straddle the sciences and the humanities. He was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities. He has lectured at more than 100 universities nationwide about the similarities and differences in the ways that scientists and artists view the world.

Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller and has been translated into thirty languages. It was runner-up for the 1994 PEN New England/Boston Globe Winship Award. The novel is one of the most widely used texts in universities in the U.S. More than fifty independent theatrical and musical productions around the world have been based on Einstein’s Dream.

Lightman’s novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award in fiction. His novel Reunion was a selection of Books Sense 76, a Boston Globe/New England bestseller, a Washington Post bestseller, a Barnes and Nobel national college bestseller, and a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. Lightman’s collection of essays, A Sense of the Mysterious, was a finalist for the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award. The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th Century Science, was named by Discover Magazine as one of the ten best books on science in 2005. The Accidental Universe (2014) was named by Brainpickings as one of the ten best books of the year. The partially fictionalized memoir Screening Room (2015) was named by the Washington Post as one of the best books of the year.

Three Flames, his most recent book, was praised by Annie Proulx as his “best book since Einstein’s Dreams . . . a piercing story of social dissolution in damaged Cambodia.”