Mary Pat Brady is Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Duke University Press, 2002), which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Prize for the Best Work of Latina/o and Chicana/o Literary and Cultural Criticism. She is also an associate editor of the sixth edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature (Cengage 2008-2009). An earlier essay, “The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories” (published in American Literature in 1999) won the Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published in that journal for 1999. She has also taught at Indiana University, UC Santa Barbara, and UCLA; she has also served as the Director of Cornell’s Latina/o Studies Program.  

Mark Chiang is Associate Professor in the Global Asian Studies Program and English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University (NYU Press 2009). His work has also appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, Q & A: Queer in Asian America, Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature and Culture, among other venues.

Erica R. Edwards is Professor of African American Studies and English at Yale University. She is the author of The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire (NYU Press, 2021), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association, earned an honorable mention for the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, and was a finalist for the National Women Studies Assocation’s Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s Book Prize, and the Prose Award in Literature from the Association of American Publishers. Her first book, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Her work on African American literature, politics, and gender critique has appeared in journals such as differences, Callaloo, American Quarterly, and American Literary History, and her public-facing work has appeared in venues such as The Washington Post, Public Books, and A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought. She founded the Lindon Barrett Scholars Mentoring Program and the UC Center for Black Studies in California. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Institute of Citizens & Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Rolland Murray is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Our Living Manhood: Literature, Black Power, and Masculine Ideology (U of Pennsylvania P, 2007). He is currently working on a book titled, Blackness Incorporated: Market Culture, Institutionalization, and African American Literature. His essays have appeared in such journals as American Literary History, Callaloo, the Yale Journal of Criticism, and African American Review. He has been awarded fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as well as the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.

Kinohi Nishikawa is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (2018), and he is currently writing “Black Paratext,” a history of modern African American literature and book design. Nishikawa’s essays have appeared in PMLA, American Literary History, MELUS, Chicago Review, and other journals.

Richard Jean So is Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at McGill University. He focuses on computational and data-driven approaches to contemporary literature and culture, with a particular interest in race and inequality. His most recent book is Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction, and he is at work on a new project called Fast Culture, Slow Justice: Race and Writing in the Platform Age. He has two forthcoming articles related to this new book project: "#Covid, Crisis and the Search for Story in the Platform Age" (with Hoyt Long and Kaitlyn Todd, Critical Inquiry Summer 2023) and "#BLM Insurgency, White Structures of Feeling, and the Fate of the 2020 Racial Awakening" (with Long Le-Khac and Maria Antoniak, New Literary History 2023).