Lorna Goodison is one of the Caribbean's most distinguished contemporary poets. Her work appears in the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces and her many honors include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Americas Region and the Musgrave Gold Medal. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Controlling the Silver, Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems, Travelling Mercies (2001) and Turn Thanks: Poems (1999), as well as two collections of short stories and an acclaimed memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People which was a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the Trillium Award, and won the B.C. Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Her work, translated into many languages, is widely published and anthologized. Born in Jamaica, Goodison has taught at the University of Toronto and now teaches at the University of Michigan. She divides her time between Ann Arbor and Toronto.

V.V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, is the author of Love Marriage (Random House, 2008). Set in Sri Lanka and its diaspora, the novel was named one of Washington Post Book World's Best Books of 2008, selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program, and longlisted for the Orange Prize. Ganeshananthan is a graduate of Harvard College, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the new MA program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specializing in arts and culture. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, on Esquire.com, and in Himal Southasian magazine. Her journalism and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among others. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she presently serves on the board of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and on the graduate board of The Harvard Crimson. She is a past recipient of Phillips Exeter's Bennett Fellowship and residency, and has taught at Skidmore College. She is now the Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.