Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of four poetry books and the story collection How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the Scotiabank Giller prize. Her stories have won an O Henry Award and appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, and Granta. She was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand and was raised an educated in Toronto.

Khuê Phạm is a Vietnamese-German writer. An award-winning journalist with the prestigious weekly Die Zeit, she specialises in features and profiles. Having published the non-fiction book We New Germans (2012) about the second generation of immigrants in Germany, she has recently turned her family's history into her first work of fiction. Her debut novel Wherever You Are will be out this September.

Hoa Nguyen is the author of six books of poetry including Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008, and Violet Energy Ingots which was nominated for a Griffin Poetry Prize. Her latest collection of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, published by Wave Books in 2021, was named a Best Book of 2021 by Publisher's Weekly and is nominated for a National Book Award and the General Governor’s Literary Award for Poetry.