Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empathy Exams, a New York Times best-selling essay collection, and a novel, The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. The Empathy Exams, chosen as a Notable Book of 2014 and an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times, was named one of the Top 10 Books of 2014 by Publisher’s Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Oprah, Slate, Salon, The L Magazine, and Time Out: New York. It was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and the ABA Indies Choice Award in nonfiction. Jamison’s essays and criticism have appeared in Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Boston Review, Bookforum, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, and The New York Times, where she is a regular columnist for the Sunday Book Review. She will edit the 2017 edition of Best American Essays, and has written introductions for recent editions of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (Melville House) and the photographer Ryan Spencer’s Such Mean Estate, a collection of cinematic visions of the apocalypse(PowerHouse Books). She has a PhD in English from Yale University, and has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, and the Corporation of Yaddo. She lives in Brooklyn and is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University.

Heidi Julavits is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. A founding editor of The Believer, she teaches at Columbia University.