Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran and raised in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley. Her debut novel Sons and Other FlammableObjects (Grove, 2007) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the “First Fiction” category. Her second novel The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) was a 2014 “Best Book of the Year” according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and many more.  Her widely acclaimed third book Sick: A Memoir (Harper Perennial, 2018) was a Best Book of 2018 according to Time Magazine, Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, Autostraddle, The Paris Review, LitHub, and more. It is currently in its fifth printing. Her most recent book, the essay collection Brown Album: Essays on Exile & Identity (Vintage, May 2020), has been praised in The New York Times, O: Oprah Magazine, TIME, goop, USA Today, and many more. Her next book, Tehrangeles: A Novel, is forthcoming from Pantheon in 2024. Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her other writing has appeared in many sections of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, Slate, BOMB, and many others. She has enjoyed residencies and fellowships at Northwestern’s Academy for Alternative Journalism, Yaddo, Ucross, VCCA, Vermont Studio Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and more. She has taught creative writing and literature at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Bucknell University, Bard College, Wesleyan University, Sarah Lawrence College, Fordham University, the University of Leipzig, and more for the past 20 years. She is a contributing editor at Evergreen Review and lives in NYC. For more info: www.porochistakhakpour.com

Marisa Crawford is the author of the poetry collections The Haunted House, Reversible, and, most recently, DIARY (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). She is the editor of The Weird Sister Collection (Feminist Press, forthcoming 2024), and co-editor, with Megan Milks, of We Are The Baby-Sitters Club: Essays & Artwork from Grown-Up Readers. Marisa is co-host of the 90s rock podcast All Our Pretty Songs. She lives in New York.