Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide and was made into an Oscar-nominated film. In 2023, her bestselling collection of Dear Sugar columns, Tiny Beautiful Things, was adapted for a Hulu television show and in 2016, it was adapted as a play that continues to be staged in theaters around the world.

Strayed is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Torch, and the bestselling collection Brave Enough, which brings together more than one hundred of her inspiring quotes.

Her award-winning essays and stories have appeared in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, Vogue, The Sun Magazine and elsewhere. Strayed has also written for television and film and she’s made two hit podcasts — Dear Sugars, which she co-hosted with Steve Almond, and Sugar Calling. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Rachel DeWoskin is the award-winning author of five novels: Someday We Will Fly (Penguin Random House, 2019); Banshee (Dottir Press, 2019); Blind (Penguin Random House, 2015); Big Girl Small (FSG, 2011); Repeat After Me (The Overlook Press, 2009); two poetry collections, Two Menus (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and the forthcoming poetry collection, absolute animal (University of Chicago Press, 2023); and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton, 2005), about the years she spent in Beijing as the unlikely star of a Chinese soap opera.

She has received a National Jewish Book Award, a Sydney Taylor Book Award, an American Library Association's Alex Award, and an Academy of American Poets Award, among others. Three of her books, Foreign Babes in Beijing, Someday We Will Fly, and Banshee, are being developed for feature film or television.

DeWoskin's poems, essays, and articles have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Baffler, Ploughshares, and New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. DeWoskin is core fiction faculty at the University of Chicago and affiliated faculty in Jewish and East Asian Studies. She is on the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action (WDA).

Brian Lindstrom's award-winning films attempt to reduce stigma and reveal the humanity of people living on the margins. In Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse, Lindstrom explores police accountability after members of the Portland Police Bureau brutally killed a non-violent man with schizophrenia. Finding Normal follows long time heroin and crack addicts trying to rebuild their lives with the help of recovery mentors. Mothering Inside focuses on the Family Preservation Project's innovative work re-uniting incarcerated mothers with their children. Like a Shield examines the trauma of arrest and incarceration from the point of view of children and mothers separated by the legal system.

Along with his wife Cheryl Strayed, he is the co-director of We Are Forbidden, a New York Times Op-Doc film about the impact of menstrual stigma on women and girls in Nepal. His most recent film is Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill which premiered at DOCNYC in November of 2022 and is currently playing at various film festivals.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter, and the creator, writer, and host of the narrative podcast Mother Country Radicals, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and won the award for “Best Audio Storytelling.”  Zayd’s plays have premiered off-Broadway, across the country and internationally, and are published by Concord and Dramatists Play Service.

Honors include the Horton Foote New American Play Prize, the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, the Kennedy Center’s Jean Kennedy Smith Award, the Sky Cooper American Playwriting Prize, Theatre Master’s Visionary Playwright Award, and Lincoln Center’s Lecomte du Nouy Prize. Zayd holds degrees from Brown, BU, Columbia, and NYU, and was an American Playwriting Fellow at Juilliard. He is currently a Professor at Northwestern University and Director of the MFA in Writing for the Screen + Stage.