Julian Talamantez Brolaski (it / xe / they) is a poet and country musician, the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011). Julian plays with the band Juan & the Pines, and their first full-length solo album It’s Okay Honey came out in 2023. Julian was the 2023–2024 Bagley Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Its poems were recently included in Queer Nature (2022), When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat 2020). Julian is the co-editor of The Glittering Field: A Gathering of New Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Poetry with Crisosto Apache, forthcoming from Litmus Press in 2026.

Cristina Henríquez is the author of four books including, most recently, The Great Divide, which was a Today Show Read With Jenna pick, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and one of Time magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024. It was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, was a finalist for the Heartland Booksellers Award, and was a Goodreads Choice Award nominee. Her other books include the novels, The Book of Unknown Americans and The World In Half, and the collection, Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection.

Henríquez’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and AGNI, and the anthology This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers. Her work has been featured in the Best American Short Stories 2018 and on Symphony Space Selected Shorts. Her nonfiction has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Real Simple, The Oxford American, and Preservation, as well as in the anthologies State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America and Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Women Writers Reflect on the Candidate and What Her Campaign Meant.

She is the 2024 recipient of the 21st Century Award given by The Chicago Public Library Foundation, was a 2020 fiction judge for the National Book Awards, has been a guest on National Public Radio, and is a recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award, a grant started by Sandra Cisneros in honor of her father.

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