CAMILLE T. DUNGY is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster: May 2, 2023). She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade. Dungy is the poetry editor for Orion magazine. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, over 40 other anthologies, plus dozens of venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. You may know her as the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.

KIESE LAYMON is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi.

In his observant, often hilarious work, Laymon does battle with the personal and the political: race and family, body and shame, poverty and place. His savage humor and clear-eyed perceptiveness have earned him comparisons to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Walker, and Mark Twain. He is the author of the award-winning memoir Heavy, the groundbreaking essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the genre-defying novel Long Division.

Laymon’s memoir Heavy won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media. Heavy was also named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years and in 2024, was one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times. A personal narrative illuminating national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable—an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family. In a starred review, Kirkus wrote, “Laymon skillfully couches his provocative subject matter in language that is pyrotechnic and unmistakably his own…. A dynamic memoir that is unsettling in all the best ways.” Heavy was named a best book of 2018 by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly. The audiobook, read by the author, was the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year.

MARY CAPPELLO composes essays, memoir, literary nonfiction and experiments in prose, always with the aim of bringing a poetic sensibility together with a scholarly ethos. Her seven books include a mnemic collage based on a twinned legacy of violence and creativity in her Italian/American family; an anti-chronicle meant to thwart the ritualized routine of breast cancer treatment in the US; a Los Angeles Times bestselling detour on awkwardness—ontological, diplomatic, aesthetic, and social; discursive double portraits of friendship between lesbians and gay men living with AIDS; a lyric biography of a medical pioneer and his cabinet of swallowed and aspirated things; the mood fantasia, Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack; and most recently a lyric manifesto on the lost arts of the lecture, the notebook, and the nap. LECTURE was the inaugural title in Transit Books’ Undelivered Lecture Series. She is also the co-author, with James Morrison and Jean Walton of Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration, featured on Michael Silverblatt’s bookworm (where he says he read it in a “state of a kind of ecstasy”) and described by Charles Baxter as “one of the great books about education.” 

She has been variously honored with Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellowships in Nonfiction; the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize for her documentary work with new immigrants to Italy; and the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative for her essay, “Can Creative Writing Be Taught?” Her groundbreaking work on polymath humanitarian, Chevalier Jackson, and the patients in his care set the stage for multi-modal performances in diverse locales from Brooklyn’s Observatory to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (London), from The Smithsonian Institution to Grand Rounds in Pediatric Otolaryngology, from the Velaslavasay Panorama (LA) to serving as Presidential Lecturer for the ABEA (American Bronchoesophagological Association). Keen to reconceive the forms nonfiction takes in public to meet the pressing political needs of our time, she has authored projects like the essay as collaborative mood room, and the inter-active anti-panel, while also calling for a return to the lecture as a sounding, contemplative art. Her most recently completed book, Frost Will Come: Essays from the Bardo is a tribute to the tumultuous and visionary place of her poet-mother’s “bardo,” her transition from a deeply lived life to a difficult, beautiful, and uneasy death. A former Fulbright Lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow), Cappello is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island.