Sari Botton‘s memoir in essays, And You May Find Yourself…Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo, was chosen by Poets & Writers magazine for the 2022 edition of its annual “5 Over 50” feature. An essay from it received notable mention in The Best American Essays 2023, edited by Vivian Gornick. For five years, she was the Essays Editor at Longreads. She edited the bestselling anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NewYork and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. She publishes Oldster Magazine, Memoir Land, and Adventures in Journalism. She was the Writer in Residence in the creative writing department at SUNY New Paltz for Spring, 2023.

Elissa Altman is the award-winning author of Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, and the memoirs Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing, Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw, and Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking. Three-time finalist and winner of a James Beard Award for narrative food writing, she has been a Pushcart Prize nominee for her essay Forever Less of Beauty, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Connecticut Book Award, Maine Literary Award, and the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize. Her work has appeared in publications including Orion, Longreads, The Bitter Southerner, On Being, O: The Oprah Magazine, LitHub, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and the Washington Post, where her column, Feeding My Mother, ran for a year. Altman writes and speaks widely on the intersection of permission and creativity, and has appeared live on the TEDx stage and at the Public Theater in New York. She teaches the craft of memoir at Orion, Fine Arts Work Center, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Kripalu, Truro Center for the Arts, Rutgers Community Writing Workshop, and beyond, She lives in Connecticut with her wife, book designer Susan Turner.

Jonathan Lerner is the author of the memoir Swords in the Hands of Children: Reflections of an American Revolutionary, about his participation in the 1960s radical left and the militant Weather Underground; and the new memoir Performance Anxiety: The Headlong Adolescence of a Mid-Century Kid, about his youth in the years just before the disruptions we call The Sixties. He has had a long career as a magazine writer and editor, focusing mainly on architecture, environment and public space, and is a longtime contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Hyeseung Song is a first-generation Korean American painter and the author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl. Docile has been called a “savagely beautiful memoir” by David Henry Hwang, a “revelation” by Chloé Cooper Jones and was named a “Best Book” by Apple, Electric Literature, and more. Raised in Texas, Song studied philosophy at Princeton and Harvard Universities, and painting at the Grand Central Atelier in New York City. A two-time Greenshields award winner, TedX speaker, and resident artist of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the Vermont Studio Center and the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program, Song has also taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is at work on a second memoir, a meditation on grief, mental illness and the power of artmaking. Song lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York.

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