Agnes Chew is the author of Eternal Summer of My Homeland, longlisted for the Asian Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for POPULAR Readers’ Choice Awards, and a national bestseller in Singapore; and The Desire for Elsewhere. Her fiction won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Asia), and appears in Granta, Necessary Fiction, and Best New Singaporean Short Stories, among others. An honorary fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, she has been awarded scholarships and residences from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House, Granta Writers’ Workshop, Hawthornden Foundation, and Nuoren Voiman Liiton. She is working on her first novel, which was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition and Goldfinch Novel Award.

Beste Filiz (she/her) was born in Istanbul and became a child asylum seeker at three years old when her family was forced to flee Türkiye to London, England. She is now a Turkish-British-American writer for young people. She received her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University. She was a recipient of the 2023 Walter Dean Myers Grant from We Need Diverse Books and a mentee in their 2025 Mentorship Program. She has received scholarships from Lambda Literary, Tin House and was writer-in-residence at Storyknife. She lives with her non-binary partner and three cats and walks shelter dogs.

IG: @beste_filiz_writes

Chris Karnadi is an Indonesian American writer of fiction and nonfiction. He has been supported by Kweli Journal, Seventh Wave Magazine, and Periplus Collective and published writing at Catapult, The Atlantic, Slate, and more.

Raja’a Khalid was born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents and grew up in Dubai where she still lives. She has an MFA in Art from Cornell University and is an alum of the McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House). She has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart prize and her stories appear or are forthcoming in publications such as The Rumpus, New Delta Review, Lakeer, River Styx and elsewhere. She is working on her debut novel.

IG: @rajaa_khalid
Website: www.rajaakhalid.com

Eraldo Souza dos Santos is a Brazilian philosopher and writer. He is currently writing a family memoir with his mother, Nilva Moreira de Souza, probing how she, then a seven-year-old child, was sold into slavery during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the late 1960s. They were nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in 2025, and one of their poems has appeared in Poetry. “She Is There,” a piece stemming from this project, appeared in Best Small Fictions 2025. Souza dos Santos has been selected by Yaddo, the Blue Mountain Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center to work on this project.

Tabish Talib is a Pakistani-American award-winning documentary filmmaker and aspiring writer. His films covering the genocide in Gaza have won an Emmy and Peabody award. He also received a James Beard Award for his work profiling undocumented migrant farmworkers feeding America.

His fiction writing focuses on historical narratives and speculative futures inspired by real life events. Tabish was a 2025 Kweli Fellow in Fiction Writing and a 2026 Anaphora Arts Fellow. An excerpt from his novel-in-progress is slated to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Kweli Journal. Having moved a lot as a child, he currently lives in Harlem with his wife and growing collection of vintage maps.

Nicole Zhen is a Chinese-American writer based in Seattle. Her work has been supported by VONA, Seventh Wave, and the Adroit Journal. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.