Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet, and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children's books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award. Along with her Pulitzer and National Book Award, Walker has been honored with the O. Henry Award and the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction. Additionally, she was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2006 and received the Lennon Ono Peace Award in 2010.
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi, and the author of the forthcoming memoir Good, God: A Creation Story. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. Laymon is also the author of the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, a New York Times notable book of 2021, Long Division, winner of the 2022 NAACP Image Award for Fiction, and the lyrical picture book City Summer, Country Summer. Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University.
Melanie R. Hill is a Named Term Chair Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice and Assistant Professor of American Literature at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of Colored Women Sittin’ on High: Womanist Sermonic Practice in Literature and Music (University of North Carolina Press), which focuses on the ways in which Black women preachers in African American literature, music, and in the space of the pulpit counter social injustices through sermon and song.
