Paul Beatty is an American author and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. In 2016, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of The Sympathizer (Grove/Atlantic, 2015), which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He is also the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. His current book is The Refugees, a short story collection (Grove Press, 2017).