Between Dystopias

Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. He is the author of the New York Times-bestseller Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction in 2019 and its sequel Moon Witch, Spider King His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. It was also a New York Times Notable Book. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. James divides his time between Minnesota and New York.

Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian U.S. writer born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. Her debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin, (Random House, 2022) is a New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2022, a Good Morning America Anticipated Book, an Amazon’s Best of the Month Editor’s Pick, finalist for a 2023 Lambda Literary Award and a 2023 Chautauqua Literary Prize, and winner of the 2023 PEN Open Book Award. She is the author of the poetry collection Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. She is a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Parul Sehgal is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, she was a book critic at the New York Times, where she also worked as a senior editor and columnist. She has won awards for her criticism from the New York Press Club, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. She teaches in the graduate creative-writing program at New York University.