Melissa Febos is the bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Canongate Books in the U.K. Her awards and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, The British Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Febos is a professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.
Helen Mort is an award-winning author based in Sheffield. She has published three poetry collections (Division Street, 2013 and No Map Could Show Them, 2016) and her latest, The Illustrated Woman(2022) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. She is also the author of a novel (Black Car Burning, 2019), a short story collection (Exire, 2019) as well as writing drama and creative non fiction. Her first non-fiction book A Line Above The Sky (Ebury, 2022) was featured in the Guardian and Evening Standard’s ‘books to watch’ lists. She has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Prize and won the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize in 2015. She has taught creative writing for over ten years and is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Helen is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
