Jesse Lonergan is a comic book artist living in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. His comic work is known for its experimental layouts and innovative page compositions, playing with the formal elements of the comics medium to tell stories in new and original ways. He works with both mainstream and indie publishers, as well as dabbling in self-publishing. His wordless comic HEDRA was nominated for an Eisner for best single issue in 2020, and his graphic novel DROME was featured on many best-of-the-year lists in 2025. He likes tiny-tiled floors, distorted guitars, junk food, old maps, and movies about sad robots.
 

Brooklyn-based cartoonist Gabrielle Bell has contributed to the New Yorker, the Paris Review, McSweeneys, the Believer, and Vice Magazine. Her first full-length graphic memoir, Everything Is Flammable, was named one of 2017’s best graphic novels by Entertainment Weekly, Paste, and Publisher’s Weekly. Her most recent project, What Is the Deal With Gabrielle Bell (2026), is an autobiographical series exploring different mental health modalities.

Dasha Tereshchenko is a Canadian mezzo-soprano praised as “most impressive” by The New York Times and possessing “star quality to spare” by Blogcritics. She is a Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition Encouragement Award winner, a recipient of the Domaine Forget Prize at the 2025 Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal Competition, and an Opéra de Montréal National Auditions Finalist. Recent roles include Silvia Lombardi in the U.S. premiere of Korngold’s The Silent Serenade (Mannes Opera), Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (Music on Site), and the title role in Handel’s Silla (Chicago Summer Opera). She holds degrees from Mannes School of Music and the University of Toronto, and is pursuing a Graduate Diploma at The Juilliard School in the coming 26/27 academic year.

Charlotte Brussee was generously supported by the Maria Francisca Josepha Brouwer Fund for Dutch Artists
 

“She was born for the stage”; as such commented the jury at her final exam at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. Charlotte Brussee (1999) was admitted to the Sweelinck Academy of the Conservatory of Amsterdam in 2014, as well as being principal cellist in the string ensemble “Fancy Fiddlers” of Coosje Wijzenbeek for exceptionally gifted young string players. At this conservatory she had lessons with a.o. Monique Bartels and Maarten Mostert, and most recently with Michael Stirling, with whom she completed her Bachelor studies. Subsequently she continued her (master) studies at the Hochschüle für Musik Detmold with Xenia Jankovic, and currently at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris in the class of Raphaël Pidoux.

Charlotte was prize winner at a.o. the Britten Cello Competition and the Prinses Christina Competition and had masterclasses with among others Pieter Wispelwey, Jérôme Pernóo, Gregor Horsch, Dmitri Ferschtmann, Gary Hoffman, Reinhard Latzko, Xenia Jankovic, Leonid Gorokhov, Emanuelle Bertrand, Véronique Marin and Astrig Siranossian. She played solo with orchestras including Amsterdam Sinfonietta, and played chamber music with Candida Thompson, Leonid Gorokhov, Maja Bogdanovic, Daniel Rowland, Anna Fedorova, Dana Zemtsov and members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra.  Moreover, she played in ensembles such as Cello Octet Amsterdam, Kamerata Zuid, and as principal cellist of the Ricciotti Ensemble. In the summer of 2025, she was selected as principal cellist of the symphony orchestra of Stellenbosch International Music Festival in South Africa.

At present, she is affiliated as “Young Artist” with Daniel Rowland’s International Stift Festival, and recently won the audition for cellist in Dutch orchestra collective Pynarello. To her great delight, Charlotte plays with a rare Radrizzani cello from 1910, generously on loan to her by The Netherlands Musical Instruments Foundation. Her bow was made around 1900 by Frech master bowmaker Charles Nicholas Bazin, in the atelier of Peccatte.
 

Will Evans is an award-winning publisher, writer, translator, bookstore founder, professor, and literary arts advocate. In 2013, he founded Deep Vellum, a nonprofit publishing house and bookstore, dedicated to bringing the world into conversation through literature by publishing the world’s vital stories by underrepresented writers, and cultivating a lifelong love of reading through creative programming and outspoken advocacy for the literary arts. He has been awarded CLMP's Golden Colophon Award for Paradigm Independent Publishing, accepted to the Texas Institute of Letters, named a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture, and was knighted by France as a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. He received BA degrees in History and Russian Literature from Emory University, and an MA in Russian Culture from Duke University. His translation of Russian writer Oleg Kashin's novel Fardwor, Russia: A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin was published by Restless Books in 2016. He teaches courses on Publishing and World Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas and SMU.

Dr. Rachael Allen is the author of Kingdomland, which was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and God Complex, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023, both published by Faber. She works as an editor for Fitzcarraldo Editions and a Senior Lecturer for Queen Mary University.

Carine Abouseif is a senior editor at The Walrus. She edits essays, features, and investigations. She has handled pieces on AI, allegations of racism at a top law school, and the disappearance of two children in Nova Scotia. In 2026, a long-form piece she edited on the aftermath of a death at the University of Toronto won a National Magazine Award. Prior to her time at The Walrus, Carine worked as a substantive editor at The Globe and Mail. Her own writing focuses on health and culture and has been featured in The Walrus, The Globe, Broadview and elsewhere. She is also a former writing instructor at U of T. Her first name is pronounced Kah-reen.

Vancouver-based Kamal Al-Solaylee is the author of the bestseller Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, winner of the 2013 Toronto Book Award and a finalist for the CBC’s Canada Reads and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. His second book, Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone) won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and was finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards for Nonfiction. His third book of nonfiction, Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From, was published in 2021 and was named a Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail and CBC Books. His work mixes personal narrative with geopolitics and field reporting from, to date, 20 countries. He is a two-time nominee for Canada’s National Magazine Awards in the column category, winning the Gold Medal in 2019. More recently, he wrote and produced a number of documentaries for CBC’s IDEAS on subjects as diverse as the Queen of Sheba, Victorian writer Wilkie Collins and the history of port cities. He holds a PhD in English and is currently the director of the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia.

An alumnus of the 2009 Banff Centre Literary Journalism Program, Marcello Di Cintio is the author of six books, including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers, and, most recently, Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers. His books have been honoured with the Shaughnessey Cohen Prize for Political Writing, three W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prizes, and three Alberta Literary Awards – among other accolades. In addition to his books, Di Cintio has placed stories in publications such as Canadian Geographic, Afar, The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s and The Walrus. He has served as a writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary, the Calgary Public Library and the Palestine Writing Workshop. Di Cintio has also taught nonfiction writing to students ranging from gifted teens to former sex workers to young journalists in Gaza. He lives in Calgary.

Trained as a scientist, Dr. Monica Kidd has been an award-winning journalist for thirty years. She has worked as a staff reporter for CBC Radio and as a freelance writer, with a special emphasis on health and the environment. Her recent magazine work has appeared in The Walrus, Canadian Geographic and Alberta Views. She’s published eight books of nonfiction, fiction and fiction, has written and directed short films, including the animation The Storm, for the National Film Board in 2021, and holds graduate degrees in both biology and creative nonfiction. She lives in Calgary, where she also works as a family physician and as an associate humanities editor for The Canadian Medical Association Journal. Her ninth book, Holding Ground: The World’s Eroding Coastlines is forthcoming from Harper Collins Canada in 2027.