Festival Authors, Moderators, and Presenters

Few contemporary poets have achieved Billy Collins’s combination of critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Serving as United States poet laureate from 2001 to 2003 and New York State poet laureate from 2004 to 2006, Collins is known for an accessible, conversational style that grounds everyday observations before shifting into unexpected irony or quiet lyricism. Among his many acclaimed collections are The Art of Drowning, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Picnic, Lightning, recipient of the Paterson Poetry Prize. His Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems remains a major 21st-century bestseller. A former Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College (CUNY), Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016. He has been recognized as a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.”

Hernan Diaz is the New York Times bestselling author of In the Distance, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Trust, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize, and named one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. An acclaimed voice in contemporary American literature, Diaz engages audiences through witty conversations about foreignness, genre theory, literary history, and how research is an act of reading. In its starred review of his forthcoming book Ply, set for release on September 29, Library Journal writes, “Diaz brilliantly envisions how love, trust, and loyalty can remain when freedom and justice have collapsed.” He has received the John Updike Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages.

Roxane Gay has authored six critically acclaimed books, including essay and short story collections and Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017), hailed by The New York Times as “luminous … intellectually rigorous and deeply moving.” Booklist recommends her 2023 essay collection Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticisms, and Minding Other People’s Business as a must-read “for everyone interested in reading intellectual, accessible, and important takes on timely topics.” A Guggenheim Fellow, Gay is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper’s Bazaar, and McSweeney’s. In 2016, Gay and poet Yona Harvey became the first Black women lead writers for a Marvel series with Black Panther: World of Wakanda. Gay served as the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University and currently works on film and television projects while running her own publishing imprint, Roxane Gay Books.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of more than thirty-five publications, including novels, novellas, collections, and comic books. An English professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and an NEA Fellowship recipient, Jones has earned numerous honors, including the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the L.A. Times’ Ray Bradbury Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel. Library Journal praised The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025) as “grief horror, portraying the mourning of a land and a people,” and bestselling science fiction author Daniel Kraus called it “very likely Jones’s masterpiece,” adding, “For me and vampires, there is Stoker, there is Rice, and now there is Jones.” His forthcoming release, Off the Reservation (October 2026), is the sequel to his 2020 bestseller The Only Good Indians, which Stephen King called “thrilling, literate, scary, [and] immersive.”

Called “one of our most poignant and moving contemporary novelists” by Vogue, Lily King is the author of the bestselling novels Euphoria and Writers & Lovers, which was named a top ten book of 2020 by The Washington Post. Publishers Weekly calls King “a master psychological portraitist,” and Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog, places her “firmly in the top rank of our most accomplished novelists.” The author of six novels and a story collection, she brings deft characterization and emotional precision to stories that illuminate the inner workings of life’s most complicated relationships. Her most recent novel, Heart the Lover, an instant New York Times bestseller, was long-listed for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul and immigrated to Queens at age seven. Her fiction “explores the most fundamental crisis of immigrants’ children: how to bridge a generation gap so wide it is measured in oceans,” notes The Observer. Her national bestselling debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), was named a top ten book of the year by The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. Her second novel, Pachinko (2017), about a Korean family that immigrates to Japan, has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and named one of The New York Times Book Review’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Her upcoming book American Hagwon (Cardinal/HBG), to be released on September 29, has been called “a gift to her readers” by Kirkus in its starred review.