Joshua Bennett (editor) is a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), a finalist for an NAACP Image Award; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard, 2020); Owed (Penguin, 2020); and The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022). He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His first work of narrative nonfiction is Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023).
Jesse McCarthy (editor) is an assistant professor of English and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. His critically acclaimed essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? (Liveright, 2021) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. He is the author of the novel The Fugitives (Melville House, 2021). He has published articles and reviews in the journals transposition, NOVEL, and African American Review and contributed chapters to Richard Wright in Context (Cambridge, 2021) and Ralph Ellison in Context (Cambridge, 2022) as well as an introduction for Vincent O. Carter’s memoir The Bern Book (Dalkey Archive, 2022).