M Gessen is the author of eleven books, including “Surviving Autocracy” and “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017. They have written about Russia, Ukraine, autocracy, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among other subjects, for The New York Review of Books and the New York Times. On a parallel track, they have been a science journalist, writing about AIDS, medical genetics, and mathematics; famously, they were dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with Siberian cranes. They are a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. They are the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the John Chancellor Award, the Hitchens Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, a Polk Award, and an Overseas Press Club Award. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, Gessen has been living in New York since 2013.

Amy Hoffman is a writer, editor, teacher, and social justice activist. Her most recent project was co-editing, together with Jyotsna Vaid, The Dream of a Common Movement: Selected Writings of Urvashi Vaid (Duke 2025). Hoffman has published three memoirs: Hospital Time (Duke 1997), about taking care of friends with AIDS in the 1980s; An Army of Ex-Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News (UMass 2007); and Lies About My Family (UMass 2013). She has also published two novels: The Off Season (UWisconsin 2017) and Dot & Ralfie (UWisconsin 2023). Her memoirs have been shortlisted for Publishing Triangle and Lambda awards, and since 2012 she has received nearly annual fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her articles have appeared, most recently, in the Boston Review; Gay & Lesbian Review; and the anthology The Little Magazine in Contemporary America. Hoffman was editor of Women’s Review of Books from 2003 through 2017 and has taught creative writing and literature at the University of Massachusetts, Emerson College, and in the Solstice low-residency MFA program. She has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Hoffman lives in the Boston area with her wife, Roberta Stone.

Jyotsna Vaid earned a doctorate in experimental psychology at McGill University (Montreal) and then pursued post-doctoral research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurological Sciences in India, as a Fulbright scholar, before joining Texas A&M University in 1986, where she is Professor of Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience and Affiliated Faculty in Women's and Gender Studies. Her primary research focuses on the impact of knowing multiple and diverse languages and writing systems. She has also examined cognitive processes underlying humor, and the role of gender and race in the construction of merit in academia. Besides co-editing The Dream of a Common Movement: Selected Writings of Urvashi Vaid (2025), she has published two other books—Language Processing in Bilinguals: Psycholinguistic and Neuropsychological Perspectives (1986/2014), and Creative Thought (1997)—and over 150 scholarly articles and book chapters. A Fellow of several professional societies in her field, Vaid was Founding Editor of two internationally circulated journals, Writing Systems Research and the Committee on South Asian Women Bulletin. She is the older sister of Urvashi Vaid.