Percival Everett & David Mas Masumoto

Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty books of fiction and poetry and a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has described himself as "pathologically ironic" and has played around with numerous genres such as western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire, philosophical fiction and poetry. His books are often satirical, aimed at exploring race and identity issues in the United States. Everett is best known for his novels Erasure, adapted as the Academy Award-winning film American Fiction, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, and The Trees. His recent book, James, is a reimagining of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of runaway slave Jim. Everett has been awarded the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, Creative Capital and Guggenheim awards, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Aimee Liu is a best-selling novelist, essayist, and nonfiction author. Though one quarter Chinese, she felt an allegiance to India, despite being born and mostly raised in the U.S. Her father's career with the United Nations gave her a stamp of internationality that made her more inclusive than exclusive about her cultural identity. As a result, she has always been partial to stories and images of people with mixed heritage.

Her novels Face and Cloud Mountain are based on her family’s mixed-race history and examination of her Chinese-American identity. Flash House, centers on an American social worker whose quest to rescue her missing husband produces an unlikely bond with a native child of mysterious origins in India and western China in 1949. Her most recent novel, Glorious Boy, is a tale of war and devotion, longing and loss, and the power of love to prevail. Set in India’s remote Andaman Islands before and during WWII, the story revolves around a mysteriously mute four-year-old who vanishes on the eve of the Japanese occupation.

Aimee also ghosted or co-authored more than a dozen books on psychology and medical topics, edited business and trade publications, and worked as a flight attendant and as associate producer for NBC's TODAY show. She taught in Goddard College's low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Port Townsend, WA.

David Mas Masumoto, a third-generation farmer, grows peaches, nectarines, grapes and raisins on an organic 80-acre farm south of Fresno, California. He is the author of twelve books including: Epitaph for a Peach, Wisdom of the Last Farmer, Four Seasons in Five Senses, Country Voices, The Perfect Peach, a family farm cookbook, and his most recent book Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and Resilience on a Family Farm. Masumoto is a columnist for The Fresno Bee and The Sacramento Bee, has written for USA Today and The Los Angeles Times, and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine and the New York Times. His writing awards include the Commonwealth Club Silver medal, Julia Child Cookbook Award and the James Clavell Literacy Award. He has also been a finalist in the James Beard Foundation Awards. Masumoto received the “Award of Distinction” from UC Davis in 2003, the California Central Valley “Excellence in Business” Award in 2007 and served on the National Endowment for the Arts board.