These five brilliant authors will be part of all of our More than a Novel Affair festivities! Join them at a reception, and then in discussion with each other on making time and space for art at the Newberry Library on Friday, May 16. They will also be at our cocktail party and seated dinner at Ragdale on Saturday, May 17.

Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and grew up transnationally in India, Canada, and the United States. Having worked as a lobbyist, field organizer and nonprofit administrator, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where he also studied dance in the Gallatin School. Ali is the author of over two dozen books of fiction, poetry, and essay, translator of books by Marguerite Duras, Ananda Devi, and Mahmoud Chokrollahi, and editor of volumes on Shreela Ray, Jean Valentine, and Agha Shahid, as well as other anthologies. His most recent books are Sukun: New and Selected Poems, the novel Indian Winter, and a critical study, Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry and Poetics of Lucille Clifton. He also published a YA fantasy with Choose-Your-Own-Adventure entitled The Citadel of Whispers. Founding editor of Nightboat Books, he served as Series Editor for both the University of Michigan Press's Poets on Poetry series and the Under Discussion series. In 2022, he received the Banff Mountain Environmental Literature Award for his book Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water. After teaching at various colleges and universities, including Oberlin, St. Mary's College of California, Davidson College, Naropa University, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Ali currently serves as Professor of Literary Arts, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Jami Attenberg is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including The Middlesteins, All Grown Up, and a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. Her latest novel, A Reason to See You Again, was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is also the creator of the annual online group writing accountability project #1000wordsofsummer, which inspired the USA Today bestseller 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. Jami has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, The Guardian, and others. Her work has been published in sixteen languages.

Xochitl Gonzalez is the New York Times bestselling author of Anita de Monte Laughs Last, a Reese’s Book Club Pick longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the award-winning novel Olga Dies Dreaming, named a Best of 2022 by The New York Times, TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she was recognized as a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Commentary.

Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His two novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) were finalists for The Booker Prize and have been translated into 30 languages. He has won an LA Times book prize, the prestigious Internationaler Literaturpris, FT/Oppenheimer prize for fiction, an NAACP Image award and has been nominated for two dozen prizes for fiction. He was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers in 2015 and served as a judge of the Booker prize in 2021. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Financial Times, Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. He is the Helen S. Lanier Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Georgia and the program director of the Oxbelly Fiction Writers retreat. His third novel, The Road to the Country, was published in 2024.