Heather Grzych is an author and host of the Wisdom of the Body podcast, a top 2.5% global podcast. A board member and former president of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association with a part-time clinical practice, Heather has spent her career with people navigating uncertainty and creating the future. She is the author of The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility (© 2020) and has been featured in Sports Illustrated, Yoga Journal, and the Sunday Independent. She is writing a speculative thriller about the architect of the globally governing AI, who helped his puppet government unify the planet after a period of great chaos and death—and about the mysterious disappearance of the woman he loved.

Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of a debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury), winner of the California Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. It has been translated into seven languages. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, CNN, Harper’s Bazaar, Time, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Telegraph, KQED, and elsewhere. Sasha grew up between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to the U.S. at the age of 13.

Nina Schuyler's short story collection, In This Ravishing World, won the 2025 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. It also won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature. Her novel, Afterword, won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Science Fiction and Literary. Her novel, The Translator, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction. The Painting was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. The second edition of her bestselling craft books, How to Write Stunning Sentences and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal will be published in 2026. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and won Best Microfiction 2025 and 2025 Best Small Fictions. For nearly a decade, she taught for the University of San Francisco’s MFA program and currently teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies. Her latest novel, Open The Floodgates, is about a river who is given personhood and has to go to court to argue for its existence.