Murli Melwani taught English Literature at Sankardev College, Shillong, India, before making a mid-career change to head an export company in Taiwan. He moved to Plano, Texas, after 25 years in Taiwan.

His short stories have been published in magazines in various countries, including the U.S.A, Hong Kong, and India.

He is the author of A collection of short stories: Stories of a Salesman, 1967 (a second edition appeared in 1979); A Play in Three Acts, Deep Roots, 1973; and Themes in Indo Anglian Literature, 1973.

His book of literary criticism, Themes in the Indian Short Story in English: An Historical and a Critical Survey (abbreviated TSSE:AHCS), was published in 2009 to favorable reviews. Melwani is still passionate about promoting Indian short stories written in English. His website, The Indian Short Story in English, has been set up to encourage others to read and review short stories published since 2007.

Maxine Hong Kingston (Chinese: 湯亭亭; born Maxine Ting Ting Hong; October 27, 1940) is a Chinese American author and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese Americans.

Kingston has contributed to the feminist movement with such works as her memoir The Woman Warrior, which discusses gender and ethnicity and how these concepts affect the lives of women. She has received several awards for her contributions to Chinese American literature, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1981 for China Men.

Kingston was awarded the 1997 National Humanities Medal by President of the United States Bill Clinton. She was a member of the committee to choose the design for the California commemorative quarter.

In 2003, Kingston was arrested in Washington, D.C. while protesting against the impending Iraq War. The protest, which took place on International Women's Day (March 8), was coordinated by the women-initiated organization Code Pink. Kingston refused to leave the street after being instructed to do so by local police forces. She shared a jail cell with authors Alice Walker and Terry Tempest Williams, who were also participants in the demonstration. Kingston's anti-war stance has significantly trickled into her work; she has stated that writing The Fifth Book of Peace was initiated and inspired by growing up during World War II.

Kingston was honored as a 175th Speaker Series writer at Emma Willard School in September 2005. In April, 2007, Kingston was awarded the Northern California Book Award Special Award in Publishing for Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006), an anthology which she edited.

In July 2014, Kingston was awarded the 2013 National Medal of Arts by President of the United States Barack Obama.

Rachel Khong (born 1985) is an American writer and editor based in San Francisco.

Khong was born in Malaysia to a Malaysian Chinese family. She grew up in Rancho Cucamonga, California and attended high school in nearby Diamond Bar, California. She attended Yale University and graduated with a degree in English in 2007. Khong later went on to receive her MFA from University of Florida in 2011, where she studied with Padgett Powell.

Her writing has appeared in publications such as American Short Fiction, Joyland, and The San Francisco Chronicle. She is the coauthor of a cookbook called All About Eggs.

Her first novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, received Best Book of the Year honors from NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Vogue. The story was inspired by her grandmother's battle with Alzheimer's disease. The novel won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction, as well as a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction. Universal Pictures optioned the film rights in June 2019, with Constance Wu attached to lead.

FilmNation Entertainment announced on February 5, 2021 that they and Ali Wong are producing an adaptation of Khong's short story, The Freshening, with director Cathy Yan set to write and direct.

David Hoon Kim is a Korean-born American educated in France, who took his first creative writing workshop at the Sorbonne before attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Stegner Program. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Brins d'éternité, Le Sabord and XYZ La revue de la nouvelle. He has been awarded fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the MacDowell Colony, the Elizabeth George Foundation, among others. Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost is his first book. He writes in English and in French.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a University Professor, Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002) and the novel The Sympathizer, from Grove/Atlantic (2015). The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), a California Book Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction.

Viet was born in Ban Mê Thuột, Viet Nam (now spelled Buôn Mê Thuột after 1975, a year which brought enormous changes to many things, including the Vietnamese language). He came to the United States as a refugee in 1975 with his family and was initially settled in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, one of four such camps for Vietnamese refugees. From there, he moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he lived until 1978.

Seeking better economic opportunities, his parents moved to San Jose, California, and opened one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores in the city. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, San Jose had not yet been transformed by the Silicon Valley economy, and was in many ways a rough place to live, at least in the downtown area where Viet’s parents worked. He commemorates this time in his short story “The War Years” (TriQuarterly 135/136, 2009), and in a video essay for CBS.

Viet attended St. Patrick School and Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose. After high school, he briefly attended UC Riverside and UCLA before settling on UC Berkeley, where he graduated with degrees in English and ethnic studies. He stayed at Berkeley for a Ph.D. in English, moved to Los Angeles for a teaching position at the University of Southern California, and has been there ever since.