Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of twenty-five books including a poetry collection, Tell Me How You Got Here. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, Guernica, and The Journal of the American Medical Association, among many other places, as well as featured and read aloud on National Public Radio, named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries, and longlisted for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award. Her novel The Lioness of Boston, based on the life of trailblazer Isabella Stewart Gardner, is in its eleventh printing and was recently featured as a clue on Jeopardy!. She grew up half in the UK and half in Boston where she lives with her spouse and four children. Her novel Love & Other Monsters, historical fiction told from the perspective of Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s forgotten stepsister who was integral in the creation of Frankenstein, will be published in April 2026.

Ben Shattuck's most recent book, The History of Sound (Viking), was the recipient of the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. His film adaptation of the title story premiered at the 2025 Cannes film festival. His first book, Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau (Tin House), was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, a New York Times Best Book of Summer, a New England Bestseller, and was nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is a recipient of the PEN Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Pushcart Prize. He spends time between Brooklyn and coastal Massachusetts, where he owns and runs the oldest general store in America, built in 1793.