Brooke Warner is publisher of She Writes Press and SparkPress, president ofWarnerCoaching Inc., and author ofWrite On, Sisters!, Green-light Your Book, What’s Your Book?, and three books on memoir.Brookeisa TEDx speaker, weekly podcaster (of “Write-minded” with co-host Grant Faulkner of NaNoWriMo), and the former Executive Editor of Seal Press. She has served on the Boards of the Independent Book Publishers Association, including for two years as Chairperson; the National Association of Memoir Writers; and the Book Industry Study Group. She has also been on the Board of the Bay Area Book Festival since its first year in 2014. She has been Chairperson since 2000. Brooke writes a regular column forPublishers Weekly, and weekly Substack @brookewarner. She lives and works in Berkeley, California.

George Rehm is a founding partner of aeris CAPITAL AG. He has over 30 years of experience as a lawyer and executive in international licensing, technology transfer, and investment and privatization transactions in the US, Europe, and Asia. George has held board or observer positions in numerous transformational healthcare companies, including Crescendo Biosciences, Adamas Pharmaceuticals, and Ion Torrent, Inc. George continues to manage the aeris Life Science portfolio and serves as a director of GenomeDx Inc., PFS Genetics, Butterfly Networks, LAM Therapeutics Inc., Solstice Biosciences, G2i and Jiff Inc. He received his BSFS from Georgetown University, and a JD from the University of California, Hastings College of Law in parallel to graduate studies in City Planning at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley and served as graduate assistant at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, UC Berkeley, Boalt Hall. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Aya de León teaches creative writing in the African American StudiesDepartment at UC Berkeley. She is acquiring editor for a new climate justice fiction imprint at She Writes Press. Fighting Chance Books will publish novels by authors of all genders about people taking collective action in the here and now to solve the climate crisis. Aya is the author of ten novels, published by Kensington, Candlewick, and Orion, all focused on racial, gender, class and climate justice. Her books have won the Jane Addams Award for peace and social justice in children’s literature, and multiple International Latino Book Awards and Independent Publisher Awards. Aya’s work has appeared inHarper’s Bazaar, Ebony, Guernica, Bitch Magazine, VICE, The Root, Ploughshares,and onDef Poetry. In 2022, she organized an online conference entitled Black Literature vs. the Climate Emergency and she works on the issue of climate with the Black Hive, which is part of the Movement for Black Lives. She currently has two novels-in-progress and is working on an intersectional memoir-in-progress about race, gender, war, body image, and the environment.

Piper Kerman is the author of the memoirOrange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison,which was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning original series for Netflix. She serves on the board of directors of the Women’s Prison Association and the advisory boards of the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, InsideOUT Writers, Healing Broken Circles, and JustLeadershipUSA. Piper is a frequent invited speaker to students of law, criminology, gender and women’s studies, sociology, and creative writing, and also to groups that include the International Association of Women Judges, the National Association of Counties, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Criminal Justice Association, the American Probation and Parole Association, the American Correctional Association’s Disproportionate Minority Confinement Task Force, public defenders, justice reform advocates, and formerly and currently incarcerated people. Piper has taught writing in Ohio state prisons as an Affiliate Instructor with Otterbein University. She’s a graduate of Smith College and lives in Berkeley, California.

Aida Salazar is an award-winning author, arts activist, and translator whose writings for adults and children explore issues of identity and social justice. She is the author of the critically acclaimed middle grade verse novels, The Moon Within; Land of the Cranes; and A Seed in the Sun. Her other works include the picture book anthology, In the Spirit of a Dream: 13 Stories of Immigrants of Color; the bio picture book Jovita Wore Pants: The Story of a Mexican Freedom Fighter; and the anthology Calling the Moon: Period Stories by BIPOC Authors. Aida is a founding member of LAS MUSAS, a Latinx kidlit author collective. She lives with her family of artists in Oakland, California.