Alexander Chee and Allan Gurganus

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and Queen of the Night. His essay collection, How to Write An Autobiographical Novel, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor at large at VQR. His essays and stories have appeared most recently in The New York Times Magazine, T, Tin House, and Best American Essays 2016, among others.

Allan Gurganus is the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy), White People (Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Pen-Faulkner Finalist), Plays Well with Others, The Practical Heart: Four Novellas (Lambda Literary Award) and most recently Local Souls and Decoy. His stories have won the National Magazine Prize and have been honored in
Best American Stories, The O’Henry Prize Collection and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and his essays and editorials appear in the New York Times and The New York Review of Books. Gurganus was
a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His novel-in- progress, slated for 2019, is South of God: The Erotic History of a Country Baptist Church.