Jenny Boully and Katy Simpson Smith

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC VIRTUALLY | Jenny Boully is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow in General Nonfiction. She is the author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, which the Georgia Review calls “a supple and suggestive volume, one dedicated to multiplying literary possibilities even as it names and forcefully critiques the economic and institutional forces that construct and constrain such possibility.” Her first book The Body: An Essay, published when she was 25, is regarded as a canonical text in experimental essays, poetic prose, and imaginative form. Her other books include not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Essays, [one love affair]*, and of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon: a book of failures. She was born in Thailand and grew up on the southwest side of San Antonio, Texas. She attended Hollins University, where she double majored in English and Philosophy and then went on to earn an MA in English Criticism and Writing. Her other degrees include an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and the novels The Story of Land and Sea, Free Men, and The Everlasting, which the New York Times named among the Top 10 Historical Fiction of 2020. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Granta, and Literary Hub. She lives in New Orleans.