Sonia Gensler is the award-winning author of Ghostlight, The Dark Between and The Revenant, all from Alfred A. Knopf/Random House. Weird and dreamy from birth, Sonia grew up in a small Tennessee town and ran with a dangerous pack of band and drama geeks. As an adult, she experimented with a variety of impractical professions-museum interpreter, historic home director, bookseller, and perpetual graduate student-before finally deciding to share her passion for stories through teaching. Sonia taught literature and writing to young adults for ten years and still thinks fondly of her days in the classroom. She currently lives in Oklahoma with her husband and cat.

Ben Montgomery is author of the New York Times-bestselling 'Grandma Gatewood's Walk,' 'The Leper Spy,' 'The Man Who Walked Backward,' and 'A Shot in the Moonlight." He spent most of his 20 year newspaper career as an enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times. He founded the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com and helped launch the Auburn Chautauqua, a Southern writers collective. He has taught journalism at the University of Montana and the University of South Florida.

In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for a series called "For Their Own Good," about abuse at Florida's oldest reform school.

Montgomery grew up in Oklahoma and studied journalism at Arkansas Tech University. He worked for the Courier in Russellville, Ark., the Standard-Times in San Angelo, Texas, the Times Herald-Record in New York's Hudson River Valley and the Tampa Tribune before joining the Times in 2006. He lives in Tampa.

Martha Jackson is a storyteller at heart, a podcast host, lover of her community, and advocate for sharing authentic voices. As the creator and host of The Bubble Lounge Podcast, Martha has spent six years celebrating the people, businesses, and stories that make Highland Park and University Park unique. Her podcast has become a cherished part of the community, offering insights into parenting, education, local traditions, and the triumphs and challenges of everyday life. A proud graduate of the University of Oklahoma with a degree in Radio-Television-Film, Martha initially aspired to work behind the scenes in media. However, her journey took an unexpected turn when she launched The Bubble Lounge Podcast. Despite her initial fears of being on camera and sharing her voice, Martha embraced the opportunity to grow personally and professionally. Through her podcast, she has not only entertained and informed but also empowered others to embrace their creativity

Ben Baby is a Cincinnati-based NFL reporter for ESPN. He has covered the Cincinnati Bengals since 2019. Previously, he covered college football for The Dallas Morning News. He is a graduate of the University of North Texas and is from Grapevine.

Kael Alford is a photographer, writer, and educator. Her work explores legacies of political violence, our relationship to the ecosystems that sustain us and our tenuous relationships to others. She develops photography-based projects that bring individual stories into dialogue with public discourse, backed by extensive research and long-term commitment to topics and subjects. Her photographs have been widely exhibited in North America and Europe and are held in the permanent collections at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans) and in private collections. She lives in Denton, Texas.

Sisters Sarah Galaro and Lizzie Combs are Dallas-based writers and marketers. Together, they have formed Tabletop Marketing. Sarah has over a decade of experience as a brand marketer and quarterback of national campaigns. Complementing her is Lizzie, combining experience as a strategist at a New York-based agency with a background in the arts. Tabletop offers full-stack marketing, crafting comprehensive solutions with a special emphasis on strategic planning and brand development. In addition to their work as marketers, Sarah and Lizzie are involved in the Dallas Arts community. Sarah regularly contributes to Arthouse Dallas’ creative writing and poetry workshops. Lizzie has had several original plays and monologues featured in local and national festivals.

Benji Harris is one of Nashville’s most talented and versatile mainstay musicians. His original trio ‘Scarletta’ has had a Top 30 hit on Country Radio, and a popular music video in high rotation on CMT. He has played for country music stars on arena tours across the country, and has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, and Late Night with Seth Meyers. Benji has performed with SongDivision for numerous Fortune 500 clients and has a vast knowledge when it comes to communicating clients’ core values and purpose using music. With years in the music business and the meetings & events industry, Benji brings a high degree of passion, professionalism, and creativity to each and every client with whom he works.

Paula Goldberg is a storyteller, educator, lover of coffee and salt and someone who is fiercely optimistic that at 52 percent of the population, women can be a political and artistic force. She has worked in corporate America, academia and artistically as a content writer, actor, screenwriter, producer and director.

Credits include the feature screenplay for The Perfect Family starring Kathleen Turner and Emily Deschanel, Writer and Director of Daily short pick of the week, Perfidy with Julie Benz and Sasha Roiz (2020), the short screenplay of Kleen starring Melora Walters (premiered at the LA International Short Film Festival, July 2019,) writing and directing 2 micro shorts with XV Anthology, directing the 3rd season of the Roland Joffe produced MTV series, Undressed, creating the original web series, Inappropriate Workplace and most impressively, raising a 16 year-old son. Her most recent screenplay, Unimaginable, was selected to The Women’s List 2024 and was a semi-finalist in the Dallas International Film Festival’s Screenwriting competition.

Award winning Editorial Cartoonist and artist for over many years. Mr. Flint’s work has been published worldwide in many different publications. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University. His editorial cartoons have appeared in the Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star Telegram, White Rock Lake Weekly, Katy Trail Weekly and several other publications. Mr. Flint has illustrated 15 children’s books, his paintings are in galleries worldwide, and his work has appeared on several television programs.

Matt Lyle is a playwright and comedy writer living in Dallas, Texas. He’s a graduate of the Second City Training program and was the host and head writer for The City Life Supplement, named a Top 5 Comedy Show in Chicago (NEWCITY 2013). His sketches have been seen in Dallas in A Brief Endless Love at the Dallas Comedy House, Gold, Frankincense and Credit Card Debt in Theatre Too, and Adulthood: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Ken Burns at FunHouse Theater and Film and currently in Most Likely Forever yours at the Wyly Theatre. Matt’s plays, The Boxer, Barbecue Apocalypse, Big Scary Animals, Raptured!, Hello Human Female, A 3D Adventure, A Dance of Joy, and The Better Doctor, have been produced in DFW and across the U.S. In 2018 Matt was honored as a Distinguished Alum of the Stephen F. Austin State University School of Theatre. His work is published by Broadway Play Publishing.