John Ridley is an American screenwriter, film director, novelist, and showrunner, known for 12 Years a Slave, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. After both writing and directing his film debut, the 1997 crime thriller Cold Around the Heart, Ridley went on to write the novels Love Is a Racket and Everybody Smokes in Hell. His novel Spoils of War was adapted into the film Three Kings. In comics, he's written The Other History of the DC Universe, GCPD- The Blue Wall, I Am Batman , and The American Way for DC. His latest film, Shirley, which he wrote and directed, was released in 2024. G. Willow Wilson is the author of the acclaimed novel THE BIRD KING (2019), co-creator of the Hugo and American Book Award-winning series MS MARVEL (2013-2018), and has written for some of the world's best-known superhero comic book series, including THE X-MEN, SUPERMAN and WONDER WOMAN. Her first novel, ALIF THE UNSEEN, won the 2013 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, was a finalist for the Center For Fiction's First Novel Prize, and was long-listed for the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction. In 2015, she won the Graphic Literature Innovator Prize at the PEN America Literary Awards. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages. She lives in Seattle.