The winning stories were published before Bezos made the cuts. A good chunk of the writers in that collection aren't at the newspaper anymore. We'll see if the layoffs impact what they submit for next year's competition.
Be courteous, kind, don't accept invites, tell them you're not interested if they're making unwanted advances, and treat them as humans. If they seem receptive and able to handle constructive feedback, tell them what sticks out to you, otherwise just ignore it and move on.
Basically the same way you handle the exact same situation outside of organizing meetups, but maybe a bit extra on the friendly-and-try-to-not-traumatize-people-who-might-be-trying side of things.
`embedding-shape` answered it better than I could have, but I will add: I "ban" people from meetups who are overall bad for the group.
E.g. people who register to take up a (free) spot and then don't show up after multiple reminders, people who are especially rude to somebody fragile, even people who are unconstructively / loudly negative (picture the equivalent of walking into an auditorium of 800+ people, picking up the microphone on stage to yell "this meetup sucks!" then walking out).
This policy is controversial and I'm always trying to find the balance between being as welcoming as possible to people who aren't neurotypical or are going through a hard time and need the social interaction (e.g. me, multiple times in my life)... and people who just come off as jerks and are a net negative to the group.
I'm in multiple groups myself and I always measure myself by whether my showing up that day was a net positive, neutral or a net negative. If the latter, I don't belong there... at least not until I fix whatever was wrong.
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