First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Dr. Alan Townsend is a scientist, author and Dean of the Franke College of Forestry & Conservation at the University of Montana. His writing has appeared in multiple national venues, including The Washington Post and Scientific American. Alan's nonfiction book is called This Ordinary Stardust.  He is a highly cited author of more than 140 peer reviewed articles, and received his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College, and a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University.  He is an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Google Science Communication Fellow and was featured in the Let Science Speak documentary film series.

We talked about science, what we can learn from grief, stardust, our challenges facing our mortality, a promise to write a book and the pressure that may or may not place on a writer, and the beautiful cover of the book.

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Natalie Goldberg is the author of fifteen books, including Writing Down the Bones, which has sold over one million copies and has been translated into fourteen languages.  She co-edited a collection of talks by revered zen teacher Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life.  Her new book is Writing on Empty: A Guide to Finding Your Voice.  

We talked about writer’s block versus losing the regular routines that sustain writing while the Covid pandemic was in full swing, her family history, writing exercises, Zen, and friendship.

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Lorrie Moore is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt

University. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, as well as the

PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She is

a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville,

Tennessee.

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Jessica Shattuck is The New York Times Bestselling author of the novels Last House, The Women in the Castle, a New York Times Bestseller, #1 Indie Next Pick, and winner of The New England Book Award; Perfect Life, and The Hazards of Good Breeding, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a Boston Globe Editor’s Choice Best Book of the Year, and a finalist for the 2003 PEN/Winship Award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, Glamour, Open City, and The Tampa Review among other publications. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and three children.

We talked about research, setting her novel in two time periods, oil in Iran, the CIA, Vermont, how idealism and activism may change as we age, and patience in the long journey of writing a novel.

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Kaliane Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor based in London. Her short fiction has appeared in Somesuch Stories, The Willowherb Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, andExtra Teeth, among others. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. Her novel is called The Ministry of Time. This was recorded live at Waterstone’s bookstore in London at the Crouch End locations.

We talked about a book about time travel with no time travel, polar exploration, being a British-Cambodian writer and identity, dating for time travelers, and the structure of Bradley's novel.

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Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing; and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles. He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.

We talked about how he puts a collection together, vulnerability and guardedness, To the Lighthouse, relationships, darkness, truth and revelation.

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Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 29 novels, including By Any Other Name, Mad Honey, Wish You Were Here, and My Sister's Keeper, and, with daughter Samantha van Leer, two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page.  Picoult’s books have been translated into thirty-four languages in thirty-five countries.  Picoult also wrote five issues of DC Comic's Wonder Woman. Picoult is the co-librettist for the stage musical adaptation of her two Young Adult novels.  Picoult lives in New Hampshire with her husband. They have three children.

We talked about Emilia Bassano as the author of many of Shakespeare’s most popular place, women’s voices being erased, making a bigger table so everyone can be represented in theatre, how Jodi found her love of plays, structuring her novel By Any Other Name, and her love for Gone With the Wind.

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Abby Geni is the author of the novels The Wildlands and The Lightkeepers and the short story collections The Last Animal and The Body Farm. Her books have been translated into seven languages and have won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Chicago Review of Books Awards, among other honors. Geni is a faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago and frequent Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

We talked about emotional intelligence, teaching creative writing, science and investigation, the perfect murder (fictional that is), following a story to see where it goes, writing from a place of mystery, and moments that make you cry.

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Jill Ciment is the author of Small Claims, a collection of short stories and novellas; The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, The Tattoo Artist, Heroic Measures, Act of God, The Body in Question, and memoirs Half a Life and Consent. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, among them a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Ciment is a professor emeritus at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, and New York City.

We talked about truth and memory, #metoo, changing cultural norms, interrogating her life and her relationship, having a happy marriage with her husband who was more than 30 years older than her, and finding certainty (or not) when putting words on the page.

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Kevin Barry is the author of the novels Night Boat to Tangier, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Beatlebone, and City of Bohane as well as three story collections including Dark Lies the Island. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter lives in County Sligo, Ireland.  His new novel is The Heart in Winter.

We talked about the Irish in Butte, Montana, watching and writing westerns, Wuthering Heights, voice and character, Kevin’s writing process, comedy, and Annie Proulx.

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 Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist. He was born in Ara, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. Kumar is the author of several books of non-fiction and four novels.  His new novel is My Beloved Life. Kumar lives in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College. He serves on the board of the Corporation of Yaddo.

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Ada Limón the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. As the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. This episode also features Michael Kleber-Diggs and Erika Meitner, both of whom have poems in the collection and are former guests of First Draft.

We talk about nature poetry, fear, hope and grief, creating a collection, and inspire people to write their own You are Here poems.

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Tracy Chevalier is the author of 11 novels and the editor of one short story anthology.  Her books include Girl with a Pearl Earring, Falling Angels, Remarkable Creatures, At the Edge of the Orchard, and A Single Thread.  She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and lives in London.  Her new novel is The Glass Maker.

We talked about feeling writing in the body, Tracy’s research process, adding a touch of magical realism to her work, her writing influences for this novel in particular, her female protagonist, glass making, travel and more.

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Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts where he now teaches. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California. His first book, There There, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award. His new novel is Wandering Stars. He lives in Oakland, California.

We talked about where creativity comes from, lightning strikes, creative writing, historical figures, music, and more.

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Lauren Camp is the author of eight poetry collections including Worn Smooth between Devourings, An Eye in Each Square, Took House, and In Old Sky among others. She is the Poet Laureate of New Mexico and was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

We talked about being the Poet Laureate for New Mexico, dark skies in the Grand Canyon, the pressures of writing residencies, Lauren read some of her poems, adding photos to her collection, and seizing the day, when it finally arrives, to write.

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Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, Wonderland, and The Complicities and the nonfiction books The Art of Intimacy and The Long Run.  She is a professor of writing and publishing practices at Fordham University.

We talked about inspiration and creativity as lightning bolts and melting, abstract art, aging as an artist, breakthroughs, and longevity in art.

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Carvell Wallace is a New York Times Bestselling author, memoirist, and award-winning podcaster who covers race, arts, culture, film and music for a wide variety of news outlets.  His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, the New Yorker and other publications.  He co-wrote the nonfiction book The Sixth Man.  His podcast Closer Than They Appear explored race and identity in America and his podcast Finding Fred was nominated for a Peabody Award.  His new memoir is called Another Word for Love.

We talked about growing up with unstable housing, how writing helped him look at himself and his life differently, acting and becoming a creative, self-forgiveness, depression and holding trauma in the body, sobriety, the vast topic of love, Star Wars, and being a sensitive human.

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Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Her essay collection is called Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write. Her recent novel is called This Strange Eventful History.  She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

We talked about her family history, Algerian independence, the wisdom of age, emphasizing character, distance from true subjects, colonialism, and her novel’s structure.

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Edward Hamlin is the author of the short story collection Night in Erg Chebbi: Stories and the novel Sonata in Wax.  His writing has been published widely and recognized with a number of awards, including the Nelson Algren Award and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.  He lives in Colorado.

We talked about writing family history, research for the historical novel, classical music, the power of creation and redemption, music recording, the possibility of a lost masterpiece, and serendipity.

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Adelle Waldman is the author of the novels, Help Wanted and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which was published in 2013 and was named one of that year’s best books by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic, NPR, Slate, Bookforum, The Guardian and others. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and daughter.

We talked about Adelle’s job working at a big box store, the societal problems of low wage jobs, creating omniscient point of view, Jane Austin, George Eliot, Middlemarch, creating a common enemy in a story, and showing her novel to her former co-workers.

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Sunjeev Sahota is the author of the novels: China Room, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the American Library Association’s Carnegie Medal; The Year of the Runaways, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize and was awarded a European Union Prize for Literature; and Ours are the Streets. In 2013, he was named one of Granta’s twenty Best of Young British Novelists of the decade. He lives in Sheffield, England, with his family.  His new novel is The Spoiled Heart.

We talked about writing socially and politically motivated themes but still making them stories worth reading, unions, the impact of the news and our culture on writing, the strategic reveal of information, creative writing and algebra, and more.

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Steve Almond is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His recent books include the novel All the Secrets of the World and WilliamStoner and the Battle for the Inner Life.

For four years, Steve hosted the New York Times Dear Sugar podcast with Cheryl Strayed. He is the recipient of a 2022 NEA grant in fiction, and his short stories have been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series.  His new book is Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories.

We talk about craft in creative writing and creative nonfiction, managing conflict in stories, bringing emotion and urgency into writing about the human experience, obsession, plot and causation, and clove cigarettes and the novel Stoner. 

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Anne Lamott is the author of 20 books, which include fiction and nonfiction. Her novels include Hard Laughter, Blue Shoe, and Imperfect Birds. Her nonfiction titles include Operating Instructions, Bird by Bird, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope and the newly released Somehow: Thoughts on Love. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2010.

We talked about love, call and response, writing craft, secrets, the solace and inspiration of reading, novels and nonfiction, Ms. Magazine, and poetry.

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Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of the novels Picking Bones from the Ash and The Tree Doctor.  Her nonfiction books include American Harvest, which won the Nebraska Book Award, and Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.  

We talked about writing about nature, sex, loss, cross-cultural influences, Japan, and binaries. 

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Julia Alvarez has written novels including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, Afterlife, collections of poems including Homecoming, The Other Side/ El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself, nonfiction works including Something to Declare, Once Upon A Quinceañera, and A Wedding in Haiti, and numerous books for young readers including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, finding miracles, Return to Sender and Where Do They Go? Her new novel is The Cemetery of Untold Stories.  In 2013, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama.

We talked about Julia's childhood, her parents reaction to her fiction, telling stories, aging, creativity, the stories we can pass on, and writing craft.

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Lily Brooks-Dalton is the bestselling author of The Light Pirate, which was the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a #1 Indie Next pick, a Good Morning America Book Club selection, one of NPR's "Books We Love," and a New York Times Editors' Pick. Her previous novel, Good Morning, Midnight, which was the inspiration for the film adaptation The Midnight Sky and her memoir, Motorcycles I’ve Loved, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her work has been translated into 18 languages. A former writer-in-residence at The Kerouac House and The Studios of Key West, she currently lives in Los Angeles.

We talked about writing climate fiction, making time to feel grief, pacing the story so that hope only comes after a proper time to mourn, listening to intuition, remaking the world after catastrophe, magic, and literary structure.  

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Kiley Reid is the author of Come and Get It and Such A Fun Age, which was a New York Times Best Seller and longlisted for the 2020 Booker Price. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, The Guardian, and others. Reid is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

We talked about religion and fiction, philosophy, acting, Buddhism, materialism, college age women, grace in fiction, what creative writing can and can’t do, not judging your fictional characters, and the background work she does that doesn’t make it into a novel.

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Debra Spark is the award-winning author of five novels, including Unknown Caller, which was picked for Maine’s statewide summer READ ME program.  She has also published two collections of short stories; and two books of essays on fiction writing called And Then Something Happened and Curious Attractions.   Her book reviews, short fiction, articles, op-eds, and essays have appeared in Agni, American Scholar, AWP Writers’ Chronicle, and the Boston Globe among others.  Her new novel is Discipline.  She is the Zacamy Professor of English at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

We talked about the value of art, if beauty can save people, the real and fictional boarding school in Maine that used abusive techniques on teenagers, the role of women in the art world usually being in service to men, parenting, and creating parallel lines in a narrative piece of creative writing.

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Téa Obreht is the author of the novel The Tiger’s Wife, which won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller.  Her novel Inland won the BRLA Southwest Book Award and the Ballard Prize.  Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. She currently lives in Wyoming.  Her new novel is called The Morningside.

We talked about writing during the pandemic in a fever dream, confronting trauma in writing, besting your therapist, folktales, the world our children will inherit, and crafting a novel from feverish draft to structured finished product.

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Diane Seuss is the author of the poetry collections Frank: Sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl; Four-Legged Girl, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open; and It Blows You Hollow. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Missouri Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2014. She was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College in 2012, and she has taught at Kalamazoo College since 1988. Her new poetry collection is Modern Poetry.

We talked about aging, John Keats, dogs,  romance, music, objectivity, grief, coldness, and the snarling, flaming bitch of poetry.

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Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number, and Look Alive Out There and the bestselling novels, The Clasp and Cult Classic. She served as editor of The Best American Travel Writing series and is featured in The Library of America's 50 Funniest American Writers, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading and others. She is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her new memoir is called Grief Is for People.

We talked about structuring her memoir around the stages of grief, how she knew she was at the end of the book, being close to an event to write about it, that doctors have the best lines for writers to steal, observing the world, and how grief is not over just because the book is.

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Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel is City of Laughter.

We talked about origin stories for families and books, queer sensibility, growing up Modern Orthodox Jew, unraveling the mysterious stories of our lives, and pushing boundaries in life and creative writing.

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Leslie Jamison is the author of two essay collections— The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn—a critical memoir, The Recovering, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She’s written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer.   Her new book is called Splinters. Jamison teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, where she directs the nonfiction concentration.

We talked about how structure can be the answer to figuring out how to get a story on the page, the process of writing versus vetting it for the public, how time and perspective can bring spaciousness, the many selves that we exist as, and Google searches as confessions.

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Margot Livesey has published ten novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on Fortune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Mercury, and The Boy in the Field, and The Road from Belhaven. The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays on writing, was published by Tin House Books in 2017. Livesey is currently teaching at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives with her husband, a painter, in Cambridge, MA, and goes back to London and Scotland whenever she can.

We talked about growing up in Scotland, quiet novels, traveling in her mind when she couldn't in person during Covid, small town farm life, solace in animals and the natural world, secret sorrows, and the supernatural.

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Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry,and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. In His novel is called Martyr! He is also the Poetry Editor of The Nation.  Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.

We talked about the transition to novel writing from poetry, transcendence in poetry, not looking away from the terrors of the world, addiction and rehabilitation, the messiness of life, and questions about goodness.

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Ilyon Woo is the is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, one of the New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2023” and People Magazine’s “Top Ten Books of 2023. Woo is also the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times.  Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times.  She has a PhD in English from Columbia University. 

We talked about the unfathomable but real cruelty of slavery, institutional slavery as the foundation for the building of this country, the indelible spirits of Ellen and William Craft, researching and brining historic events to life in creative non-fiction, the fugitive slave act, how cinema influences her writing, and writing vows.

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Jill McCorkle is the author of four short story collections and seven novels including the New York Timesbestseller Life After Life.  Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories.  She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, The Atlantic, and other publications. She is currently a faculty member at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and is affiliated with the MFA program at North Carolina State University.  Her new short story collection is called Old Crimes.

We talked about nostalgia, regret, epigraphs, Tennessee Williams, moments of grace in fiction, blindspots, when the reader knows more than the characters in stories, creating suspense, and linked stories.

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Vanessa Chan is the author of the novel The Storm We Made and the story collection The Ugliest Babies in the World.  Her other work has been published in Vogue, Esquire, and more. Chan grew up in Malaysia and is now based mostly in Brooklyn.

We talked about researching her novel, family stories, the horror of WW II in Malaysia, young boys building the railroad near the border, war crimes, colonialism, spies, her favorite pastime when not writing, finding the title of the novel, and the difficulty of writing such a tough story.

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Antoine Wilson is the author of the novel Mouth to Mouth, which was featured on Barack Obama’s 2022 Summer Reading List.  His other novels include The Interloper and Panorama City. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Quarterly West, and Best New American Voices, among other publications. He is a contributing editor at A Public Space.

This was recorded live at the 2023 Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago. We talked about what it means to be a good person, first drafts, writing what you want to read, the intricacies of visual and literary art, and remembering the vibes of great books.

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Buzzy Jackson has a Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley and is a member of the National Book Critics’ Circle. Her debut novel is To Die Beautiful. She is currently working on a new novel based on a historical American true crime.  This was recorded live at Paonia Books in Paonia, Colorado. We talked about World War II and Nazi resistance fighters in the Netherlands, particularly the real life Hannie Schaft, the main character of To Die Beautiful, how writing this book impacted Buzzy's activism, writing painful scenes in the book, and more.

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David James Duncan is the author of the novels The River Why, The Brothers K, and Sun House, the story collection River Teeth, and the nonfiction collection and National Book Award finalist, My Story as Told by Water, and the best-selling collection of “churchless sermons," God Laughs & Plays.  He lives on a trout stream in Missoula, Montana.

We talked about his writing process, how writing a novel over 16 changed him, activism, solitude and creativity.

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Paul Harding is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Tinkers.  His other novels include Enon and This Other Eden, which was short listed for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. He is director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University, and lives on Long Island, New York.

We talked about mystery in the writing process and the content of the creative writing project, the world offering itself to you and through you via your art, writing about Maine and history, teaching writing, the Old Testament, and the title This Other Eden.

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Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University. His new novel is called Day.

We talked about writing during the pandemic, throwing away a novel he wasn't happy with, the challenge of writing the middle of a novel, and getting the voice of children right.

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Salar Abdoh is the author of Out of Mesopotamia, Tehran at Twilight, Opium, and The Poet Game, and editor and translator of the celebrated crime collection, Tehran Noir.  He divides his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran. He is a professor at the City University of New York’s City College campus in Harlem, where he teaches in the English Department’s MFA program and also directs undergraduate creative writing. His new novel is called A Nearby Country Called Love.

We talked about the influences on his creativity, masculinity, life in Iran, gender and gayness, writing stories close to home, and finding love and belonging.

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Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC. Her new novel is called Absolution.

We talked about voice, epistolary influence, focusing on women's stories, retrospective narrators, the idea of absolution, and Vietnam.

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Ayana Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times Bestseller, second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Award. Mathis’s nonfiction has been published in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica and Glamour. She currently teaches at Hunter College’s MFA Program.  Her new novel is The Unsettled.

We talked about the title, her main character's agency, her focus on character and story, and myth among other topics.

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Edgar Kunz is the author of two poetry collections: Fixer, named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book, and Tap Out. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Recent poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, APR, and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.

We talked about vulnerability, how Edgar knows when a poem is finished, the influence of Luise Glück, death, divorce, agency, and Ellen Bryant Voigt's poem about smoking.

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Tan Twan Eng’s debut novel The Gift of Rain was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007 and has been widely translated. His second novel The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 and the 2013 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Tan divides his time between Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town. His new novel is called The House of Doors and was long listed for the Booker Prize.

We talked about W. Somerset Maugham, descriptive writing, historical research, having fun while writing, and the act of creation.

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Richard Deming is a poet, art critic, and theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. His collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, received the 2009 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. His most recent book of poems is Day for Night. He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading, Art of the Ordinary: the Everyday Domain of Art, Film, Literature, and Philosophy, and This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity. He teaches at Yale University where he is the Director of Creative Writing.

We talked about the meaning of exquisite loneliness, what the opposite of loneliness is, flow state, connection with other people, creativity, finding your life's purpose, and crafting beautiful sentences in Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin.

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Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and the Southern Book Prize, and won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the Judy Grahn Award, and the Christian Gauss Award. Her second book is called Thin Skin.

We talked about Oppenheimer, environmental justice, motherhood, living the queer creative life, structuring essays, and crafting personal narratives with historical research.

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Ben Fountain’s work has received the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction, and a Whiting Writers Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.  His books include Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award.  His non-fiction book is Beautiful Country Burn Again.  His latest novel is Devil Makes Three.

We talked about Ben's early exposure to social justice and politics, his history as a traveler to Haiti, protagonists who may or may not stake their claim on their own agency, writing from a female Haitian's point of view, his creative writing process, and Robert Stone.

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Daniel Magariel is an author from Kansas City. One of the Boys, his first novel, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and Amazon Best Book of 2017, was translated into eight languages and shortlisted for the Lucien Barrière Prize. He has a BA from Columbia University, as well as an MFA from Syracuse University. He teaches at Columbia University. Magariel lives in Cape May, New Jersey. His new novel is Walk the Darkness Down.

We talked about vulnerability, writing into the unknown, Daniel's experiences commercial fishing, and finding his title.

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Etaf Rum was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. She has a Masters of Arts in American and British Literature as well as undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and English Composition and teaches undergraduate courses in North Carolina. Rum also owns a coffee shop and bookstore called Books and Beans. Her novels include Evil Eye and A Woman is No Man, which was a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna Today Show book club pick.

We talked about trauma, a Palestinian-American woman's journey to finding her voice, writing the prologue once the novel was finished, her writing process, and finding words where it seemed there were none.

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Edan Lepucki is the author of the novella If You’re Not Yet Like Me and the novels California, Woman No. 17, and Time’s Mouth. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Cut, Romper, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. We talked about the editing process, mother - child relationships, generational trauma, time travel, and Sharon Olds.

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James McBride is an award-winning author, musician, and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, published in 1996, has sold millions of copies and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. His 2013 novel, The Good Lord Bird, about American abolitionist John Brown, won the National Book Award for Fiction. His new novel is The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. We talked about having faith in the process, tangible creative writing craft tips, creating community on the page, music, odd jobs, and writing a new novel every single time he goes to the page.

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Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and novelist. She is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a NAACP Image Award. Griffiths is also a recipient of fellowships including Cave Canem, Kimbilio, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Tin House. Her novel is Promise.

We talked about what it was like growing up Black in 1957 Maine, feeling a work of art, setting, her creative process, and moving from imagery to a finished novel.

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David van den Berg grew up hunting and fishing in the Florida swamps. He studied anthropology, religion, and archaeology at Rollins College before moving to Los Angeles to work as an actor. He has a J.D. and a Master of Laws in Taxation from Loyola Law School. He’s the founder of Prometheus Dreaming, a digital literary journal. His poetry collection is called Love Letters from an Arsonist.

We talked about his inspiration for his poetry, the influence of the Florida landscape, poetic influences and the creative process.

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Roger Reeves earned his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, and is the author of Dark Days: Fugitive Essays; Best Barbarian; and King Me, winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. In this episode we discuss the hush harbors where enslaved individuals found quiet and opportunities for ecstasy, why writing lowers his heart beat, the gifts of poetry, and feeling the words as they are written. Of course, there is plenty of discussion on writing craft, creative writing, poetry, essays, creative non-fiction, and literature.

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Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA and elsewhere. Jenny Qi received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Science (Cancer Biology) from UCSF.

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Jennifer Grotz is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Still Falling. Also a translator from French and Polish, her co-translations with Piotr Sommer of Jerzy Ficowski's Everything I Don't Know received the PEN Award for Best Book of Poetry in Translation in 2022. Her poems have appeared in five volumes of the annual Best American Poetry series and have been published in venues such as The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, New York Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. In addition to teaching at the University of Rochester, she directs the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences.

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Luis Alberto Urrea was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his landmark work of nonfiction The Devil’s Highway. He is the author of numerous other works of nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, including the national bestsellers The Hummingbird’s Daughter and The House of Broken Angels, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, among many other honors, he lives outside Chicago and teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago. His new novel is Good Night, Irene.

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Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of two novels translated into thirty-five languages. His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations.

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Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in, among others, The New Yorker, Harper's, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards, and has been translated into many languages.

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Stephen Buoro was born in Nigeria in 1993. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia where he received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship. He lives in Norwich, United Kingdom. The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa is his first novel.

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Elizabeth Graver is the author of five novels, including Kantika, which was inspired by her grandmother, Rebecca née Cohen Baruch Levy, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul, and whose life journey took her to Spain, Cuba and New York. Her fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Essays.

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Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the memoir Wild Game, which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and The Washington Post and is in development as a Netflix film. She founded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, and currently serves as executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute. She splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod, where she lives with her husband and children. Her new novel is Little Monsters.

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Michelle Brafman is the author of the short story collection Bertrand Court and the novels Washing the Dead and Swimming with Ghosts. She taught creative writing at the George Washington University, the New Directions Writing Program, and the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing Program. She founded Yeah Write, a writing coaching business. She lives in the Washington, DC area.

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TC Boyle is the author of 30 books of fiction including most recently, Blue Skies, The Harder They Come, The Terranauts, The Relive Box, Outside Looking In, and Talk To Me. He received a Ph.D. degree in Nineteenth Century British Literature from the University of Iowa in 1977, his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974, and his B.A. in English and History from SUNY Potsdam in 1968.

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T.J. Newman is a former bookseller and flight attendant whose first novel, Falling, became a publishing sensation and debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list. The book was named a best book of the year by USA Today, Esquire, and Amazon, among many others, and has been published in more than thirty countries. The book will soon be a major motion picture from Universal Pictures. T.J. lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Drowning is her second novel.

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Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His plays include of Boss Grady’s Boys, The Steward of Christendom, Our Lady of Sligo, The Pride Parnell Street, and Dallas Sweetman. His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, Annie Dunne, A Long Long Way, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Secret Scripture, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, On Canaan’s Side, The Temporary Gentleman, Days Without End, A Thousand Moons, and Old God’s Time. He has also published three collections of poetry. He is the recipient of the Irish-America Fund Literary Award, The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize, the London Critics Circle Award, The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, and Costa Awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year. He lives in Wicklow with his family.

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Mona Simpson is the best-selling author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, and Casebook. Off Keck Road was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is on the faculty at UCLA and also teaches at Bard College. In 2020, she was named publisher of The Paris Review. She lives in Santa Monica, California. Her new novel is called Commitment.

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Curtis Sittenfeld is the bestselling author of six novels: Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland, Eligible, and Rodham. Her first story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, was published in 2018 and picked for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club. Her books have been selected by The New York Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and People for their “Ten Best Books of the Year” lists, optioned for television and film, and translated into thirty languages. Her new novel is Romantic Comedy.

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Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, is Professor and Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor, and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University. He is also a best-selling author and a physician with a reputation for his focus on healing in an era where technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine. He received the Heinz Award in 2014 and was awarded the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama, in 2015. His new novel is The Covenant of Water.

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Mai Nardone is a Thai and American writer whose fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Granta, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He lives in Bangkok. His collection is called Welcome Me to the Kingdom.

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Ann Lauterbach is the author of ten books of poetry and three books of essays, including The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience and The Given & The Chosen, her 2009 collection, Or To Begin Again, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Lauterbach’s work has been recognized by fellowships from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She is the Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literatures at Bard College. A native of New York City, she lives in Germantown, New York.

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Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the novel In Between Days, which was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection and an IndieBound “Indie Next” selection, and the short story collection The Disappeared. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Porter is currently a Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Trinity University in San Antonio.

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Cathleen Schine is the author of the 12 novels including The Love Letter and Rameau’s Niece, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, and The Grammarians. Her new novel is called Künstlers in Paradise. In addition to novels, she has written articles for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. She grew up in Westport, Ct. And lives in Venice, California.

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Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His new poetry collection is called Above Ground.

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Robert Lopez is the author of three novels, Part of the World, Kamby Bolongo Mean River —named one of 25 important books of the decade by HTML Giant, All Back Full, and two story collections, Asunder and Good People. His novel-in-stories is called, A Better Class Of People. His new nonfiction book is called Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere. He teaches at Stony Brook University and has previously taught at Columbia University, The New School, Pratt Institute, and Syracuse University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

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Michelle Dowd is a journalism professor and contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Book Review, The Alpinist, Catapult, and other national publications. She is Faculty Lecturer of the Year for 2022 at Chaffey College, where she founded the award-winning literary journal and creative collective, The Chaffey Review. Her memoir is called Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult.

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Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World, which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, was short-listed for the Rabindranath Tagore Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness. 

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Susan Griffin is an award-winning poet, writer, essayist and playwright who has written nineteen books, including A Chorus of Stones, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Named by Utne Reader as one of the top hundred visionaries of the new millennium, she is the recipient of an Emmy for her play Voices, an NEA grant and a MacArthur Grant for Peace and International Cooperation. Her craft book is Out of Silence, Sound. Out of Nothing, Something.

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Matthew Salesses is the author of eight books, including The Sense of Wonder, the national bestseller Craft in the Real World, and the PEN/Faulkner Finalist and Dublin Literary Award longlisted novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. He also wrote The Hundred-Year Flood; I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity; The Last Repatriate; and Our Island of Epidemics.

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Kathryn Ma is the author of the widely praised novel The Year She Left Us, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and an NPR “Great Read” of the year. Her short story collection, All That Work and Still No Boys, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was named a San Francisco Chronicle “Notable Book” and a Los Angeles Times “Discoveries Book.” She is also a recipient of the David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction and has twice been named a San Francisco Public Library Laureate. Her new book is called The Chinese Groove.

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Katherine Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers, which was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the Iowa Review among others. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona.

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Peter Turchi is the author of seven books and the co-editor of three anthologies. His books include (Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before; A Muse and A Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic; Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie, in collaboration with the artist; a novel, The Girls Next Door; a collection of stories, Magician; and The Pirate Prince, co-written with Cape Cod treasure hunter Barry Clifford, about Clifford’s discovery of the pirate ship Whydah. He has also co-edited, with Andrea Barrett, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. He currently teaches at the University of Houston, and in Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers.

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Blair Braverman is a writer, adventurer, and long-distance dogsledder who has completed some of the toughest sled dog races in the world. Her non-fiction books include Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube and Dogs on the Trail: A Year in the Life. She is a columnist and contributing editor for Outside magazine and a contributor to The New York Times, This American Life, Vogue, and many other venues. Her third book and debut novel is called Small Game. She lives in northern Wisconsin with her husband, Quince Mountain, and their team of sled dogs, called BraverMountain Mushing. 

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Stephanie Feldman is the author of the novels Saturnalia and The Angel of Losses, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award, and finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, Flash Fiction Online, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Rumpus, Uncharted Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Weird Horror, and more. She lives outside Philadelphia with her family.

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Jack Driscoll is a two-time NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient and the author of twelve books, including the story collections, Wanting Only to Be Heard, winner of the AWP Grace Paley Short Fiction Prize and The World of a Few Minutes Ago, winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award and Michigan Notable Book Award. Driscoll is the founding father of the Interlochen Center for the Arts creative writing department and now teaches in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program. His new book is called Twenty Stories.

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Chris Belcher is a writer, professor, and former sex worker. She completed a PhD in English at the University of Southern California, where she now teaches Gender and Sexuality Studies and in the Writing Program. Under her working name, Natalie West, she edited the acclaimed anthology We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival. Born and raised in West Virginia, she now lives in Los Angeles with her partner and two orange cats. Her memoir is called Pretty Baby.

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Chicago-born Peter Orner is the author of two novels: The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love, and three story collections Esther Stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others. Peter’s essay collection/ memoir, Am I Alone Here? Notes on Reading to Live and Living to Read was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His new collection is called Am I Alone Here?

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Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and lives in America. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; it was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her latest novel, The Furrows: An Elegy, was named by Time Magazine as a 100 Must-Read Books of 2022 and is also a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2022. She is currently a professor of English at Harvard.

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Elizabeth Strout is the author of the New York Times bestseller Olive Kitteridge, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; the national bestseller Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine and New York City.

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Morowa Yejidé is a native of Washington, DC, is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Time of the Locust, which was a 2012 finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, long listed for the 2015 PEN/Bingham Prize, and a 2015 NAACP Image Award nominee. Her most recent novel, Creatures of Passage, was shortlisted for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and a 2021 Notable Book selection by NPR and the Washington Post. She lives in the DC area with her husband and three sons.

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Elizabeth McCracken is the author of eight books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, The Souvenir Museum and Hero of This Book. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Thunderstruck & Other Stories won the 2015 Story Prize. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places.

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Omer Friedlander was born in Jerusalem in 1994 and grew up in Tel Aviv. He earned a BA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, England, and an MFA from Boston University, where he was supported by the Saul Bellow Fellowship. His short stories have won numerous awards, and have been published in the United States, Canada, France, and Israel. A Starworks Fellow in Fiction at New York University, he has earned a Bread Loaf Work-Study Scholarship as well as a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. He currently lives in New York City. His short story collection is The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land.

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Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays is called Inciting Joy.

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Tracy K. Smith is the author of five poetry collections, including Such Color: New and Selected Poems; Wade in the Water, winner of the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize. Her debut collection, The Body’s Question, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2002. Her second book, Duende, won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her collection Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She also edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.

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Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of five novels and one book of nonfiction. She has been the recipient of a Stegner Fellowship in fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, and a Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from Lambda Literary, among other awards. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, the Boston Review, Bookforum, the New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is an associate professor of writing and publishing practices at Fordham University. 

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George Saunders is the author of eleven books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner was selected to represent each decade, from the fifty years since the Prize’s inception. His stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 1992. The short story collection Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2013 and the Story Prize.

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Andrea Barrett is the author of nine previous works of fiction, including the National Book Award–winning Ship Fever and Pulitzer Prize finalist Servants of the Map. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship, as well as a finalist for the Story Prize and a recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Having lived in Rochester, New York, and western Massachusetts, Barrett now resides in the Adirondacks. Her new short story collection is Natural History.

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Kevin McIlvoy published six novels: One Kind Favor, A Waltz, Little Peg, Hyssop, At the Gate of All Wonder, and The Fifth Station, as well as two collections of stories, 57 Octaves Below Middle C and The Complete History of New Mexico. His work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Harper’s Magazine, The Collagist, The Southern Review, River City, Ploughshares, and The Missouri Review. He taught in the Department of English at New Mexico University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He was the editor in chief at Puerto del Sol, the NMSU national literary magazine, for over twenty years.

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Katie Runde is originally from the Jersey Shore, where her family ran boardwalk businesses. She has lived in Southern California, New York City, and Puerto Rico, and now lives in Iowa City with her husband and two daughters. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and attended the Tin House Summer Workshop. Her first novel is called The Shore.

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Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the linked story collection, If I Survive You, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a National Book Award Nominee, and an Indie National Bestseller. Jonathan is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and is the recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts (Prose) Literature Fellowship. He is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

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Jill Bialosky is a poet, editor, writer, and novelist. Her new poetry collection Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, four critically acclaimed novels, including The Prize, and most recently, The Deceptions, and two memoirs, Poetry Will Save Your Life and New York Times bestselling memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life. She is an Executive Editor and Vice President at W. W. Norton & Company. In 2014 she was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry.

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Carlos Allende is a media psychology scholar and a writer of fiction. He has written three novels: Cuadrillas y Contradanzas, a historical melodrama set during the War of Reform in Mexico, and Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle, a horror farce set in Venice, California and Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love. Based on his research on narrative persuasion and audience engagement, he developed the course The Psychology of Compelling Storytelling, which he teaches in the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension. He lives in Santa Monica with his husband.

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Casey Parks is a reporter for The Washington Post who covers gender and family issues. She was previously a staff reporter at the Jackson Free Press and spent a decade at The Oregonian, where she wrote about race and LGBTQ+ issues and was a finalist for the Livingston Award. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, ESPN, USA Today, and The Nation. A former Spencer Fellow at Columbia University, Parks was most recently awarded the 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for her work on Diary of a Misfit. Parks lives in Portland.

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Eric Nguyen earned an MFA in creative writing from McNeese State University in Louisiana. He has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary, Voices of Our Nation Arts (VONA), and the Tin House Writers Workshop. He is the editor-in-chief of diaCRITICS and lives in Washington, DC. His first novel is Things We Lost to the Water.

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Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. Currently, he is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His new short story collection is The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories.

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Chinelo Okparanta was born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Her debut short story collection, Happiness, Like Water, was nominated for the Nigerian Writers Award, long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, as well as the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Her first novel, Under the Udala Trees, was nominated for numerous awards, including the Kirkus Prize and Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Her new novel is Harry Sylvester Bird.

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Poet, critic, and professor James Longenbach wrote primarily on modernist and contemporary poetry. He is the author of the critical works Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, Modern Poetry After Modernism, The Resistance to Poetry, The Art of the Poetic Line, The Virtues of Poetry, How Poems Get Made, and The Lyric Now.

His poetry collections include Threshold, Fleet River, Draft of a Letter, The Iron Key, Earthling, and Forever. Longenbach died on July 29, 2022.

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Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), First Light, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Soul Thief, and The Sun Collective, and the story collections Believers, Gryphon, Harmony of the World, A Relative Stranger, There’s Something I Want You to Do, and Through the Safety Net. His stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories. Baxter lives in Minneapolis. His new craft book is Wonderlands.

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Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award, Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader’s Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories of Violence. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader’s Choice. The Misfit’s Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books. Her short story collection is called Verge and her new novel is Thrust.

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Ben H. Winters is the author of the novels The Quiet Boy, Golden State; the New York Times bestselling Underground Airlines; The Last Policeman and its two sequels; the horror novel Bedbugs; and several works for young readers. His first novel, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, was also a Times bestseller. Ben has won the Edgar Award for mystery writing, the Philip K. Dick award in science fiction, the Sidewise Award for alternate history, and France’s Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. He also writes for film and television, and was a producer on the FX show Legion. He lives in LA with his family.

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Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third poetry collection is called O. Her second full-length collection, Louder than Hearts, won the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Zeina is also the author of two chapbooks: 3arabi Song, selected from 1720 manuscripts as winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and There Was and How Much There Was. Her first book, To Live in Autumn, centered on Beirut, won the 2013 Backwaters Prize and was a runner-up for the 2014 Julie Suk Award.

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Tsering Yangzom Lama is a Tibetan writer. She was born and raised in Nepal, and has since lived in Canada and the United States. Tsering earned her MFA in writing from Columbia University and a BA in Creative Writing and International Relations from the University of British Columbia. Tsering’s debut novel is We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies.

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Nathanial White grew up in Maine and has lived in Mexico, Brazil, and Ecuador. His speculative fiction explores the human psyche, physical disability, culture, technology and consumerism. He currently teaches high school English in the Rocky Mountains of Western Colorado. His novella is called Conscious Designs.

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Lawrence Jackson is a biographer and critic whose work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, n+1, and Best American Essays. He teaches English and history at Johns Hopkins and founded the Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts.

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Soon Wiley received his BA in English & Philosophy from Connecticut College. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Wichita State University. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and earned him fellowships in Wyoming and France. He resides in Connecticut with his wife and their two cats.

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NoViolet Bulawayo is the author of the novels Glory and We Need New Names, which was recognized with the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Pen/Hemingway Award, the LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, the Fred Brown Literary Award, the Betty Trask Award, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award (second place), and the National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Fiction Selection.

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Akwaeke Emezi is the author of the New York Times best seller The Death of Vivek Oji, which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, Pet, a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s literature and Freshwater, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and shortlisted for the PEN/Hemmingway Award, the New York Public Library Young Lion’s Fiction Award and The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. They were selected as a 5 Under 35 Honoree by the National Book Foundation. Emezi’s new novel is called You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, which is a literary romance.

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Jeffrey Yang is the author of four poetry collections including Hey, Marfa, winter of the Southwest Book Award, and and An Aquarium, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. He is the translator of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies and Su Shi’s East Slope. His new collection is called Line and Light.

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Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Limón is also the host of the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poems is called The Hurting Kind

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Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey which is set in 1950s Eastern Kentucky and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her second novel is called Mother Country.

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Keith O'Brien is the author of three books: Outside Shot, Fly Girls, and Paradise Falls. He has been a finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting, and contributed to National Public Radio. O’Brien’s radio stories have appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition, as well as Marketplace, Here & Now, Only a Game, and This American Life. He has also written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, USA Today, Politico, Slate, Esquire.com, and the Oxford American, among others.

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Aimee Bender is the author of six books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own, which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures, which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, which won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award, The Color Master, a NY Times Notable book for 2013, and her latest novel, The Butterfly Lampshade, which came out in July 2020, and was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles with her family and teaches creative writing at USC.

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Rebecca Kauffman is the author of four novels including The Gunners, which received the Premio Tribuk dei Librai award in Italy, and Chorus.

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Sarah Manguso is a fiction writer, essayist, and poet, and the author, most recently, of the novel Very Cold People. Her nonfiction books are 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay, and her other books include the poetry collections Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise and the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape. Her work has been recognized by an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at Antioch University.

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Douglas Stuart is a Scottish - American author. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, won the Booker Prize. His new novel is Young Mungo. His short stories, Found Wanting, and The Englishman, were published in The New Yorker magazine. His essay, Poverty, Anxiety, and Gender in Scottish Working-Class Literature was published by Lit Hub. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he has an MA from the Royal College of Art in London and since 2000 he has lived and worked in New York City.

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Jacquelyn Mitchard is the New York Times bestselling author of 22 novels for adults and teenagers, and the recipient of Great Britain’s Talkabout prize, The Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards, and named to the short list for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was the inaugural selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club.  Mitchard's syndicated columns have been collected in a book entitled The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship. She has also worked as a speechwriter, teacher, and journalist. Her new novel is called The Good Son.

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Evie Wyld's debut novel, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, was short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her second novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Encore Award and the European Union Prize for Literature, and it was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award for Best Novel. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Her latest novel, The Bass Rock, won the Stella Prize. She lives in London.

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 Lan Samantha Chang is the author of three novels, The Family Chao, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritance, and a story collection, Hunger. Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. Chang is the director of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives with her husband and daughter in Iowa City, Iowa.

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Thrity Umrigar is the best-selling author of the novels Bombay Time, The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, The Weight of Heaven, The World We Found, The Story Hour, Everybody’s Son and The Secrets Between Us. Her new novel is called Honor. Umrigar is also the author of the memoir, First Darling of the Morning and three children's picture books. Her books have been translated into several languages and published in over fifteen countries. She is a Distinguished University Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

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Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including On Animals, The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in Los Angeles.

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Charlotte Wood is the author of six novels and three books of non-fiction. Her latest book is The Luminous Solution, an exploration of creativity and the inner life. Her last novel was the international bestseller, The Weekend. It was shortlisted for several awards including the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister's Literary Award, both of which she won, among others, for her previous novel, The Natural Way of Things, in 2016. 

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Anahid Nersessian is an associate professor of English at University of California at Los Angeles. She is the author of The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life; Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment; and Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse.

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Steven Schwartz is the author of four short story collections, Little Raw Souls, To Leningrad in Winter, Lives of the Fathers, Madagascar: New and Selected Stories, and three novels, The Tenderest of Strings, Therapy and A Good Doctor’s Son. His fiction has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, the Cohen Award, the Colorado Book Award for the Novel, two O. Henry Prize Story Awards, the Foreword Review Gold Medal for Short Stories, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Bread Loaf.

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Peter Ho Davies is the author of three novels including A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, The Fortunes, and The Welsh Girl. He has also published two short story collections, The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His new book is called The Art of Revision: The Last Word. He is currently on faculty at the University of Michigan.

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Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. His short fiction has won two Pushcart Prizes and has been published in multiple editions of The Best American Series. He has also written eight works of nonfiction, including Apostle and (with Greg Sestero) The Disaster Artist, as well as many screenplays for video games and television. His new short story collection is called Creative Types. Bissell lives in Los Angeles with his family.

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Michael Bazzett is a poet and teacher. His work has appeared in The Sun, Ploughshares, Linebreak, West Branch, The Collagist, Sixth Finch and 32 Poems, among others. He has written collections of poetry, some of which include Our Lands Are Not So Different, The Interrogation, The Temple, and The Echo Chamber. He also published a translation of The Popol Vuh.

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Jean Hanff Korelitz was born and raised in New York City and educated at Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge. She is the author of the novels: The Plot, You Should Have Known (Adapted for HBO as “The Undoing”), Admission (adapted as the 2013 film of the same name), The Devil and Webster, The White Rose, The Sabbathday River and A Jury of Her Peers, as well as a middle-grade reader, Interference Powder, and a collection of poetry, The Properties of Breath. A new novel, The Latecomer, will be published by Celadon Books on May 31, 2022.

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Alice McDermott is the author of several novels, including The Ninth Hour; Someone; After This; Child of My Heart; Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; and At Weddings and Wakes—all published by FSG. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. For more than two decades she was the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the faculty at the Sewanee Writers Conference. McDermott lives with her family outside Washington, D.C.

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Ben Okri is a poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer, anthologist, aphorist, and playwright. He has also written film scripts. His works have won numerous national and international prizes, including the Booker Prize for Fiction. His newest book is a short story collection called Prayer for the Living.

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George Saunders is the author of eleven books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner was selected to represent each decade, from the fifty years since the Prize’s inception. His latest book is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

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Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. He was born and raised in Kansas and now makes his home in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry prize and will be published by Milkweed Editions in June, 2021. Michael teaches creative writing through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and at colleges and high schools in Minnesota.

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Diane Seuss was born in Michigan City, Indiana, in 1956 and raised in Edwardsburg and Niles, Michigan. She studied at Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University, where she received a master’s degree in social work. Seuss is the author of five books of poetry, including frank: sonnets, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, recipient of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. A Guggenheim fellow, Seuss served as the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the English department at Colorado College in 2012 and is currently writer-in-residence at Kalamazoo College, where she has been on the faculty since 1988. She lives in Michigan.

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EJ Levy’s work has been featured in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation and The Paris Review, and has received a Pushcart Prize. Her story collection, Love, In Theory, won the Flannery O’Connor Award and Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. Her anthology, Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers, won the Lambda Literary Award. She holds a degree in History from Yale and an MFA from Ohio State University, and currently teaches in the MFA Program at Colorado State University. The Cape Doctor is her first novel.

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Nawaaz Ahmed is a transplant from Tamil Nadu, India. Before turning to writing, he was a computer scientist, researching search algorithms for Yahoo. He holds an MFA from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is the winner of several Hopwood awards. He is the recipient of residencies from Macdowell, VCCA, Yaddo, and Djerassi. He is a former Kundiman and Lambda Literary Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn. Radiant Fugitives is his first novel.

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Kalani Pickhart is the recipient of research fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center and the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Intelligence for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.  I Will Die in A Foreign Land is her first novel. Kalani currently lives and writes in Phoenix, Arizona. 

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Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist. She is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Whose Story Is This?, Call Them By Their True Names, Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.  Her new book is Orwell’s Roses.

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Keisha N. Blain is a 2022 New America National Fellow and an award-winning historian. She is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom and Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. Blain has published extensively on race, gender, and politics in both national and global perspectives. She is one of the co-developers of #Charlestonsyllabus, a Twitter movement and crowdsourced list of reading recommendations relating to the history of racial violence in the United States.

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Lauren Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent the novel Matrix. Her work has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, was twice a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

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Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. His most recent is Bewilderment. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His novel, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

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Annie Murphy Paul is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time magazine, and The Best American Science Writing, among many other publications. She is the author of Origins, reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and selected by that publication as a "Notable Book," and The Cult of Personality, hailed by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker as a “fascinating new book.” Her new book is called The Extended Mind.

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Peter Orner's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, Ploughshares and many other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice received a Pushcart Prize. Peter has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. His fiction titles include Maggie Brown and Others, Esther Stores, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, Love and Shame and Love, and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. His non-fiction book is Am I Alone Here? He edited the titles Hope Deferred, Underground America, and Lavil: Life, Love and Death in Port-au-Prince.

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Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He has published two books on writing, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo, and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide. He’s also published a collection of 100-word stories, Fissures, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story. His new collection is called All the Comfort Sin Can Provide. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and he has been anthologized in collections such as Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and Best Small Fictions. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. 

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Kevin McIlvoy has published six novels, A Waltz, The Fifth Station, Little Peg, Hyssop, At the Gate of All Wonder, and One Kind Favor; and a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico and a collection of his prose poems and short-short stories, 57 Octaves Below Middle C. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and other literary magazines. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction. For twenty-seven years he was fiction editor and editor in chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1987 to 2019; he taught as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008.

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Robert Olen Butler has published seventeen novels: Late City, The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River and six volumes of short fiction, Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.

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Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include Her Read, a graphic poem and A Wake with Nine Shades, a finalist for Foreword Reviews Best of the Indie Press Award. A poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist and licensed builder, she has received grants from Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Community of Writers and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Plume, Rhino, and TriQuarterly. She teaches at Northwestern Michigan College and elsewhere.

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Christine Mangan is the author of the novels Tangerine, which was a New York Times Best Seller and Palace of the Drowned. She has her PhD in English from University College Dublin, with a focus on 18th-century Gothic literature, and an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Southern Maine.

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Joshua Henkin is the author of the novels Morningside Heights, Swimming Across the Hudson, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book, Matrimony, a New York Times Notable Book, and The World Without You, winner of the 2012 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for American Jewish Fiction and a finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and directs the MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College.

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Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is the author of three novels. Her second novel Call Me Zebra won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the John Gardner Award, was long listed for the PEN Open Book Award, was an Amazon Best Book of the Year, A Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller and named a Best Book by over twenty publications. She received a 2015 Whiting Writers' Award and was a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree for her debut novel, Fra Keeler.  Her latest novel is Savage Tongues.

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S. Kirk Walsh is a novelist, editor, and teacher based in Austin, Texas. Her debut novel is The Elephant of Belfast, inspired by true events that took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during World War II. Her debut novel has generated praise from The New Yorker, The Christian Science Monitor, and others as well as being selected for several reading lists. Walsh is now working on second novel inspired by events that took place in Detroit during the 1930s and 1940s.

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Tobey Pearl earned degrees in law and international relations from Boston University and studied international law at the University of Hong Kong. Terror to the Wicked is her first book. She lives with her husband, the author Matthew Pearl, three children, and rescue dog.

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Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. He was born and raised in Kansas and now makes his home in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry prize and will be published by Milkweed Editions in June, 2021. Michael teaches creative writing through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and at colleges and high schools in Minnesota.

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Steven Pressfield is the author of The Man-at-Arms, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, Tides of War, Last of the Amazons, Virtues of War, The Afghan Campaign, Killing Rommel, The Profession, The Lion's Gate, The War of Art, Turning Pro, Do the Work, The Warrior Ethos, The Authentic Swing, An American Jew, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t, The Knowledge, and The Artist's Journey.

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Marisa Silver is the author of The Mysteries, Little Nothing, a New York Times Editor's Choice, and winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction, Mary Coin, a New York Times Bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller's Award, and an NPR and BBC Best Book of the Year, Alone With You, The God of War, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, No Direction Home, and Babe in Paradise, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.

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Justin Jannise grew up in rural southeast Texas was the first in his family to attend college. He graduated from Yale University and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is now finishing his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. His poetry collection is called How to be Better by Being Worse.

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Diane Seuss was born in Michigan City, Indiana, in 1956 and raised in Edwardsburg and Niles, Michigan. She studied at Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University, where she received a master’s degree in social work. Seuss is the author of five books of poetry, including frank: sonnets, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, recipient of the Juniper Prize for Poetry.

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Gabriela Garcia is the author of the novel Of Women and Salt. Her fiction and poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Tin House, Zyzzyva, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere

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Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Post Road, Esopus, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories. His first book, The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award. His second short story collection is Farthest South. Rutherford teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College. 

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Imbole Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been translated into eleven languages, adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a miniseries. Her new novel, How Beautiful We Were, was published in March 2021. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York.

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Anna North is a journalist and a novelist. Her journalistic work currently focuses on reproductive health and the politics thereof. North is the author of three novels, Outlawed, America Pacifica and The Life and Death of Sophie Stark. She is also a senior reporter at Vox. She grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Brooklyn.

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Layla AlAmmar is a writer and academic from Kuwait. She has an MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. She was the 2018 British Council International Writer in Residence at the Small Wonder Short Story Festival. Her debut novel, The Pact We Made was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. Her second novel, Silence is a Sense, was published in Spring 2021. She has written for The Guardian, LitHub, and ArabLit Quarterly. She is currently pursuing a PhD on the intersection of Arab women's fiction and literary trauma theory.

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Elizabeth McCracken is the author of seven books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, and her new short story collection, The Souvenir Museum. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Thunderstruck & Other Stories won the 2015 Story Prize. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places.

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Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The sequel to this novel is The Committed and his short story collection is called The Refugees. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.

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Nalini Singh is the author of more than 60 novels and novellas. She has five different series of books, primarily in the Paranormal Romance Genre. Her latest novel is a thrilled called Quiet in Her Bones. Nalini Singh was born in Fiji and moved to New Zealand as a child where she still lives and writes. 

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Chang-rae Lee is the author of My Year Abroad, Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as On Such a Full Sea, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.

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 Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories of Violence. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. The Misfit's Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books. Her new collection of short stories is called Verge.

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Carol Edgarian is an award-winning novelist, essayist, teacher, and editor. Her novels includeVera, the New York Times bestseller Three Stages of Amazement, and the international bestseller Rise the Euphrates. Carol’s articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and W, among many other places, and she coedited The Writer’s life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame from the Diaries of the World’s Great Writers. In 2003 Carol and her husband, Tom Jenks, founded the nonprofit Narrative, a leading digital publisher of fiction, poetry, essays, and art.

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Dantiel Moniz is the author of the short story collection Milk Blood Heat, which was an Indie Next Pick, an Amazon “Best Book of the Month” selection, and a Roxanne Gay Audacious Book Club pick. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, One Story, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares and The Yale Review among others. She lives in Northeast Florida and teaches fiction at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Priyanaka Champaneri is the author of the novel The City of Good Death, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Fiction Writing in 2018. Champaneri received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and has been a fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts several times. 

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Alan Lightman is the author of six novels, including the international best seller Einstein’s Dreams and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award. He has taught at Harvard and at MIT, where he was the first person to receive a dual faculty appointment in science and the humanities. He is currently professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. His new book is called Probable Impossibilities.

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George Saunders is the author of eleven books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner was selected to represent each decade, from the fifty years since the Prize’s inception. His latest book is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

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Natalie West is a Los Angeles based writer and educator. She worked as a professional Dominatrix while obtaining her PhD in Gender Studies. Her personal essays have appeared in Salon, Autostraddle, Kink Academy, Columbia Journal, and them. She moonlights as a sex work, BDSM, and queer community authenticity consultant for film and television.

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Eley Williams is the author of the novel The Liar's Dictionary, the short story collection Attrib. and Other Stories, and the poetry collection Frit. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University of London. Her critical and creative work has appeared in the London Review of Books, the TLS and the Guardian.

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Te-Ping Chen is a fiction writer and journalist whose debut collection of short stories is called Land of Big Numbers. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Granta and Tin House. She is a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Philadelphia who was previously based in Beijing and Hong Kong.

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Ben Okri is a poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer, anthologist, aphorist, and playwright. He has also written film scripts. His works have won numerous national and international prizes, including the Booker Prize for Fiction. His newest book is a short story collection called Prayer for the Living.

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Mateo Askaripour is the author of the novel Black Buck. He aims to empower people of color to seize the opportunities for advancement, not matter the obstacle. He was a 2018 Rhode Island Writers Colony writer in residence and his writing has appeared in Entrepreneur, LitHub, Catapult, The Rumpus, Medium and elsewhere.

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Peter Ho Davies’s latest book is A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself. His previous novel, The Fortunes, a New York Times Notable Book, won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and the Chautauqua Prize, and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His first novel, The Welsh Girl, a London Times Best Seller, was long-listed for the Booker Prize. He has also published two short story collections, The Ugliest House in the World (winner of the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, and the Oregon Book Award) and Equal Love (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a New York Times Notable Book).

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Mark Wunderlich was born in Winona, Minnesota and grew up in rural Fountain City, Wisconsin. He attended Concordia College’s Institut für Deutsche Studien, and later the University of Wisconsin from which he received a BA in German Literature and English. Wunderlich earned a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University’s School of the Arts Writing Division where he studied poetry with J.D. McClatchy, William Matthews and Lucie Brock-Broido, among others, and translation with William Weaver and Frank MacShane. His poetry collections include The Anchorage, Voluntary Servitude, The Earth Avails, and God of Nothingness. 

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Jamie Harrison, who has lived in Montana with her family for more than thirty years, has worked as a caterer, a gardener, and an editor, and is the author of six novels: The Center of Everything, The Widow Nash and the four Jules Clement/Blue Deer mysteries, slated to be reissued soon by Counterpoint Press: The Edge of the Crazies, Going Local, An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence, and Blue Deer Thaw. She was awarded the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award for The Widow Nash and was a finalist for the High Plains Book Award.

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Emma Glass was born in Wales and now lives in London. She is a writer and works as a children’s nurse. Her debut novel Peach has been translated into seven languages and was on the longlist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her second novel is called Rest and Be Thankful.

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Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, and the New York Times Bestselling author of 32 books, including The Undefeated, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, How to Read a Book, illustrated by Melissa Sweet, Swing, Rebound, which was shortlisted for prestigious Carnegie Medal, and, his Newberry medal-winning middle grade novel, The Crossover and the poetry collection Light for the World To See, among others. 

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Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her work has won awards and honors including the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction. She is a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow. Her stories have appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, The Sewanee Review, and Phoebe, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, 2017, and 2018, and in New Stories From The South.

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Cynan Jones was born in 1975 near Aberaeron, Wales where he now lives and works. He is the author of five short novels, The Long Dry, Everything I Found on the Beach, Bird, Blood, Snow, The Dig, and Cove and Stillicide. He has been longlisted and shortlisted for numerous prizes and won a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award 2007, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize 2014, the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2015 and the BBC National Short Story Award 2017.

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Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Arrest is his twelfth novel. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

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Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), First Light, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Soul Thief, and The Sun Collective, and the story collections Believers, Gryphon, Harmony of the World, A Relative Stranger, There’s Something I Want You to Do, and Through the Safety Net. His stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories. Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota.

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Yishai Sarid was born and raised in Tel Aviv Israel. He studied law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and has a Public Administration Master’s Degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of five novels.

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Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide best seller and became a major motion picture. She received her MFA from Columbia University and lives with her daughter in New York City and on an island off the coast of Maine.  Her new story collection is called Why I Don’t Write: And  Other Stories.

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Bryan Washington is the author of the short story collection Lot and the novel Memorial. He is a National Book Award 5 Under 35 honoree.  He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Buzzfeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, and GQamong others.  He lives in Houston.  Memorial was nominated for The Center for Fiction’s 2020 First Novel Prize.

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Ken Bonert was born in South Africa and is the grandson of Lithuanian immigrants. His debut novel The Lion Seeker won both the 2013 National Jewish Book Award for Outstanding Debut Fiction and the 2013 Edward Lewis Wallant Award. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, Grain and the Fiddlehead. His journalism has appeared in the Globe and Mail and other publications. He lives in Toronto.

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Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York and the author of the bestselling memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days. His first novel, Did You Ever Have a Family, hit the New York Times bestseller list and was longlisted for the National Book Award, Man Booker Prize, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. His new novel is called The End of the Day.

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Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers The Emperor’s Children and The Burning Girl, and a book of essays, Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Debra Spark is the author of five books of fiction, two collections of short stories, one anthology, and two works of nonfiction. Her most recent books are the novel Unknown Caller, the short story collection The Pretty Girl, and a second book of essays on fiction writing, And Then Something Happened. She teaches fiction at Colby College and at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

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Rebecca Watson is the author of the novel little scratch. She writes for publications including the Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and Granta. In 2018 she was short-listed for the White Review Short Story Prize.

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David Szalay is the author of five works of fiction: Spring, The Innocent, London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes, and All That Man Is, for which he was awarded the Gordon Burn prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, and Turbulence, winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Szalay was born in Canada, grew up in London, and now lives in Budapest.

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Peter Geye is the author of the award winning novels, Safe from the Sea, The Lighthouse Road, and Wintering, winner of the Minnesota Book Award. He currently teaches the year-long Novel Writing Project at the Loft Literary Center. Born and raised in Minneapolis, he continues to live there with his family. His new novel is called Northernmost.

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Cherie Dimaline is a member of the Georgian Bay Metis Community in Ontario who has published 5 books. Her 2017 book, The Marrow Thieves, won the Governor General’s Award and the prestigious Kirkus Prize for Young Readers, was a finalist for the White Pine Award, and was the fan favourite for CBC’s 2018 Canada Reads. Her new book is Empire of Wild.

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Margot Livesey is a writer and teacher. Her first book, published in 1986, was a collection of stories called Learning By Heart. Since then Margot has published eight novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on For tune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Mercury, and The Boy in the Field. The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays on writing, was published by Tin House Books in 2017.

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R.L. Maizes is the author of the short story collection We Love Anderson Cooper and the novel Other People's Pets. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and have aired on NPR.

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Benjamin Nugent is the author of the short story collection Fraternity. He is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2019 Terry Southern Prize. His stories have been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from the Paris Review.

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Ursula Hegi is the author of The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls, The Worst Thing I've Done, Sacred Time, Hotel of the Saints, The Vision of Emma Blau, Tearing the Silence, Salt Dancers, Stones from the River, Floating in My Mother's Palm, Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories, Intrusions, and Trudi & Pia. She teaches writing at Stonybrook's Southhampton Campus and she is the recipient of more than thirty grants and awards.

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Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of How to Pronounce Knife. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award and appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, NOON, The Believer, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018, and O. Henry Prize Stories 2019. She is the author of four books of poetry, Cluster, Light, Found and Small Arguments.

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Michelle Bowdler is the author of Is Rape a Crime? Michelle is a recipient of a 2017 Barbara Deming Memorial Award for non-fiction and has been a Fellow at Ragdale and MacDowell Colony. She has been published in the New York Times and in the anthologies The Anatomy of Silence and We Rise to Resist: Voices from a New Era in Women’s Political Action.

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Sejal Shah is the author of the debut essay collection, This Is One Way To Dance. Her stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, the Kenyon Review Online, Literary Hub, Longreads, and The Rumpus.

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Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and six novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, The Green Road, and Actress. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature.

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TaraShea Nesbit is a writer and teacher. Her second novel, Beheld, is a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and an Indies Next Pick for April 2020. Her first novel, The Wives of Los Alamos, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and winner of two New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. She is an assistant professor of fiction and nonfiction at Miami University.

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Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born and raised in California to a Japanese mother and American father, and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her books include American Harvest, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, and Picking Bones from Ash.

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Mary South is a graduate of Northwestern University and the MFA program in fiction at Columbia University. For many years, she has worked with Diane Williams as an editor at the literary journal NOON. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Baffler, The Believer, BOMB, The Collagist, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Guernica, LARB Quarterly, The New Yorker, NOON, The Offing, The White Review, and Words Without Borders. We discussed her short story collection You Will Never Be Forgotten.

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Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and author of the New York Times bestseller Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is being adapted as a television series. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes The Atlantic’s weekly “Dear Therapist” advice column and contributes regularly to The New York Times and many other publications. 

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Vanessa Hua is an award-winning, best-selling author and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her novel, A River of Stars, was named to the Washington Post and NPR’s Best Books of 2018 lists. Her short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, received an Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature and was a finalist for a California Book Award, and was reissued by Counterpoint in 2020. We discussed her collection Deceit and Other Possibilities.

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Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Ledger; The Beauty, longlisted for the National Book Award; Come, Thief, a finalist for the PEN USA Poetry Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Hirshfield is also the author of two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, and has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets. In this discussion we talked about Ledger.

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Sue Monk Kidd writes fiction and non-fiction. Her novels include The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair, The Invention of Wings, and The Book of Longings. Some of her non-fiction titles include The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and When the Heart Waits. In this episode we discuss her new novel The Book of Longings

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Emily Nemens is a writer, illustrator, and editor. Her debut novel, The Cactus League, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in February 2020. In 2018, Nemens became the seventh editor of The Paris Review, the nation’s preeminent literary quarterly. In this episode we discuss The Cactus League.

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Ann Napolitano is the author of the novels Dear Edward, A Good Hard Look, and Within Arm’s Reach. She is also the Associate Editor of One Story literary magazine. She received an MFA from New York University; she has taught fiction writing for Brooklyn College’s MFA program, New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and for Gotham Writers’ Workshop. In this episode we discuss Dear Edward.

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Anna Solomon is the author of three novels—The Book of V., Leaving Lucy Pear, and The Little Bride—and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, One Story, The Boston Globe, Tablet, and elsewhere. Anna is a graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches writing at Barnard College, Warren Wilson’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center. In this episode we discuss The Book of V.

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Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan. She studied at Michigan State University and earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University.She is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, Forché's books of poetry include: In the Lateness of the World, The Angel of History, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us, which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes, which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her memoir What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistancewas a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction. In this episode we discuss In the Lateness of the World.

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Ander Monson is the author of eight books, including the non-fiction book I Will Take the Answer and the short story collection, The Gnome Stories. He edits the magazine DIAGRAM <thediagram.com> among other projects, and he directs the MFA program at the University of Arizona.

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