2016 Featured Presenters

Keynote speaker
Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award in the poetry category for Citizen, the first book to ever be named a finalist in both the poetry and criticism categories. Citizen also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Rankine has recently joined the faculty of the writing program at the University of Southern California.
Featured Readers
Scroll over presenter photos for biographies.
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Rabih Alameddine
Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman, a finalist for both the 2014 National Book Award and the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award; I, the Divine; The Hakawati; Koolaids; and the story collection The Perv. He divides his time between San Francisco and Beirut.
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Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander is the author of six books of poems, two collections of essays, a play, and various edited collections. She was recently named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, as well as the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She previously served as the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University, where she taught for 15 years and chaired the African American Studies Department. In 2009, she composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. Her memoir, The Light of the World, was released in 2015 to great acclaim.
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Richard Bausch
Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including The Last Good Time, which was made into a feature-length motion picture, and Peace, which was awarded the 2010 Dayton International Literary Peace Prize. His work has been published and anthologized widely, and he is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, among others. He is editor of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and a professor at Chapman University in Orange, California.
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Eula Biss
Eula Biss is the author of three books: On Immunity: An Inoculation, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction; Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism; and a collection of poetry, The Balloonists. Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, an NEA Literature Fellowship, and a Jaffe Writers’ Award.
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Peter Ho Davies
Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and two story collections, The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His work has appeared in Harpers, the Atlantic, and the Paris Review, and has been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. In 2003, Granta named him among its “Best of Young British Novelists,” and he was a 2008 recipient of the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, Davies now lives in the United States and teaches at the University of Michigan.
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W.S. Di Piero
W.S. Di Piero is the author of eleven books of poetry, including, most recently, Tombo. Winner of the 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, he has published poems widely and has written for periodicalsincludingthe New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and the New Republic. Di Piero has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant, and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award.
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Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels, including Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, The Colour of Memory, and The Search; many genre-defying books, such as Out of Sheer Rage, But Beautiful, and Zona; and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. He currently teaches at the University of Southern California.
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Percival Everett
Percival Everett is author to more than twenty books of fiction, among them Erasure, Glyph, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. His latest works are Half an Inch of Water, a collection of stories, and Trout’s Lie, a collection of poems. He is the recipient of the Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Believer Book Award, and the 2006 PEN USA Center Award for Fiction. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen is the author of Purity and four other novels, including Freedom and The Corrections, and five works of nonfiction and translation, including The Kraus Project and Farther Away. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Künste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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Francisco Goldman
Francisco Goldman is the author of Say Her Name, winner of the Prix Femina Étranger, and four other books. He has received a Cullman Center Fellowship and a Berlin Prize, among other awards and honors. Every year he teaches one semester at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and then hightails it back to Mexico City.
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Rigoberto González
Rigoberto González is the author of fifteen books, most recently the poetry collection Unpeopled Eden, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. A professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, he is the recipient of Guggenheim, NEA, and USA Rolón fellowships; an NYFA grant in poetry; the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; the Poetry Center Book Award; the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award; and the 2015 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle.
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Judy Grahn
Judy Grahn is internationally known as a poet, writer, and cultural theorist, and for having helped fuel feminist, gay and lesbian activism, and women’s spirituality movements since the 1960s. Recent publications include Love Belongs to Those Who Do the Feeling, The Judy Grahn Reader, and A Simple Revolution: the Making of an Activist Poet. Her forthcoming book is Hanging On Our Own Bones. Judy is a retired professor, continues writing and teaching, and co-edits an online journal based in her theory of menstrual ritual origins of human culture: Metaformia Journal.
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Linda Gregerson
Linda Gregerson is the author of seven collections of poetry, including New and Selected Poems; The Selvage; The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Poets Prize; Magnetic North, which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award; and Waterborne, which won the 2003 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
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Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a photographer, visual artist, and award-winning poet. Her most recent books include Lighting the Shadow and Mule & Pear, which was honored with the Inaugural Poetry Award from the Black Caucus American Library Association. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and the Millay Colony, and she works in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets on the multi-genre interview series Poets on Poetry.
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Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrera is the current Poet Laureate of the United States and the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012 to 2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera’s many collections of poetry include Senegal Taxi; Half of the World in Light, a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007. He is also the author of CrashBoomLove: A Novel in Verse, which received the Americas Award. His books of prose for children include SkateFate; Calling the Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award; Upside Down Boy, which was adapted into a musical; and Cinnamon Girl.
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Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Gabriel, which was nominated for a National Book Award, and Wild Gratitude, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also written several collections of essays, including A Poet’s Glossary. Hirsch’s honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the NEA.
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Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison is the author of the acclaimed essay collection The Empathy Exams, which received the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and debuted on the New York Times Best Seller list. She is also the author of a novel, The Gin Closet, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize. She is a regular columnist for the New York Times Book Review and teaches in the School of the Arts Writing Program at Columbia University.
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Laura Kasischke
Laura Kasischke has published nine novels and eight collections of poetry. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Space, In Chains. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and two grants from the NEA.
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Douglas Kearney
Douglas Kearney is the Whiting Award-winning author of Fear, Some; The Black Automaton, a National Poetry Series selection; and, most recently, Patter. He is also a librettist; his opera Sucktion has been produced internationally, and his opera Crescent City premiered in Los Angeles in 2012. He has been commissioned to write and/or teach ekphrastic poetry for the Weisman Museum in Minneapolis, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Getty. He teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.
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Phil Klay
Phil Klay is a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War and the author of the short story collection Redeployment, which received the 2014 National Book Award for fiction and the 2015 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award for best debut in any genre.
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Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem is the author of over a dozen books—including the much-lauded novels Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude—and the winner of a MacArthur Foundation Grant. Other novels include Chronic City, selected for the New York Times’ “The 10 Best Books of 2009” list; You Don’t Love Me Yet; and Dissident Gardens, a New York Times notable book of 2013. Lethem's latest book is Lucky Alan and Other Stories. In the spring of 2010, Lethem was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Pratt Institute and became the second Roy E. Disney Chair in Creative Writing at Pomona College, succeeding David Foster Wallace.
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Robin Coste Lewis
Robin Coste Lewis’s debut collection of poems is Voyage of the Sable Venus. She is a Provost’s Fellow at the University of Southern California, earned her MFA from New York University’s Creative Writing Program, and holds a Master of Theological Studies degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University. A Cave Canem fellow, she was a finalist for the International War Poetry Prize and the National Rita Dove Prize.
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Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her other books of include Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte's low-residency MFA program, and the 24PearlStreet online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California.
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Kelly Link
Kelly Link is the author of the collections Get in Trouble, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Link’s short stories have been published in The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and she has received a grant from the NEA. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press, which has been recognized as a leading small publisher of literary science fiction and fantasy, and a co-editor of the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Born in Miami, Florida, she currently lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts.
(Photo credit: Sharona Jacobs Photography LLC)
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Helen Macdonald
Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator, historian, and naturalist who lives in Cambridge, England. She is the author of the memoir H Is for Hawk, which won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and was the 2014 Costa Book of the Year, and the poetry collection Shaler’s Fish. Macdonald writes the On Nature column for the New York Times Magazine and teaches at the University of Cambridge.
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Emily St. John Mandel
Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre. She is the author of four novels, most recently Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award. A previous novel, The Singer's Gun, was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystere de la Critique in France. Her short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013. She is a staff writer for The Millions and lives in New York City with her husband.
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Domingo Martinez
Domingo Martinez is the New York Times best-selling author of The Boy Kings of Texas, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was a gold medal winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award. The Boy Kings of Texas has been optioned by HBO through Salma Hayek’s production company, Ventanarosa. Martinez's work has appeared in many literary journals and publications, and he is a regular contributor to This American Life. He was the recipient of the Bernard De Voto Fellowship in Nonfiction at Bread Loaf, and was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
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Heather McHugh
Heather McHugh is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including Eyeshot, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, and Hinge and Sign, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant,” and her work has been recognized by the NEA, PEN, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is currently the Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle.
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Elizabeth McKenzie
Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of the novel The Portable Veblen; a collection, Stop That Girl, shortlisted for the Story Prize; and the novel MacGregor Tells the World, a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and School Library Journal best book of the year. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and has been recorded for NPR's Selected Shorts. She was an NEA/Japan-US Friendship Commission Fellow in 2010. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Stanford Continuing Studies program, and is currently senior editor of the Chicago Quarterly Review and managing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader.
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Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the recent celebrated book The Argonauts; The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, a New York Times notable book; Bluets; The Red Parts; and Jane: A Murder, a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles.
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Marilyn Nelson
Marilyn Nelson, a three-time National Book Award finalist and the recipient of the 2012 Frost Medal, is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets as well as Poet-in-Residence of the American Poets Corner at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. Her most recently published books are My Seneca Village and American Ace.
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Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye books of poetry include Transfer, You & Yours, and 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, and she is also a critically acclaimed author of poetry and fiction for children and young adults. She has served as a Lannan Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, and has been honored by the Texas Institute of Letters, the International Poetry Forum, and the Library of Congress. She has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2009.
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Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times best seller The Accursed. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
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Susan Orlean
Susan Orlean is the New York Times bestselling author of five books of nonfiction, including The Orchid Thief and Rin Tin Tin. A staff writer for the New Yorker for more than twenty years, she has earned a reputation as one of America’s most distinctive journalistic voices for her deeply moving—and deeply humorous—explorations of American stories, both familiar and obscure.
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Ruth Ozeki
Ruth Ozeki is a filmmaker, novelist, Zen Buddhist priest, and author of three award-winning novels. My Year of Meats won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award, among others, and her second novel, All Over Creation, was a New York Times notable book and the recipient of a 2004 Willa Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction. Her latest novel, A Tale for the Time Being, immediately hit the New York Times Best Seller list and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
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Gregory Pardlo
Gregory Pardlo is the author of the poetry collections Totem, which received the 2007 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and Digest, awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A Cave Canem fellow, he is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the New York Times, and the MacDowell Colony. His poems have been published widely in journals and appear in the anthology Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and two editions of Best American Poetry. He is a teaching fellow in the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University.
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D.A. Powell
D.A. Powell is the author of five poetry collections, including Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. A longtime resident of California, Powell attended Sonoma State University and the University of Iowa. He has taught at both institutions, as well as Harvard University, Columbia University, Stanford University, and Davidson College. Repast: Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails, a reissue of Powell’s first three collections, was recently published. He teaches at the University of San Francisco.
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Roger Reeves
Roger Reeves is the author of the poetry collection King Me. His work has appeared widely, and his honors include a 2014-2015 Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a fellowship from the NEA.
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Roxana Robinson
Roxana Robinson is the author of Sparta, four earlier novels including Cost, three story collections, and the biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Four of these were New York Times notable books. Robinson’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, BASS, and elsewhere. She was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Balakian Award, and has received fellowships from the NEA, the MacDowell Colony, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is President of the Authors Guild.
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Luis J. Rodriguez
Luis J. Rodriguez was named Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2014. He is the author of fifteen books across a number of genres, the most recent poetry titles of which are My Nature Is Hunger: New and Selected Poems, 1989-2004; Trochemoche; and The Concrete River. A critic, memoirist, and activist, Rodriguez has been the recipient of a PEN West/Josephine Miles Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He serves a founding editor of Tia Chucha Press and co-founder and president of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural and Bookstore in California.
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Richard Siken
Richard Siken is a poet, a painter, a filmmaker, and an editor at Spork Press. His first book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets’ prize. He is a recipient of two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, two Lannan Residency Fellowships, and a Literature Fellowship in poetry from the NEA. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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Héctor Tobar
Héctor Tobar is the Los Angeles-born author of Deep Down Dark and the novel The Barbarian Nurseries. Tobar has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine. At the Los Angeles Times, he worked as a city reporter, columnist, and foreign correspondent; he won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. He is also the author of Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States, and The Tattooed Soldier, a novel.
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Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of four collections of poetry—Thrall; Native Guard, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia; and Domestic Work—as well as the nonfiction book Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, among others. She is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, and has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Ellen Bryant Voigt
Ellen Bryant Voigt is the author of eight books of poetry, including most recently Headwaters, and two collections of craft essays. In 1976 she created the first low-residency MFA program for writers. Her many honors include grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, an appointment as the Poet Laureate of Vermont and as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She is currently on the faculty of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College.
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Jess Walter
Jess Walter is the author of eight books, most recently the story collection We Live in Water and the novel Beautiful Ruins, a No. 1 New York Times Best Seller. He was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for The Zero and won the 2005 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Citizen Vince. He has been a finalist for the PEN/USA Literary Prize in both fiction and nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and has twice won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. His books have been published in thirty languages, and his short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Harper's, McSweeney's, Esquire, Tin House, and elsewhere. He lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family.
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Amy Wilentz
Amy Wilentz is the author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo, winner of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle autobiography award; The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier; Martyrs’ Crossing; and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen. Sheteaches literary nonfiction at UC Irvine and has been honored with PEN, Whiting, and American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal awards.
AWP Award Series Readers
Scroll over presenter photos for biographies.
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Charles M. Boyer
Charles M. Boyer has an M.A. in fiction writing from the University of New Hampshire, and now teaches English and Humanities at Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Massachusetts. He has received a writing grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board and a Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. His chapbook of poetry, The Mockingbird Puzzle, was published by Finishing Line Press. History’s Child is inspired by and loosely interprets his wife’s father’s experiences during post-World War II opposition to Stalin’s occupation of Poland.
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Sarah Einstein
Sarah Einstein lives in Athens, OH where she is a PhD student in Creative Nonfiction at Ohio University. Her essays and short stories have previously appeared or are forthcoming in the Sun, Ninth Letter, PANK, Sixfold, and other journals. She has been anthologized in Southern Sin by In Fact Books, and her work appears in the upcoming anthology Writing Into the Forbidden, to be published by Ohio University Press in 2014. Einstein is the author of Remnants of Passion (Shebooks 2014).
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Susan Muaddi Darraj
Susan Muaddi Darraj's previous short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) was recognized by the US State Department's Arabic Book Program. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in New York Stories, Orchid Literary Review, Banipal, Mizna, al-Jadid, and several anthologies. She is an editor at Barrelhouse Magazine, a literary journal that celebrates the intersection of literature and pop culture, and a recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council.
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Iliana Rocha
Iliana Rocha is originally from Texas and is currently a PhD candidate in English-Creative Writing at Western Michigan University. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from Arizona State University, where she was Poetry Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review. Until recently, she taught composition and rhetoric at ASU and developmental writing at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, Arizona. Her work was chosen to be featured in Best New Poets 2014 and has previously appeared in Blackbird, Yalobusha Review, and Puerto del Sol.