Howard Norman is an award-winning author and educator whose books have been translated into 12 languages. He has written seven novels: My Darling Detective (2017), Next Life Might be Kinder (2014), What is Left the Daughter (2010), Devotion (2007), The [...]

Mat Johnson has authored the novels Loving Day (2015), Pym (2011), Hunting in Harlem (2003), Drop (2000), the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot (2007), and comic books Incognegro (2008) and Dark Rain (2010). The long list of awards and [...]

Acclaimed author Lauren Groff has three novels to her name: Fates and Furies (2015), Arcadia (2012), and The Monsters of Templeton (2008), and has been featured in publications such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic, American Short Fiction, Harper’s Tin [...]

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (2010), Inheritance (2004), and Hunger (1998). In addition to being translated into nine languages, her works have also appeared in Ploughshares, The Atlantic, and twice chosen for [...]

Jane Mead is an award-winning poet, whose writing has appeared in multiple anthologies and magazines. She has published five collections of poetry: World of Made and Unmade (2016), Money Money Money Water Water Water (2014), The Usable Field (2008), The [...]

Carl Phillips, referred to as “one of America’s most original, influential, and productive of lyric poets,” has authored 14 books of poetry and several works of criticism and translation. His recent poetry collections include: Wild is the Wind (2018), Reconnaissance [...]

Camille Dungy has authored four collections of poetry: Trophic Cascade (2017), Smith Blue (2011), Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (2006). Her most recent work is a collection of essays [...]

Thanks to our  faculty, participants, and community supporters for a wonderful 38th conference! Check out our Facebook page for a gallery of conference photos ... we wish you a fruitful new year of writing!

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Smith Blue, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. She is the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, co-editor of [...]

This faculty profile comes to us courtesy of past participant Angela Watrous, who conducted an interview with Li for the Fiction Writers Review. What follows below is an excerpt; read the entire interview on the FWR site. "Yiyun Li grew [...]

Thanks to poetry assistant Iris Dunkle for updating this profile. Poet, essayist, teacher, translator: Jane Hirshfield’s writing persona is multi-faceted, her body of work diverse. But if there is a unifying element in her pursuits, it lies in her formative [...]

Peter Ho Davies was born to Welsh and Chinese parents and raised in Britain and the U.S., so it's no surprise that his work concerns itself with the concept of identity. But his works are hardly circumscribed by the labels [...]

Thanks to poetry assistant Iris Dunkle for writing this profile. The poet and scholar Linda Gregerson begins her spectacular poem, “Bicameral,” with the line: Choose any angle you like, she said, the world is split in two. On one side, [...]

This is a re-post of conference media manager Catherine Thorpe's 2011 profile. Lan Samantha Chang was born and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin, to Chinese immigrant parents. Growing up, she experienced both the Chinese cultural traditions her family upheld and Midwestern [...]

Thanks to conference assistant Kathleen Winter for providing this updated profile.  Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry:  Holding Company (Norton, 2010) and Hoops (Norton, 2006), both finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and [...]

Thanks to fiction assistant Patrick Vogelpohl for penning this profile. Countless writers find inspiration in their family histories. However, no one draws from their lineage quite like Christopher Tilghman, a long-time conference faculty favorite who returns this summer after an [...]

“Born, bred and buttered” in Atlanta, Georgia (as she once described herself), Tayari Jones has placed all three of her novels in that city, creating a trilogy, as The Village Voice noted, “defining middle-class black Atlanta the way Cheever did [...]

Born in California's Mojave desert with roots in the South, schooled in Virginia and California, now living in Rhode Island, but frequently traveling abroad: Forrest Gander's itinerant physical existence is mirrored in his writing, which travels widely. Gander has authored [...]

          When Arthur Sze was named a Chancellor of the Academy of AmericanPoets last month, Academy Chancellor Naomi Shihab Nye called his poetry “a nourishing tonic for the mind.”  The word tonic, with its connotations of both [...]

Tayari Jones was heard on NPR today  with this essay about the death of Trayvon Martin in Florida. She writes and speaks with the elegance and heart-breaking honesty so present in all her work.  

Along with the plum blossoms, the first flurries of applications are arriving!        There's nothing quite like the smell of fresh applications in the morning, still warm from the friction of electron-transmission.        Though, to be sure, [...]