Faculty
Fiction Faculty
Adrianne Harun
Katie Kitamura
Michael Knight
R.O. Kwon
Debra Magpie Earling
Jill McCorkle
Claire Messud
Chinelo Okparanta
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Poetry Faculty
Marianne Chan
Eduardo C. Corral
Nate Marshall
Carl Phillips
Caki Wilkinson
Felicia Zamora
Nonfiction Faculty
Jaquira Díaz
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Elena Passarello
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Playwriting Faculty
Brittany K. Allen
Cusi Cram
Nathan Alan Davis
Liliana Padilla
Fiction
Adrianne Harun
Adrianne Harun is the author of two short story collections, The King of Limbo, a Washington State Book Award finalist, and Catch, Release, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award. Her first novel A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award, a finalist for both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Washington State Book Award and winner of a Pinckley Prize for Debut Crime Fiction. A new novel, On the Way to the End of the World, was recently published.
Katie Kitamura
Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Intimacies. One of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, it was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. It was also one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021. In France, it won the Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere, was a finalist for the Grand Prix de l’Heroine, and was longlisted for the Prix Fragonard. Her work has been translated into 21 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, as well as fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena, and Jan Michalski foundations. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
Michael Knight
Michael Knight is the author of three novels, three collections of short stories, and a book of novellas. His fiction has appeared in places like Narrative, The New Yorker, Oxford American, Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Sewanee Review and has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best. He is the recipient of a Special Citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation (1999), the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction (2013), and the Truman Capote Prize (2018). He directs the creative writing program at the University of Tennessee.
R.O. Kwon
R.O. Kwon’s Exhibit, a novel, published in 2024. Kwon’s nationally bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, has been translated into seven languages and was named a best book of the year by over forty publications. The Incendiaries was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award. Kwon and Garth Greenwell co-edited the bestselling Kink, a New York Times Notable Book and recipient of the inaugural Joy Award. Kwon’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, and elsewhere. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.
Debra Magpie Earling
Debra Magpie Earling is the author of the novels Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. She is the recipient of the Montana Governor’s Arts Award and has received both a Guggenheim and NEA fellowship. Other awards include the American Book Award and the Spur Award. She retired from the University of Montana where she was named professor emeritus in 2021. She is a member and citizen of the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes. She is Bitterroot Salish.
Jill McCorkle
Jill McCorkle is the author of seven novels and five story collections; her latest novel Hieroglyphics was published in 2020 and her new collection, Old Crimes, will be published in January 2024. Her work has appeared in numerous periodicals and four of her short stories have been selected for Best American Short Stories. She has taught at Harvard, Brandeis, NC State, and in the Bennington College Seminars. She lives in Hillsborough, NC, with her photographer husband, Tom Rankin.
Claire Messud
Claire Messud’s bestselling novels include The Emperor’s Children, a New York Times Book of the Year in 2006; The Woman Upstairs (2013); and The Burning Girl (2017), a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Fiction. She is also the author of a book of novellas, The Hunters (2001), and a memoir-in-essays, Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write (2020). Her work has been translated into over twenty languages. She writes for Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books and the New York Times, among other publications. She was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2020. Her new novel, This Strange Eventful History, will be published by W.W. Norton in May, 2024. Messud teaches creative writing at Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her family.
Chinelo Okparanta
Chinelo Okparanta is the author of Happiness, Like Water, Under the Udala Trees, and most recently, Harry Sylvester Bird. Her honors include an O. Henry Prize and finalist selections for the International Dublin Literary Award, the NAACP Image Award in Fiction, and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, among others. She has been nominated for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2017, Okparanta was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, and in 2018 she was selected to serve as a fiction judge for the U.S. National Book Awards.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of the forthcoming historical novel The American Daughters as well as The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, a One Book One New Orleans selection, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and was longlisted for the Story Prize. His debut, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. Ruffin is the winner of the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the Louisiana Writer Award. Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her story collection, Likes, was a finalist for the Story Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, the Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. She lives in Los Angeles.
Poetry
Marianne Chan
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of Leaving Biddle City (Sarabande Books, 2024), and All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches poetry and nonfiction at Old Dominion University.
Eduardo C. Corral
Eduardo C. Corral is the son of Mexican immigrants. He’s the author of Guillotine, published by Graywolf Press, and Slow Lightning. He’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
Nate Marshall
Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer, editor, educator, and MC. His most recent book, Finna, was recognized as one of the best books of 2020 by NPR and The New York Public Library. His first book, Wild Hundreds, was honored with the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s award for Poetry Book of the Year and The Great Lakes College Association’s New Writer Award. He was also an editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. Marshall co-wrote the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks with Eve Ewing. He also wrote the audio drama Bruh Rabbit & The Fantastic Telling of Remington Ellis, Esq., which was produced by Make-Believe Association. Marshall records hip-hop as a solo artist and with the group Daily Lyrical Product. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Poetry Foundation, and The University of Michigan.
Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Carcanet, 2022), which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Other honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Library of Congress. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022).
Caki Wilkinson
Caki Wilkinson is the author of three poetry collections: The Survival Expo, The Wynona Stone Poems, and Circles Where the Head Should Be. She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Vassar Miller Prize, the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books, and a Tennessee Arts Commission Fellowship. Poems from The Survival Expo appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Kenyon Review, Yale Review and other magazines. She lives in Memphis and is an associate professor of English at Rhodes College.
Felicia Zamora
Felicia Zamora is the author of six poetry collections including I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. She’s received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. She won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review and the 2020 C. P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International. Her poems appear in Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, Guernica, Orion, The Nation, Poetry Magazine, and others. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for Colorado Review.
Nonfiction
Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz is the author of Ordinary Girls, winner of a Whiting Award, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection, an Indie Next Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and finalist for the Discover Prize. The recipient of the Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, the Alonzo Davis Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from MacDowell, the Kenyon Review, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Black Mountain Institute, Díaz has written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices Elle, the Prix des Libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. It has been translated into eleven languages. A 2023 United States Artists fellow, their writing appears in the 2020 and 2022 editions of The Best American Essays. They are an assistant professor in the MFA and BFA programs at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Their next book, Both and Neither, is forthcoming from Doubleday and publishers internationally.
Elena Passarello
Elena Passarello is an actor, writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her first collection Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande, 2012), won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards and was a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award. Her essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been published in Oxford American, Slate, Creative Nonfiction, and The Iowa Review, among other publications, as well as in the 2015 anthologies Cat is Art Spelled Wrong and After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essay.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of The Fluency of Light, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, Borealis, and Captioning the Archives. She is the winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award, the 1913 Open Prose Contest, the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, the Jean Córdova prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, the Lambda Literary Awards for Bisexual Nonfiction, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her essays can be found in Callaloo, Autostraddle, Guernica, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, among other places. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan.
Playwriting
Brittany K. Allen
Brittany K. Allen (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based writer and actor. Her plays have been staged and developed off-Broadway and regionally, at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Jungle Theater, Manhattan Theater Club, The Public, Clubbed Thumb, WP Lab, Studio Theatre, and KC Rep, among other places. Recognitions include the Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, the Dramatists Guild Foundation Comedic Playwriting Prize, and a Van Lier New Voices Playwriting Fellowship. She is currently under commission at Playwrights Horizons and Clubbed Thumb, and she teaches on faculty at Primary Stages. Her writing has been supported by a MacDowell fellowship, and scholarships to Bread Loaf and this very conference. Some of that writing is published; in The Kilroys’ List (Volume One), McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Epiphany, and elsewhere.
Cusi Cram
Cusi Cram is a first generation New Yorker of Bolivian and Scottish heritage. Her plays have been produced by LAByrinth Theater Company, Primary Stages, The Denver Center, South Coast Repertory, The Williamstown Theater Festival, The Atlantic Theater Company, Cornerstone, Rattlestick, and on stages large and petite all over the country. She’s also written on numerous television programs for both kids and adults and was nominated for three Emmy Awards for her work on the PBS animated program, Arthur. Cusi is associate chair of the Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU, where she teaches playwriting, screenwriting, and classes she delightedly invents.
Nathan Alan Davis
Nathan Alan Davis is a playwright based in New York and Boston. His writing for the stage includes The Refuge Plays (Roundabout/NYTW), Nat Turner in Jerusalem (NYTW), The High Ground (Arena Stage), Eternal Life Part 1 (Wilma Theatre), Origin Story (Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park), The Wind and the Breeze (Cygnet Theatre), and Dontrell Who Kissed the Sea (NNPN Rolling World Premiere). For his body of work, he has received the Windham-Campbell Prize (2021), a Steinberg Award (2020), and a Whiting Award (2018). He is the Director of the MFA Playwriting Program at Boston University.
Liliana Padilla
Liliana Padilla makes plays about sex, intersectional communities, and what it means to heal in a violent world. Their play, How to Defend Yourself won the 2019 Yale Drama Prize and is a 2018-19 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Finalist. It was produced in the 2019 Humana Festival and will be at Victory Gardens in 2020. Liliana’s work has been developed with OSF, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Victory Gardens, INTAR, Hedgebrook, Seattle Rep, the Playwrights' Center and San Diego REP. MFA, UC San Diego, BFA, NYU Tisch. Liliana is currently commissioned to make new plays with NNPN, Colt Coeur, and South Coast Rep. They are also a director, actor and community builder who looks at theatre as a laboratory for how we might be together.
