First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

First Draft - Charlotte Wood (Returns) Mar 03, 2025

Charlotte Wood is the author of seven novels and three books of non-fiction. Her novel Stone Yard Devotional was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Her previous books include The Luminous Solution, a book of essays on the creative process; the international bestseller, The Weekend; and The Natural Way of Things which won a number of prizes including The Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Her features and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Saturday Paper among other publications.

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First Draft - Paul Theroux Feb 24, 2025

Paul Theroux is the author of many highly acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Great Railway Bazaar, The Mosquito Coast, Riding the Iron Rooster, and Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories. In 2015, Paul Theroux was awarded a Royal Medal from the Royal Geographical Society for “the encouragement of geographical discovery through travel writing.” His new short story collection is The Vanishing Point.

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First Draft - Lidia Yuknavitch (Returns Again) Feb 17, 2025

Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels Thrust, 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, a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence, and the short story collection Verge. 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. Her new nonfiction book is Reading the Waves.

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First Draft - Sarah Chihaya Feb 10, 2025

Sarah Chihaya is a book critic, essayist, and editor. Her work has appeared in The New

Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York magazine, The

Atlantic, and The Yale Review, among other places, and she is the co-author of The

Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. She has taught at Princeton

University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. She is currently a contributing editor

at Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn. Her new book is Bibliophobia.

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First Draft - Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer Feb 03, 2025

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has been writing and sharing a poem a day since

2006—a practice that especially nourished her after the death of her teenage son in

2021. Her daily poems can be found on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils, or a curated

version (with optional prompts) on her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, available with

the Ritual app. Her poetry collection Hush won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a

finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Her most recent collections are All the Honey

and The Unfolding. In January 2024, she became the first poet laureate for Evermore,

helping others through this platform to explore grief, bereavement, wonder, and love

through the voice of poetry. She is the co-hosts of a podcast on creative process called

Emerging Form.

This episode was recorded live at TACAW in Basalt, Colorado.

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First Draft - Alan Shapiro Jan 27, 2025

Alan Shapiro was born in Boston, Massachusetts and graduated from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Shapiro has published fourteen poetry collections, including A Dress Rehearsal for the Truth; By and By; Life Pig; Reel to Reel; Night of the Republic, a finalist for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize and the National Book Award; and Old War, winner of the Ambassador Book Award.

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First Draft - David Wrobelwski Jan 20, 2025

David Wroblewski is the author, most recently, of the novel Familiaris, his followup to the internationally bestselling The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle, an Oprah Book Club pick, Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Colorado Book Award, Indie Choice Best Author Discovery award, and Midwest Bookseller Association's Choice award, in addition to being selected as one of the best books of the year by numerous magazines and newspapers.

This was recorded live at TACAW in Basalt, Colorado.

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Paolo Bacigalupi Jan 13, 2025

Paolo Bacigalupi is an internationally bestselling author of speculative fiction. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, John W. Campbell and Locus Awards, as well as being a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Paolo’s work often focuses on questions of sustainability and the environment, most notably the impacts of climate change. He has written novels for adults, young adults, and children, and his new book is Navola.

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First Draft - Claire Messud and Amitava Kumar on Literary Friendship Jan 06, 2025

This episode on literary friendship with Claire Messud and Amitava Kumar was recorded live at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado at the June 2024 Lit Fest. Learn more about Lighthouse.

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.

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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First Draft - Boyce Upholt Dec 30, 2024

Boyce Upholt is a journalist and essayist whose writing has appeared in the Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He is the winner of a James Beard Award for investigative journalism, and he lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. His book is called The Great River: The Making & Unmaking of the Mississippi.

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Best of 2024 - Kevin Barry Dec 27, 2024

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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First Draft - Amina Gautier (Returns) Dec 23, 2024

Amina Gautier is the author of four short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will

Be Happy, The Loss of All Lost Things, and The Best that You Can Do. Gautier is the recipient of the Blackwell Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, the International Latino Book Award, the Flannery O’Connor Award, and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Fiction.

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Best of 2024 - Kiley Reid Dec 20, 2024

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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First Draft - Simon Rich Dec 16, 2024

Simon Rich has written for “Saturday Night Live,” Pixar and “The Simpsons.” He is the creator and showrunner of “Man Seeking Woman” (FXX) and “Miracle Workers” which he based on his books. His other collections include Spoiled Brats and Ant Farm. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. His new story collection is Glory Days.

We talked about Ray Bradbury, the similarities between humor and science fiction, characters who are trying to reinvent themselves, humanizing characters who seem like they have no good qualities, the underdogs, writing for TV and sketch comedy versus fiction books, and family dynamics.

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Best of 2024 - Julia Alvarez Dec 13, 2024

This is a selection for the Best of 2024 of First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing.

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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First Draft - Anna Noyes (Returns) Dec 09, 2024

Anna Noyes's debut novel is The Blue Maiden and was a New York Times Editors' Choice, with starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Forward. Her short story collection, Goodnight, Beautiful Women, was a finalist for the Story Prize and the New England Book Award, as well as a New York Times Editors' Choice. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She lives in New York, on Fishers Island.

We talked about witches, familial relationships, giving up on the novel you think you are writing and writing the one you are meant to create, the publishing industry, historical fiction, living on an island, and Shirley Jackson.

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First Draft - Elizabeth Rosner Dec 02, 2024

Elizabeth Rosner is a bestselling novelist, poet, and essayist. Her works include Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and the novel Electric City, named a best book by NPR. Rosner's essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Elle, and numerous anthologies. She lives in Berkeley, California. Her new book is Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening.

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First Draft - Maggie Smith Nov 25, 2024

Maggie Smith is the author of the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, as well as Good Bones, named one of the Best Five Poetry Books of 2017 by the Washington Post and winner of the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry; The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, winner of the 2012 Dorset Prize and the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry; and Lamp of the Body, winner of the 2003 Benjamin Saltman Award. Her new memoir is You Could Make This Place Beautiful.

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First Draft - Edward Hirsch Nov 18, 2024

Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. Edward Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude, won the National Book Critics Award. Since then, he has published eight additional poetry collections and five prose books on poetry, including A Poet’s Glossary and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. He is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

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First Draft: Megan Pinto Nov 11, 2024

Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith, her debut collection. Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Lit Hub and elsewhere. She has won the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and Storyknife. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.

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First Draft - Tracy O'Neill Nov 04, 2024

Tracy O'Neill is the author of the memoir Woman of Interest. Her novels include The Hopeful, one of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2015; and Quotients, a New York Times New & Noteworthy Book, TOR Editor's Choice, & Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. In 2012, she was awarded the Center for Fiction's Emerging Writers Fellowship. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York; and an MA, an MPhil, and a PhD from Columbia University. She teaches at Vassar College.

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First Draft - Charles Baxter (Returns Yet Again) Oct 28, 2024

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 appeared in several anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The O. Henry Prize Story Anthology. He has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Baxter lives in Minneapolis. His new novel is Blood Test.

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First Draft - Edwidge Danticat (Returns) Oct 21, 2024

Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Brother, I’m Dying, Create Dangerously, Claire of the Sea Light, The Art of Death, Everything Inside, a Reese’s Book Club selection and National Book Critics Circle Awards winner. She is also the editor of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir, and Haiti Noir 2. She has written seven books for children and young adults. Her new essay collection is We’re Alone. She teaches at Columbia University.

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First Draft - Elizabeth Strout (Returns Again) Oct 14, 2024

Elizabeth Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lucy by the Sea; Oh William!, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Olive, Again; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction 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. Her new novel is Tell Me Everything.

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First Draft - Richard Powers (Returns) Oct 07, 2024

Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including Bewilderment, The Overstory, and Orfeo. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. His new novel is called Playground.

We talked about the ocean, plot and games, the structure of Playground, beguiling endings, water, play, the game Go, science and spirituality, immortality and talking to the dead.

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First Draft - Alan Townsend Sep 30, 2024

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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First Draft: Natalie Goldberg Sep 23, 2024

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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First Draft - Lorrie Moore Sep 16, 2024

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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First Draft - Jessica Shattuck Sep 09, 2024

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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First Draft - Kaliane Bradley Sep 02, 2024

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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First Draft - Carl Phillips Aug 26, 2024

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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First Draft - Jodi Picoult Aug 19, 2024

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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First Draft - Abby Geni Aug 12, 2024

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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First Draft - Jill Ciment (Returns) Aug 05, 2024

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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First Draft - Kevin Barry (Returns) Jul 29, 2024

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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First Draft - Amitava Kumar (Returns) Jul 22, 2024

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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First Draft - Ada Limón (and friends) Jul 15, 2024

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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First Draft - Tracy Chevalier Jul 08, 2024

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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First Draft - Tommy Orange Jul 01, 2024

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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First Draft - Lauren Camp Jun 24, 2024

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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First Draft - Stacey D’Erasmo (Returns) Jun 17, 2024

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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First Draft - Carvell Wallace Jun 10, 2024

Carvell Wallaceis 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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First Draft - Claire Messud (Returns Again) Jun 03, 2024

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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First Draft - Edward Hamlin May 27, 2024

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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First Draft - Adelle Waldman May 20, 2024

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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First Draft - Sunjeev Sahota May 13, 2024

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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First Draft - Steve Almond May 06, 2024

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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First Draft - Anne Lamott Apr 29, 2024

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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First Draft - Marie Mutsuki Mockett (Returns) Apr 22, 2024

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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First Draft - Julia Alvarez Apr 15, 2024

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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First Draft - Lily Brooks-Dalton Apr 08, 2024

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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First Draft - Kiley Reid Apr 01, 2024

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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First Draft - Debra Spark (Returns Again) Mar 26, 2024

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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First Draft - Téa Obreht (Returns) Mar 18, 2024

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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First Draft - DIane Seuss (Returns) Mar 11, 2024

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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First Draft - Sloane Crosley Mar 04, 2024

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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First Draft - Temim Fruchter Feb 26, 2024

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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First Draft - Leslie Jamison (Returns Again) Feb 19, 2024

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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First Draft - Margot Livesey (Returns) Feb 12, 2024

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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First Draft - Kaveh Akbar Feb 05, 2024

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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First Draft - Ilyon Woo Jan 29, 2024

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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First Draft - Jill McCorkle Jan 22, 2024

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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First Draft - Vanessa Chan Jan 15, 2024

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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First Draft - Antoine Wilson Jan 08, 2024

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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First Draft - Buzzy Jackson Jan 01, 2024

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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First Draft - David James Duncan Dec 25, 2023

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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First Draft - Paul Harding (Returns) Dec 18, 2023

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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First Draft: Michael Cunningham (Returns) Dec 11, 2023

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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First Draft - Salar Abdoh Dec 04, 2023

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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First Draft - Alice McDermott (Returns Again) Nov 27, 2023

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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First Draft - Ayana Mathis Nov 20, 2023

Ayana Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York TimesBestseller, 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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First Draft - Edgar Kunz Nov 13, 2023

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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First Draft - Tan Twan Eng Nov 06, 2023

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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First Draft - Richard Deming Oct 30, 2023

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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First Draft - Jenn Shapland Oct 23, 2023

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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First Draft - Ben Fountain (Returns) Oct 16, 2023

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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First Draft - Daniel Magariel Oct 09, 2023

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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First Draft - Etaf Rum Oct 02, 2023

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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First Draft - Edan Lepucki (Returns) Sep 25, 2023

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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First Draft - James McBride Sep 18, 2023

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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First Draft - Rachel Eliza Griffiths Sep 11, 2023

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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First Draft - David van den Berg Sep 04, 2023

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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First Draft - Roger Reeves Aug 28, 2023

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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First Draft - Jenny Qi Aug 21, 2023

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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First Draft - Jennifer Grotz Aug 14, 2023

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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First Draft - Luis Alberto Urrea Aug 07, 2023

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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First Draft - Hernan Diaz Jul 31, 2023

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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First Draft - Alice Elliott Dark Jul 24, 2023

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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First Draft - Stephen Buoro Jul 17, 2023

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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First Draft - Elizabeth Graver Jul 10, 2023

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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First Draft - Adrienne Brodeur (Returns) Jul 03, 2023

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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First Draft - Michelle Brafman (Returns) Jun 26, 2023

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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First Draft - TC Boyle Jun 19, 2023

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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First Draft - T.J. Newman Jun 12, 2023

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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First Draft - Sebastian Barry Jun 05, 2023

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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First Draft - Mona Simpson May 29, 2023

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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First Draft - Curtis Sittenfeld (Returns) May 22, 2023

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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First Draft - Abraham Verghese May 15, 2023

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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First Draft - Mai Nardone May 08, 2023

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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First Draft - Ann Lauterbach May 01, 2023

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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First Draft - Andrew Porter Apr 24, 2023

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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First Draft - Cathleen Schine Apr 17, 2023

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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First Draft - Clint Smith Apr 03, 2023

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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First Draft - Robert Lopez Mar 27, 2023

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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First Draft - Rebecca Makkai (Returns) Mar 20, 2023

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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First Draft - Michelle Dowd Mar 13, 2023

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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First Draft - Jai Chakrabarti Mar 06, 2023

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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First Draft - Susan Griffin Feb 27, 2023

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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First Draft - Matthew Salesses Feb 20, 2023

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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First Draft - Kathryn Ma Feb 13, 2023

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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First Draft - Katherine Standefer Feb 06, 2023

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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First Draft - Peter Turchi Jan 30, 2023

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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First Draft - Blair Braverman Jan 23, 2023

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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FIrst Draft - Stephanie Feldman Jan 16, 2023

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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First Draft - Jack Driscoll (Returns) Jan 09, 2023

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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First Draft - Chris Belcher Jan 02, 2023

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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First Draft - Peter Orner (Returns) Dec 26, 2022

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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First Draft - Namwali Serpell Dec 19, 2022

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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First Draft - Elizabeth Strout (Returns) Dec 12, 2022

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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First Draft - Morowa Yejidé Dec 05, 2022

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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First Draft - Elizabeth McCracken (Returns Again!) Nov 28, 2022

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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First Draft - Omer Friedlander Nov 21, 2022

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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First Draft - Ross Gay Nov 14, 2022

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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First Draft - Tracy K. Smith Nov 07, 2022

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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First Draft - Stacey D'Erasmo Oct 31, 2022

Stacey D’Erasmois 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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First Draft - George Saunders (Returns Again) Oct 24, 2022

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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First Draft - Andrea Barrett Oct 17, 2022

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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First Draft - Kevin McIlvoy (In Memory) Oct 10, 2022

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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First Draft - Katie Runde Oct 03, 2022

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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First Draft - Jonathan Escoffery Sep 26, 2022

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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First Draft - Jill Bialosky Sep 19, 2022

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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First Draft - Carlos Allende Sep 12, 2022

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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First Draft - Casey Parks Sep 05, 2022

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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First Draft - Eric Nguyen Aug 29, 2022

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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First Draft - Jamil Jan Kochai Aug 22, 2022

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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First Draft - Chinelo Okparanta Aug 15, 2022

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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First Draft - James Longenbach (New Edit) Aug 08, 2022

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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First Draft - Charles Baxter (Returns!) Aug 01, 2022

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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First Draft - Lidia Yuknavitch (Returns) Jul 25, 2022

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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First Draft - Ben Winters Jul 18, 2022

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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First Draft - Zeina Hashem Beck Jul 11, 2022

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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First Draft - Tsering Yangzom Lama Jul 04, 2022

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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First Draft - Nathanial White Jun 27, 2022

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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First Draft - Lawrence Jackson Jun 20, 2022

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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First Draft - Soon Wiley Jun 13, 2022

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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First Draft - NoViolet Bulawayo Jun 06, 2022

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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First Draft - Akwaeke Emezi May 30, 2022

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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First Draft - Jeffrey Yang May 23, 2022

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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First Draft - Ada Limón (returns) May 16, 2022

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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First Draft - Jacinda Townsend May 09, 2022

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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First Draft - Keith O'Brien May 02, 2022

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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First Draft - Aimee Bender Apr 25, 2022

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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First Draft - Rebecca Kauffman Apr 18, 2022

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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First Draft - Sarah Manguso (Returns!) Apr 11, 2022

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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First Draft - Douglas Stuart Apr 04, 2022

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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First Draft - Jacqueline Mitchard Mar 28, 2022

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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First Draft - Evie Wyld Mar 21, 2022

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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First Draft - Lan Samantha Chang Mar 14, 2022

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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First Draft - Thrity Umrigar Mar 07, 2022

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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First Draft - Susan Orlean (Returns) Feb 28, 2022

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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First Draft - Charlotte Wood Feb 21, 2022

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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First Draft - Anahid Nersessian Feb 14, 2022

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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First Draft - Steven Schwartz (Returns) Feb 07, 2022

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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First Draft - Peter Ho Davies (Returns) Jan 31, 2022

Peter Ho Davies is the author of three novels includingA 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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First Draft - Tom Bissell Jan 24, 2022

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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First Draft - Michael Bazzett Jan 17, 2022

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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First Draft - Jean Hanff Korelitz Jan 10, 2022

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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First Draft - Alice McDermott (Returns Again!) Jan 03, 2022

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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First Draft - Best of 2021 Ben Okri Dec 27, 2021

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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First Draft - Best of 2021 George Saunders Dec 20, 2021

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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First Draft - Best of 2021 Michael Kleber-Diggs Dec 13, 2021

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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First Draft - Best of 2021 Diane Seuss Dec 06, 2021

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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First Draft - EJ Levy Nov 29, 2021

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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First Draft - Nawaaz Ahmed Nov 22, 2021

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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First Draft - Kalani Pickhart Nov 15, 2021

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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First Draft - Rebecca Solnit Nov 08, 2021

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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First Draft - Keisha N. Blain Nov 01, 2021

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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First Draft - Lauren Groff (Returns) Oct 25, 2021

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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First Draft - Richard Powers Oct 18, 2021

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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First Draft - Annie Murphy Paul Oct 11, 2021

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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First Draft - Peter Orner (Returns!) Oct 04, 2021

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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First Draft - Grant Faulkner Sep 27, 2021

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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First Draft - Kevin McIlvoy (Returns Yet Again!) Sep 20, 2021

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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First Draft - Robert Olen Butler Sep 13, 2021

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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First Draft - Jennifer Sperry Steinorth Sep 06, 2021

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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First Draft - Christine Mangan Aug 30, 2021

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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First Draft - Joshua Henkin Aug 16, 2021

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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First Draft - Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Aug 09, 2021

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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First Draft - S. Kirk Walsh Aug 02, 2021

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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First Draft - Tobey Pearl Jul 26, 2021

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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First Draft - Michael Kleber-Diggs Jul 19, 2021

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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First Draft - Steven Pressfield Jul 12, 2021

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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First Draft - Marisa Silver Jul 05, 2021

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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First Draft - Justin Jannise Jun 28, 2021

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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First Draft - Diane Seuss Jun 21, 2021

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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First Draft - Gabriela Garcia Jun 14, 2021

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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First Draft - Ethan Rutherford (Returns) Jun 07, 2021

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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First Draft - Imbolo Mbue May 31, 2021

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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First Draft - Anna North May 24, 2021

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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First Draft - Layla AlAmmar May 17, 2021

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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First Draft - Elizabeth McCracken (Returns!) May 10, 2021

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 (Returns!) May 03, 2021

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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First Draft - Nalini Singh Apr 26, 2021

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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First Draft - Chang-rae Lee Apr 19, 2021

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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First Draft - Lidia Yuknavitch Apr 12, 2021

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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First Draft - Carol Edgarian Apr 05, 2021

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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First Draft - Dantiel Moniz Mar 29, 2021

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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First Draft - Priyanka Champaneri Mar 22, 2021

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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First Draft - Alan Lightman (Returns) Mar 15, 2021

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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First Draft - George Saunders (Returns) Mar 08, 2021

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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First Draft - Natalie West Mar 01, 2021

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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First Draft - Eley Williams Feb 22, 2021

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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First Draft - Te-Ping Chen Feb 15, 2021

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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First Draft - Ben Okri Feb 08, 2021

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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First Draft - Mateo Askaripour Feb 01, 2021

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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First Draft - Peter Ho Davies Jan 25, 2021

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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First Draft - Mark Wunderlich Jan 18, 2021

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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First Draft - Jamie Harrison Jan 11, 2021

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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First Draft - Emma Glass Jan 04, 2021

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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First Draft - Kwame Alexander Dec 28, 2020

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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First Draft - Danielle Evans Dec 21, 2020

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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First Draft - Cynan Jones Dec 14, 2020

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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First Draft - Jonathan Lethem Dec 07, 2020

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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First Draft - Charles Baxter (Returns!) Nov 30, 2020

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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First Draft - Yishai Sarid Nov 23, 2020

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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First Draft - Susan Minot Nov 16, 2020

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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First Draft - Bryan Washington Nov 09, 2020

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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First Draft - Ken Bonert Nov 02, 2020

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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First Draft - Bill Clegg (Returns!) Oct 26, 2020

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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First Draft - Claire Messud Oct 19, 2020

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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First Draft - Debra Spark Oct 12, 2020

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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First Draft - Rebecca Watson Oct 05, 2020

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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First Draft - David Szalay Sep 28, 2020

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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First Draft - Peter Geye Sep 21, 2020

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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First Draft - Cherie Dimaline Sep 14, 2020

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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First Draft - Margot Livesey Sep 07, 2020

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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First Draft - R.L. Maizes Aug 31, 2020

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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First Draft - Benjamin Nugent Aug 24, 2020

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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First Draft - Ursula Heigi Aug 17, 2020

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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First Draft - Souvankham Thammavongsa Aug 10, 2020

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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First Draft - Michelle Bowdler Aug 03, 2020

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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First Draft - Sejal Shah Jul 27, 2020

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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First Draft - Anne Enright Jul 20, 2020

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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First Draft - TaraShea Nesbit Jul 13, 2020

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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First Draft - Marie Mutsuki Mockett Jul 06, 2020

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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First Draft - Mary South Jun 29, 2020

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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First Draft - Lori Gottlieb Jun 22, 2020

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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First Draft - Vanessa Hua Jun 15, 2020

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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First Draft - Jane Hirshfield Jun 08, 2020

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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First Draft - Sue Monk Kidd Jun 01, 2020

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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First Draft - Emily Nemens May 25, 2020

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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First Draft - Ann Napolitano May 18, 2020

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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First Draft - Anna Solomon May 11, 2020

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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First Draft - Carolyn Forché May 04, 2020

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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First Draft - Ander Monson Apr 27, 2020

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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First Draft - Sahar Mustafah Apr 20, 2020

Sahar Mustafah, writer and editor is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants and she explores her heritage in her fiction. Her books include Code of the West and The Beauty of Your Face. In addition to working as a writer, Mustafah also teaches high school English outside of Chicago.

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First Draft - Julian Jarboe Apr 13, 2020

Julian K. Jarboe is a writer and artist from Massachusetts. They are the recipient of a Writers' Room of Boston Fellowship, a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, an Honorable Mention from the Tiptree Fellowship, and a residency from The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts . They graduated from The Massachusetts College of Art and Design with Academic Honors. Their story collection is called Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel.

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First Draft - Katrin Schumann Apr 06, 2020

Katrin Schumann was born in Germany and grew up in Brooklyn and London. Her writing explores our search for a sense of belonging, and the struggle to define ourselves in the context of our circumstances. Schumann now lives in Boston and Key West, and she is the Program Coordinator of the Key West Literary Seminar and Workshops. She writes fiction and non-fiction. Her novels include This Terrible Beauty and The Forgotten Hours.

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First Draft - Deb Olin Unferth Mar 30, 2020

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the memoir Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection Minor Robberies; and the novel Vacation, winner of the Cabell First Novel Award. Her work appears in Harper’s, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Granta, and elsewhere. She has received three Pushcart Prizes, and a grant from Creative Capital for Innovative Literature. Her newest novel is Barn 8

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First Draft - P. Carl Mar 23, 2020

P. Carl is a nonfiction writer, playwright, dramaturg and a Distinguished Artist in Residence at Emerson College in Boston. He is also a writer and lecturer on theater, gender, inclusive practices, and innovative models for building community and organizations. He is an accomplished theater artist, most recently the dramaturg and producer on a range of diverse projects including Claudia Rankine's new play, The White Card. Carl is the founder of the online journal HowlRound, and is currently advising the Broadway production of Jagged Little Pill. Carl's memoir is called Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition.

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First Draft - Chuck Palahniuk Mar 16, 2020

Chuck Palahnuik is an American novelist and freelance journalist, who describes his work as transgressional fiction. He is the author of the award-winning novel Fight Club, which also was made into a popular film of the same name. Some of his other works include Choke, Lullaby, “Guts”, and Adjustment Day. His new book about writing is called Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different.

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First Draft - Kevin Wilson Mar 09, 2020

Kevin Wilson is the author of two short story collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine, and three novels, The Family Fang, Perfect Little World, and Nothing to See Here. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South.

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First Draft - Jenny Offill Mar 02, 2020

Jenny Offillis an American novelist and editor. Her novel Dept. of Speculation was named one of "The 10 Best Books of 2014" by The New York Times Book Review. She writes fiction, non-fiction, and children's books. Her newest novel is called Weather.

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First Draft - Tishani Doshi Feb 24, 2020

Tishani Doshi has published six books of poetry and fiction. Small Days and Nights, her second novel, has been shortlisted for the TATA Best Fiction Award 2019. She discusses this novel on First Draft as well as topics concerning modern day culture and issues in India.

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First Draft - Julia Phillips Feb 17, 2020

Julia Phillips is the debut author of the nationally bestselling novel Disappearing Earth, which is being published in twenty-one languages and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She discusses the novel and writing it on First Draft.

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First Draft - Jill Ciment Feb 10, 2020

Jill Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada. She 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, and Act of God, novels; and Half a Life, a memoir. She discusses the writing life and the novel The Body in Question in this episode.

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First Draft - Luke Geddes Feb 03, 2020

Luke Geddes is the author of the novel Heart of Junk and the short story collection I am a Magical Teenage Princess. He also makes collage art and lives in Cincinnati. He discusses the novel Heart of Junk and the writing and collecting life.

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First Draft - Ethan Rutherford Jan 27, 2020

Ethan Rutherford is the author of The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, which 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. Rutherford received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College.

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First Draft - Isabel Allende Jan 20, 2020

Isabel Allende is the author of more than 23 works of fiction and non-fiction including The House of Spirits, Eva Luna, Of Love and Shadows, and Ripper. She has sold more than 74 million books, which have been translated into 40 languages. Allende devotes much of her time to human rights causes and after her daughter Paula died, she established a charitable foundation in her honor, which delivers care to girls and women around the world.

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First Draft - Walter Mosley Jan 13, 2020

Walter Mosley is a fiction, non-fiction, and screenplay writer. He has written more than 50 books, including the bestselling mystery series featuring detective Easy Rawlins. His latest book is called Elements of Fiction.

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First Draft - Jeannie Vanasco Jan 06, 2020

Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl and The Glass Eye. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, the New York Times Modern Love, NewYorker.com and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and is an assistant professor of English at Towson University.

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First Draft - Adrienne Brodeur Dec 30, 2019

Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me. Brodeur founded the fiction magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, where she served as editor in chief from 1996-2002. In 2005, she became an editor at Harcourt. She is now the Executive Director of Aspen Words, a literary arts nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute.

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First Draft - Etgar Keret Dec 23, 2019

Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer of fiction, non-fiction, television and film whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Zoetrope, among others, and over 40 short movies have been based on his stories, one of which won the American MTV Prize. His feature film Wristcutters also won several international awards. His short story collection Fly Already won the Sapir Prize for Literature in Israel. Some of his other titles include The Seven Good Years, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, Four Stories, and A Girl on the Fridge. Keret's books have been published in 42 languages in 45 countries.

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First Draft- David Quammen Dec 16, 2019

David Quammen writes fiction and non-fiction with a focus on science and the natural world. He has written more than ten books. His newest book is called The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. He is a contributing writer for National Geographic.

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First Draft - Deborah Levy Dec 09, 2019

Deborah Levy was born in South Africa and moved to England at the age of nine, where she studied contemporary arts at Dartington College of Arts. In 1989, she published her first collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, and a second, Black Vodka, in 2013. Two of her novels, Swimming Home and Hot Milk, were shortlisted for the Booker prize; her latest, The Man Who Saw Everything, was long listed for the Booker prize. She is a playwright, fiction writer, and memoirist. Her new memoir is called The Cost of Living.

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First Draft - Leslie Jamison Dec 02, 2019

Leslie Jamison writes fiction, non-fiction, and memoir. Her works include The Empathy Exams, The Gin Closet, The Recovering, and Make it Scream, Make it Burn. She teaches at Columbia University's MFA program concentrating on non-fiction.

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First Draft - Amitav Ghosh Nov 25, 2019

Amitav Ghosh is the author of nine novels, including Gun Island and the Ibis Trilogy, Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. He is also the author of six books of non-fiction. He was born on Calcutta and lives in Brooklyn and Goa, India.

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First Draft - Nick Flynn Nov 18, 2019

Nick Flynn is the author of twelve books including the memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and most recently the poetry collection, I Will Destroy You.

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First Draft - Kimi Eisele Nov 11, 2019

Kimi Eisele is the author of the debut novel The Lightest Object in the Universe. She is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tucson, Arizona. She also works for the Southwest Folklife Alliance as a writer and editor.

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First Draft - Alexandra Fuller Nov 04, 2019

Alexandra Fuller is the author of novels, memoirs, non-fiction, essays, and journalism. Her latest memoir is Travel Light, Move Fast, which focuses on the life and death of her father, an Englishman who settled in Africa. Fuller was born in England, grew up in Zimbabwe, and now lives in Wyoming.

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First Draft - Terry Tempest Williams Oct 28, 2019

Terry Tempest Williams has written and edited over 20 books, including the essay collection Erosion, Refuge, and The Open Space of Democracy. Her work focuses on the natural world and the intersection between the environment and personal and national politics, spirituality, and family. She teaches at the Harvard Divinity School and lives in rural Utah.

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First Draft - Petina Gappah Oct 21, 2019

Petina Gappah is an award-winning Zimbabwean author. Her novels include Out of Darkness, Shining Light and The Book of Memory. She has also written two short story collections and also writes journalism. She has a law degree and worked as an international trade lawyer. She lives in Harare.

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First Draft - Alix Ohlin Oct 14, 2019

Alix Ohlin is the author of the novels Dual Citizens and Inside, which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. She lives in Vancouver and is the chair of the Creative Writing Program at University of British Columbia.

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First Draft - Nathaniel Popkin Oct 07, 2019

Nathaniel Popkin is the author of three books of non-fiction and the novels, The Year of the Return, Everything is Borrowed, and Lion and Leopard. He also co-edited the anthology Who Will Speak for America?, which he also spoke about with co-editor Stephanie Feldman on First Draft.

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First Draft - Téa Obreht Sep 30, 2019

Téa Obreht is the author of the novels Inland and The Tiger’s Wife. 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, and The Atlantic, among many others. She was born in the former Yugoslavia and now lives and teaches in New York.

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First Draft - Caitlin Horrocks Sep 23, 2019

Caitlin Horrocks is the author of the novel The Vexations and the short story collection This is Not Your City. She is on the advisory board of the Kenyon Review and teaches fiction at Grand Valley State University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Subscribe to First Draft.

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First Draft - Helen Phillips Sep 16, 2019

Helen Phillips, author of The Need, has written five books, including the short story collections Some Possible Solutions and And Yet They Were Happy and the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Her work has been featured on Selected Shorts, at the Brooklyn Museum, and in the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, and Tin House, among others. She is an associate professor at Brooklyn College.

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First Draft - Katie Arnold Sep 09, 2019

Katie Arnold is a contributing editor and former managing editor at Outside Magazine, where she worked on staff for 12 years. She created and launched the popular Raising Rippers column, about bringing up adventurous kids, which appears monthly on Outside Online. Her memoir is called Running Home.

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First Draft - Kevin McIlvoy Sep 02, 2019

Kevin McIlvoy has taught creative writing for over twenty-five years. He was Editor in Chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol at New Mexico State University, and has served on the Board of Directors of two national writing organizations, Council for Literary Magazines & Presses and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. His published works include A Waltz, The Fifth Station, Little Peg, Hyssop, The Complete History of New Mexico, 57 Octaves Below Middle C, and At The Gate of All Wonder.

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First Draft - Dinaw Mengestu Aug 26, 2019

Dinaw Mengestu is the award-winning author All Our Names, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, and How to Read the Air. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s M.F.A. program in fiction and the recipient of a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation and a 20 Under 40 award from The New Yorker.

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First Draft - Peg Alford Pursell Aug 19, 2019

Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes into the Forest and Show her a Flower, a Bird, A Shadow. Peg lives in Northern California and is the founder and director of WTAW Press and of Why There Are Words, a national literary reading series and program of WTAW Press. She is a member of The Writers Grotto. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

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First Draft - Rachel Kushner Aug 12, 2019

Rachel Kushner is the author of The Flamethrowers, Telex from Cuba, and The Mars Room. A collection of her early work, The Strange Case of Rachel K, was published by New Directions in 2015. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Paris Review.

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First Draft - Karen Russell Aug 05, 2019

Karen Russell won the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and one of The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2011. Her short story collections include Vampires in the Lemon Grove, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and Orange World.

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First Draft - Jennifer DuBois two Jul 29, 2019

Jennifer DuBois is the author of A Partial History of Lost Causes, Cartwheel, and The Spectators. The National Book Foundation named her one of its 5 Under 35 authors. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Lapham’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, Salon, Cosmopolitan, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. A native of western Massachusetts, duBois teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.

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First Draft - Emily Bernard Jul 22, 2019

Emily Bernard was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She holds a B. A. and Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Boston Globe Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, Oxtford American, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and theatlantic.com. Her essay collection is called Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine.

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First Draft - Christopher Castellani two Jul 15, 2019

Christopher Castellani is the son of Italian immigrants and a native of Wilmington, Delaware. He currently lives in Boston, where he is the artistic director of Grub Street, the country’s largest and leading independent creative writing center. He is the author of the novels: A Kiss from Maddalena, The Saint of Lost Things, All This Talk of Love, and Leading Men. He is also the author of The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, a collection of essays on point of view in fiction.

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First Draft - Laila Lalami Jul 08, 2019

Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Secret Son, The Moor’s Account, and The Other Americans.

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First Draft: George Hodgman Jul 01, 2019

George Hodgman is the author of Bettyville.

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First Draft - Tina Chang Jun 24, 2019

Tina Chang was raised in New York City. She is the first female to be named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn and is the author of the collections of poetry Hybrida, Of Gods & Strangers, and Half-Lit Houses. She is also the co-editor of the W.W. Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond.

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First Draft - Devi Laskar Jun 17, 2019

Devi Laskar is the author of two poetry collections: Gas & Food, No Lodging and Anastasia Maps and the novel: The Atlas of Reds and Blues. She lives in Northern California.

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First Draft - Rachel Howard Jun 10, 2019

Rachel Howard is a writer of fiction, personal essays, memoir, and dance criticism. Her debut novel is called The Risk of Us.

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First Draft: Miriam Toews Jun 03, 2019

Miriam Toews is the author of Women Talking, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, All My Puny Sorrows, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.

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First Draft - Meg Wolitzer May 27, 2019

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times–bestselling author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking. She is also the author of the young adult novel Belzhar. Wolitzer lives in New York City.

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First Draft - Joanne Ramos May 20, 2019

Joanne Ramos was born in the Philippines and moved to Wisconsin when she was six. She graduated with a BA from Princeton University. After working in investment banking and private-equity investing for several years, she became a staff writer at The Economist. The Farm is her first novel.

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First Draft - Nell Freudenberger May 13, 2019

Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds, and The Dissident, and the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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First Draft - Molly Dektar May 06, 2019

Molly Dektar is the author of The Ash Family.

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First Draft - CJ Hauser Apr 29, 2019

CJ Hauser teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University. She is the author of the novel The From-Aways and her fiction has appeared in Tin House, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, Esquire, Third Coast, and The Kenyon Review.

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First Draft - Erika Meitner Apr 22, 2019

Erika Meitner was born and raised in Queens and Long Island, New York. She is the author of five books of poems: Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, Ideal Cities, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, Copia, and Holy Moly Carry Me. In addition to teaching creative writing at UVA, UW-Madison, and UC-Santa Cruz, she has worked as a dating columnist, an office temp, a Hebrew school instructor, a computer programmer, a systems consultant, a lifeguard, a documentary film production assistant, and a middle school teacher in the New York City public school system.

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First Draft - Cara Robertson Apr 15, 2019

Cara Robertson is the author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden. She is an attorney whose writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, the Raleigh News and Observer, and the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. She was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford Law School. A former Supreme Court law clerk, she served as a legal adviser to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford Law School

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First Draft - David Means Apr 08, 2019

David Means is the author of several short story collections including Instructions for a Funeral, The Secret Goldfish, and The Spot and the novel, Hystopia.

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First Draft - Susan Orlean Apr 01, 2019

Susan Orlean is a staff writer at The New Yorker and her books include Rin Tin Tin, The Orchid Thief, and The Library Book, among others.

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First Draft - Jessica Soffer Mar 25, 2019

Jessica Soffer's work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, Redbook, Saveur, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her bestselling novel, Tomorrow There Will be Apricots, was published in twelve countries.

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First Draft - Sophie Mackintosh Mar 18, 2019

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of The Water Cure, which is on teh long list for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

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First Draft - Eva Hagberg Fisher Mar 11, 2019

Eva Hagberg Fisher is the author of How to be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship.

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First Draft - Pam Houston Mar 04, 2019

Pam Houston is the author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country.

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First Draft - Katrin Schumann Feb 25, 2019

Katrin Schumann is the author of the novel The Forgotten Hours. She is also the author of the non-fiction titles: The Secret Power of Middle Children and Mothers Need Time Outs, Too.

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First Draft - Madhuri Vijay Feb 11, 2019

Madhuri Vijay is the author of the novel The Far Field.

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First Draft - Esmé Weijun Wang Feb 04, 2019

Esmé Weijun Wang is the author of The Border of Paradise and The Collected Schizophrenias.

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First Draft - Merritt Tierce Jan 28, 2019

Merritt Tierce is the author of the novel Love Me Back. Merritt currently writes for the Netflix show Orange is the New Black. She lives in Los Angeles.

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First Draft - Juliet Lapidos Jan 21, 2019

Juliet Lapidos is the author of the novel Talent and is a senior editor at The Atlantic.

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First Draft - Christy Stillwell Jan 14, 2019

Christy Stillwell earned a BA in English at the University of Georgia before moving west, first to Wyoming, then Montana. She holds an MA in Literature from the University of Wyoming, and an MFA from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. Her books include a chapbook of poetry called Amnesia and the novel, The Wolf Tone.

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First Draft - Tommy Caldwell Jan 07, 2019

Tommy Caldwell is the author of The Push and is an accomplished rock climber. He made the first ascents of some of the United States' hardest sport routes including Kryptonite (5.14c/d) and Flex Luthor (5.15a) at the Fortress of Solitude, Colorado. In January 2015, Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson completed the first-ever free climb of the Dawn Wall of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

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First Draft - Stuart Dybek Dec 31, 2018

Stuart Dybek is the author of three books of fiction: I Sailed With Magellan, The Coast of Chicago, and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Both I Sailed With Magellan and The Coast of Chicago were New York Times Notable Books, and The Coast of Chicago was a One Book One Chicago selection. Dybek has also published two collections of poetry: Streets in Their Own Ink and Brass Knuckles.

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First Draft - Yiyun Li Dec 24, 2018

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. Her novel, The Vagrants, won the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for Dublin IMPAC Award. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, her second collection, was a finalist of Story Prize and shortlisted for Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.

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First Draft - Tom Barbash Dec 17, 2018

Tom Barbash is the author of the novels The Dakota Winters and The Last Good Chance, a collection of short stories Stay Up With Me, and the bestselling nonfiction work On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick & 9/11: A Story of Loss & Renewal.

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First Draft - Leif Enger Dec 10, 2018

Leif Enger was raised in Osakis, Minnesota, and worked as a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio for nearly twenty years. His newest novel is called Virgil Wander.

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First Draft - RO Kwon Dec 03, 2018

R.O. Kwon’s first novel is called The Incendiaries. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Noon, Time, Electric Literature, Playboy, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere.

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First Draft - Cai Emmons Nov 26, 2018

Cai Emmons is the author of the novels Weather Woman, His Mother's Son, and The Stylist. Emmons has taught at various colleges and universities, including the University of Southern California. Since 2002 she has been teaching fiction and screenwriting at the University of Oregon.

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First Draft - Sarah Stone Nov 19, 2018

Sarah Stone’s new novel, Hungry Ghost Theater, was published by WTAW Press in October 2018. Her first novel is called The True Sources of the Nile. She teaches creative writing for the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Stanford Continuing Studies.

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First Draft - Karen Bender Nov 12, 2018

Karen Bender is the author of short story collections The New Order and Refund, the novels A Town of Empty Rooms and Like Normal People and is co-editor of the anthology Choice.

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First Draft - Christina Dalcher Nov 05, 2018

Christina Dalcher is the author of VOX.

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First Draft - Daniel Mason Oct 29, 2018

Daniel Mason is a physician and author of The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, and The Winter Soldier. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, and his research and teaching interests include the subjective experience of mental illness and the influence of literature, history, and culture on the practice of medicine.

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First Draft - Beth Macy Oct 22, 2018

Beth Macy is a journalist and author. Her latest book, Dopesick, focuses on one of America's epicenters for the opioid crisis. The book follows distressed communities in Central Appalachia to wealthy suburbs. Her other books include Factory Man and Truevine.

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First Draft - Matthew Thomas Oct 15, 2018

Matthew Thomas's New York Times-bestselling novel We Are Not Ourselves was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Folio Prize; named a Notable Book of the year by the New York Times; named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple, and others; and named one of Janet Maslin’s ten favorite books of the year in the New York Times.

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First Draft - Ben Marcus Oct 08, 2018

Ben Marcus is the author of five books of fiction: The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet, Leaving the Sea, and Notes from the Fog. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Bomb, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and New American Stories. Since 2000 he has taught on the faculty at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

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First Draft - Bernice McFadden Oct 01, 2018

Bernice McFadden is the author of nine critically acclaimed novels including Sugar, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, The Warmest December, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), Glorious, and The Book of Harlan (winner of a 2017 American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction). She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of three awards from the BCALA. Praise Song for the Butterflies is her latest novel.

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First Draft - Amitava Kumar Sep 24, 2018

Amitava Kumar writes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. His latest novel is called Immigrant, Montana. 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 two novels. He lives in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College.

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First Draft - Hannah Tinti Sep 17, 2018

Hannah Tinti is the author of the bestselling novel The Good Thief, which won The Center for Fiction’s first novel prize, and the story collection Animal Crackers, a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

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First Draft - Elissa Schappel Sep 10, 2018

Elissa Schappell is an American novelist, short-story writer, editor and essayist. Her latest story collection is called Blueprints for Building Better Girls.

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First Draft - Gary Shteyngart Sep 03, 2018

Gary Shteyngart is the author of the memoir Little Failure and the novels Super Sad True Love Story, Absurdistan, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, and Lake Success. His work has been translated into twenty-six languages. Shteyngart lives in New York City and upstate New York.

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First Draft - Francine Prose Aug 27, 2018

Francine Prose is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. Her latest book is an essay collection called What to Read and Why.

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First Draft: Kirstin Valdez Quade Aug 20, 2018

Kirstin Valdez Quade is an American writer. Her debut short story collection, Night at the Fiestas, received critical praise and won awards. A review in the New York Times labeled her stories "legitimate masterpieces" and called the book a "haunting and beautiful debut story collection."

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First Draft - Joe Mungo Reed Aug 13, 2018

Joe Mungo Reed was born in London and raised in Gloucestershire, England. He has a master’s in philosophy and politics at the University of Edinburgh and an MFA in creative writing at Syracuse University, where he won the Joyce Carol Oates Award in Fiction. He is the author of the novel, We Begin Our Ascent, and his short stories have appeared in VQR and Gigantic and anthologized in Best of Gigantic.

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First Draft - Stephanie Feldman and Nathaniel Popkin Aug 06, 2018

Stephanie Feldman and Nathaniel Popkin edited Who Will Speak for America?, which includes fiction, essays, photos, cartoons, and poetry from 43 contributing authors. The anthology was compiled just before the 2016 Presidential inaugeration of Donald Trump.

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First Draft - Hannah Pittard Jul 30, 2018

Hannah Pittard is the author of four novels. Her most recent, Visible Empire,was an Amazon Editors' Pick for Summer Fiction, an IndieNext List Pick, a New York Times "New and Noteworthy" Selection, an O Magazine Book of Summer, and one of Southern Living's Best New Books of Summer. Her previous novels include Listen to me, The Fates will Find Their Way and Reunion. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Kentucky.

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First Draft - Chuck Palahniuk Jul 23, 2018

Chuck Palahniuk is the author of novels, novellas, graphic novels, journalism, essays, and even a coloring book. He is best known for his 1996 novel Fight Club. His new novel is called Adjustment Day.

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First Draft - Lydia Millet Jul 16, 2018

Lydia Millet is an American novelist and conservationist. She has written twelve works of fiction and four books for young adults. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, and she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as well as a Guggenheim fellow, among other honors. Her latest work is a short story collection called Fight No More.

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First Draft - James Wood Jul 09, 2018

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. His critical essays are collected in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief; The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays. He is also the author of a novels Upstate and The Book Against God and a study of technique in the novel called, How Fiction Works.

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First Draft - AM Homes Jul 02, 2018

A.M. Homes most recent book is Days of Awe, a collection of short stories. She is the author of the novels, This Book Will Save Your Life, which won the 2013 Orange/Women’s Prize for Fiction, Music For Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the short-story collections, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, the best selling memoir, The Mistress's Daughter along with a travel memoir, Los Angeles: People, Places and The Castle on the Hill, and the artist's book Appendix A:

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First Draft - Howard Norman Jun 25, 2018

Howard Norman is the author of I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place.

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First Draft - J. Courtney Sullivan Jun 18, 2018

J. Courtney Sullivan is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, and Saints For All Occasions.

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First Draft - David Grann Jun 11, 2018

David Grann is a NY Times bestselling author. His books include The Lost City of Z, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, and Killers of the Flower Moon.

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First Draft - Tom Rachman Jun 04, 2018

Tom Rachman is the author of four works of fiction: his bestselling debut, The Imperfectionists , which was translated into 25 languages; the critically acclaimed follow-up, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers ; a satirical audiobook-in-stories Basket of Deplorables ; and his most recent novel set in the art world, The Italian Teacher.

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First Draft - Donna Masini May 28, 2018

Donna Masini's latest collection of poems, 4:30 Movie, an elegy for her sister, explores personal loss, global violence, the ways in which movies shape our imaginations.

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First Draft - Chris Offutt May 21, 2018

Chris Offutt is the author of two short story collections, three memoirs, and two novels including his most recent, Country Dark.

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First Draft - Tim Kreider May 14, 2018

Tim Kreider is an essayist and cartoonist. His latest book is called I Wrote This Because I Love You.

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First Draft - Kevin Powers May 07, 2018

Kevin Powers is the author of A Shout in the Ruins, The Yellow Birds and the poetry collection, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting. He was born and raised in Richmond, VA. In 2004 and 2005 he served with the U.S. Army in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq. He studied English at Virginia Commonwealth University after his honorable discharge and received an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin in 2012.

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First Draft - Curtis Sittenfeld Apr 30, 2018

Curtis Sittenfeld is the bestselling author of five novels: Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland,and Eligible. Her first story collection is called You Think It, I’ll Say It.

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First Draft - Sarah Henstra Apr 23, 2018

Sarah Henstra is the author of The Red Word and Mad Miss Mimic. She is is a professor of English literature at Ryerson University in Toronto.

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First Draft - Robert Kurson Apr 16, 2018

Robert Kurson is an American author, best known for his 2004 bestselling book, Shadow Divers, the true story of two Americans who discovered a World War II German U-boat sunk 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey. His new book, Rocket Men, tells the story of Apollo 8, the first manned NASA mission to the moon in 1968.

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First Draft - Anna Quindlen Apr 09, 2018

Anna Quindlen is a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists. She is the author of nine novels: Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue, Blessings, Rise and Shine, Every Last One, Still Life with Bread Crumbs, Miller’s Valley, and Alternate Side. Her memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, published in 2012, was a #1 New York Times bestseller. Her book A Short Guide to a Happy Life has sold more than a million copies. While a columnist at The New York Times she won the Pulitzer Prize and published two collections, Living Out Loud and Thinking Out Loud. Her Newsweek columns were collected in Loud and Clear.

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First Draft - Yang Huang Apr 02, 2018

Yang Huang grew up in Jiangsu, China and came to the U.S. to study computer science. While working as an engineer, she studied literature and pursued writing, her passion since childhood. Her collection of linked family stories My Old Faithful won the Juniper Prize for Fiction. Her debut novel Living Treasures won the Nautilus Book Award silver medal in fiction.

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First Draft - Hermione Hoby Mar 26, 2018

Hermione grew up in south London and graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2007 with a double first in English Literature. After working on the Observer’s New Review section for a few years she moved to New York and has lived in Brooklyn since 2010. She writes about culture, especially books, film, music and gender, for the Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the TLS and others. Her debut novel is called Neon in Daylight.

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First Draft - Zachary Lazar Mar 19, 2018

Zachary Lazar is the author of five books, including Sway, Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder, I Pity the Poor Immigrant, and Vengeance. I Pity the Poor Immigrant was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014. Sway was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and an Editor’s Choice at the New York Times Book Review, as well as a best book of 2008 in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Publishers Weekly, and several other publications.

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First Draft - Tara Westover Mar 12, 2018

Tara Westover is an American author living in the UK. Born in Idaho to a father opposed to public education, she never attended school. She spent her days working in her father's junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom.

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First Draft - Jenny Offill Mar 05, 2018

Jenny Offill is the author of Dept. of Speculation.

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First Draft - Steven Schwartz Feb 26, 2018

Steven Schwartz is the author of Little Raw Souls, Therapy, and Madagascar: New and Selected Stories.

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First Draft - Karen Thompson Walker Feb 19, 2018

Karen Thompson Walker was born and raised in San Diego, California, where The Age of Miracles is set. She studied English and creative writing at UCLA, where she wrote for the UCLA Daily Bruin. After college, she worked as a newspaper reporter in the San Diego area before moving to New York City to attend the Columbia University MFA program.

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First Draft - Jamie Quatro Feb 12, 2018

Jamie Quatro’s debut collection, I Want To Show You More, was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, Indie Next pick, The Oprah Magazine summer reading pick, and New York Times Editors’ Choice.

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First Draft - Elizabeth Strout Feb 05, 2018

Elizabeth Strout was born in Portland, Maine, and grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. Her novels include Amy and Isabelle, Olive Kitteridge, Abide With Me, and The Burgess Boys. This interview was recorded in 2013.

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First Draft - Boris Fishman Jan 29, 2018

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1988 at nine. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Travel & Leisure, New York Magazine, and other publications His novels include A Replacement Life and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo.

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First Draft - Elliot Ackerman Jan 22, 2018

Elliot Ackerman served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and is the recipient of the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. A former White House Fellow, his essays and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Ecotone, among others. His novels include Green on Blue and Dark at the Crossing.

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First Draft - Kate Manne Jan 15, 2018

Kate Manne is an assistant professor of the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. She was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2011 to 2013 and has a PhD in Philosophy from MIT. Her book is called Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.

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First Draft - Joan Silber Jan 08, 2018

Joan Silber's first book, the novel Household Words won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her other works of fiction are In the City, In My Other Life, Lucky Us, Ideas of Heaven, finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize, The Size of the World, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Prize in Fiction, and Fools, longlisted for the National Book Award and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her latest novel is called Improvement..

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Firsr Draft - Alice McDermott 2 Jan 01, 2018

Alice McDermott is the author of eight novels, including National Book Award winner Charming Billy and The Ninth Hour.

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First Draft - George Saunders Dec 25, 2017

George Saunders is the author of four short story collections, including Tenth of December and the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize.

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First Draft - James Han Mattson Dec 18, 2017

James Han Mattson is the author of The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves.

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First Draft - Jennifer Egan Dec 11, 2017

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her newest novel is Manhattan Beach.

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First Draft - James Longenbach Dec 04, 2017

James Longenbach is a poet and critic whose most recent collection of poems, Earthling is a meditation on the ways in which human beings inhabit their knowledge of impending mortality, ranging bemusement to panic. His most recent critical work, Lyric Knowledge: How Poems Get Made is an account of how English-language poems, ranging from the 8^th to the 21^st century, are constructed from the most basic elements of their medium (diction, syntax, rhythm, figuration, and so on). He has also written widely about modern and postmodern poetry, sometimes emphasizing the historicity of poetic language (Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things) but also exploring the ways in which poems resist their historical location (The Resistance to Poetry).

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First Draft - Matthew Weiner Nov 27, 2017

Matthew Weiner was the writer, creator, executive producer, and director of Mad Men. He also worked as a writer and executive producer on The Sopranos, along with several comedy series, and made his feature film debut in 2014. Weiner's novel is called Heather, The Totality.

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First Draft - Carmen Maria Machado Nov 20, 2017

Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize.

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First Draft - Bruce Machart Nov 13, 2017

Bruce Machart's works include the novel The Wake of Forgiveness and the short story collection Men in the Making. His novel was named a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection and a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice." Chosen as a Top Ten title for 2010 by Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and The Wall Street Journal, the novel was a finalist for the American Booksellers Association's Indie's Choice award and the PEN/USA Literary Prize. Machart lives in Hamilton, Massachusetts.

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First Draft - David Litt Nov 06, 2017

David Litt is an American political speechwriter and author of the memoir Thanks, Obama: My Hopey Changey White House Years. He is currently the head writer/producer for Funny or Die’s office in Washington, D.C.

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First Draft - Lu Spinney Oct 30, 2017

Lu Spinney was born in Cape Town and spent her childhood on a farm in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal, later moving with her family to the Indian Ocean coast north of Durban. After university, she left South Africa to live in Nice and Paris, before settling in London. Beyond the High Blue Air is her first book.

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First Draft - Eleanor Henderson Oct 23, 2017

Eleanor Henderson was born in Greece, grew up in Florida, and attended Middlebury College and the University of Virginia, where she earned her MFA. Her debut novel Ten Thousand Saints was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2011 by The New York Times and a finalist for the Award for First Fiction from The Los Angeles Times. An associate professor at Ithaca College, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and two sons. Her second novel is called The Twelve-Mile Straight.

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First Draft - Jon McGregor Oct 16, 2017

Jon McGregoris a British novelist and short story writer. In 2002, his first novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize as its youngest contender. His second and fourth novels were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006 and 2017 respectively. In 2012, his third novel was awarded the International Dublin Literary Award. His most recent novel is Reservoir 13.

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First Draft - Kevin McIlvoy Oct 09, 2017

Kevin McIlvoy has taught creative writing for over twenty-five years. He was Editor in Chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol at New Mexico State University, and has served on the Board of Directors of two national writing organizations, Council for Literary Magazines & Presses and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. His published works include A Waltz, The Fifth Station, Little Peg, Hyssop, and The Complete History of New Mexico, and 57 Octaves Below Middle C.

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First Draft - Brendan Mathews Oct 02, 2017

Brendan Mathews is the author of The World of Tomorrow. He was a Fulbright Scholar to Ireland, where he taught in the graduate creative writing program at University College Cork. His fiction has twice appeared in The Best American Short Stories and in Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, Cincinnati Review, and other publications in the US and UK. He lives with his wife and their four children in Lenox, Massachusetts, and teaches at Bard College at Simon’s Rock.

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First Draft - Josh Weil Sep 25, 2017

Josh Weil is the author of the novel The Great Glass Sea and the novella collection The New Valley, both New York Times Editor’s Choices. A Fulbright Fellow and National Book Foundation 5-under-35 honoree, he has been awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the GrubStreet National Book Prize, the Library of Virginia’s Award in Fiction, the New Writers Award from the GLCA, and a Pushcart Prize. His new short story collection is called The Age of Perpetual Light.

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First Draft - Laura van den Berg Sep 18, 2017

Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her M.F.A. at Emerson College. Her books include Find Me, The Isle of Youth, and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.

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First Draft - Nathan Englander Sep 11, 2017

Nathan Englander is the author of the novels Dinner at the Center of the Earth and The Ministry of Special Cases, and the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank—finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, most recently in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. Englander's play, The Twenty-Seventh Man, premiered at The Public Theater in 2012. He translated the New American Haggadah and co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly a Knock on the Door.

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First Draft - Lily Tuck Sep 04, 2017

Lily Tuck is the author of seven novels: Interviewing Matisse, or the Woman Who Died Standing Up; The Woman Who Walked on Water; The Double Life of Liliane, Sisters, Siam, or the Woman Who Shot a Man, which was nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; and The News from Paraguay, winner of theNational Book Award. She is also the author of the biography Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and are collected in Limbo and Other Places I Have Lived. Lily Tuck divides her time between Maine and New York City.

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First Draft - Paolo Giordano Aug 28, 2017

Paolo Giordano is an Italian novelist. His books include The Solitude of Prime Numbers, Like Family, and The Human Body.

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First Draft - Claire Messud Aug 21, 2017

Claire Messud is the author of six novels and one book of novellas including The Woman Upstairs, When the World Was Steady, THe Last Life, and The Emperor’s Children, which was a New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Messud has been awarded Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children. Her latest novel is called The Burning Girl.

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First Draft - Paul Yoon Aug 14, 2017

Paul Yoon was born in New York City. His first book, Once the Shore, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Debut of the Year by National Public Radio. His novel, Snow Hunters, won the 2014 Young Lions Fiction Award. His new novel is The Mountain.
A recipient of a 5 under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, he is currently a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University along with his wife, the fiction writer Laura van den Berg.

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First Draft - Andrew Sean Greer Aug 07, 2017

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of six works of fiction, including the bestseller The Confessions of Max Tivoli, The Story of a Marriage and his latest novel, Less. He splits his time between his home in San Francisco and the Santa Maddalena Foundation writer's residency in Tuscany, where he is the Executive Director.

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First Draft - Dorit Rabinyan Jul 31, 2017

Dorit Rabinyan was born in Israel to an Iranian-Jewish family. Her first two novels Persian Brides and Strand of A Thousand Pearls were both international best sellers. In 2014 Rabinyan published her third novel, All The Rivers, an immediate best seller in Israel. In January 2016 All the Rivers became the center of a political scandal in Israel when the Ministry of Education banned the book from high school’s curriculum

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First Draft - Claire Dederer Jul 24, 2017

Claire Dederer is the author of Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning.

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First Draft - Maile Meloy Jul 17, 2017

Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter and the story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times and Amazon.com. She has also written a trilogy for young readers, beginning with The Apothecary, which was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2012 E.B. White Award. Meloy’s short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and Best American Short Stories 2015. Her new novel for adults is Do Not Become Alarmed.

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First Draft - Leila Aboulela Jul 10, 2017

Leila Aboulela is a Sudanese-born writer whose work, written in English, has received critical acclaim and a high profile for its distinctive exploration of identity, migration and Islamic spirituality. Highlighting the challenges facing Muslims in Europe and “telling the stories of flawed complex characters who struggle to make choices using Muslim logic”, Aboulela’s work explores significant political issues.

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First Draft - Nina McConigley Jul 03, 2017

Nina McConigley is the author of Cowboys and East Indians.

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First Draft - Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich Jun 26, 2017

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, named an Indie Next Pick; one of the most anticipated books of 2017 by Buzzfeed, BookRiot, and the Huffington Post; a must-read for May by Goodreads, Audible.com, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple and People; and one of the 10 best books of the year so far by Entertainment Weekly.

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First Draft - Dani Shapiro Jun 19, 2017

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and has been broadcast on “This American Life”. Her newest memoir is called Hourglass.

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First Draft - Megan Abbott Jun 12, 2017

Megan Abbott is the Edgar-winning author of the novels Die a Little, Bury Me Deep, The End of Everything, Dare Me and The Fever. Her most recent book is You Will Know Me, which was chosen one of Best Books of 2016 by NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Time Out NY, the Washington Post, Google, Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.

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First Draft - Chavisa Woods Jun 05, 2017

Chavisa Woods is the author of Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country and Other Stories.

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First Draft - Jesse Goolsby May 29, 2017

Jesse Goolsby is the author of the novel I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them, winner of the Florida Book Award for Fiction and long-listed for the Flaherty-Duncan First Novel Prize. His fiction and essays have appeared widely, including The Literary Review, EPOCH, The Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Salon, and Pleiades.

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First Draft - Max Winter May 22, 2017

Max Winter is a graduate of UC Irvine’s MFA program, and a recipient of two Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Fiction. He has been published in Day One and Diner Journal. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife and son.

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First Draft - Peter Heller May 15, 2017

Peter Heller is the author of the novels The Dog Stars, The Painter, and Celine. He is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure.

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First Draft - Viet Thanh Nguyen May 08, 2017

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 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 the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His current book is the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees.

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First Draft - Sarah Gerard May 01, 2017

Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, the novel Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize, and two chapbooks, most recently BFF. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies. She’s been supported by fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Tin House, PlatteForum, and Ucross. She writes a monthly column for Hazlitt and teaches writing in New York City.

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First Draft - Shulem Deen Apr 24, 2017

Shulem Deen is the author of the award-winning memoir All Who Go Do Not Return, an account of growing up in and then leaving the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the U.S. He is a regular contributor to Forward, and in 2015 was listed in the Forward 50, an annual list of American Jews with outsized roles on political and social issues.

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First Draft - Karen Joy Fowler Apr 17, 2017

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three short story collections. The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Her latest novel is called We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

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First Draft - Jim Shepard Apr 10, 2017

Jim Shepard is an American novelist and short story writer, who teaches creative writing and film at Williams College. His latest novel is The Book of Aron.

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First Draft - Douglas Preston Apr 03, 2017

Douglas Preston is a novelist, journalist, and essayist. Preston's most recent nonfiction book, The Lost City of the Monkey God, published in January 2017, tells the true story of the discovery of an ancient, Pre-Columbian city in an unexplored valley deep in the Mosquitia Mountains of Honduras.

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First Draft - Melissa Febos Mar 27, 2017

Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart and the essay collection, Abandon Me. Her work has been widely anthologized and appears in publications including Tin House, Granta, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Glamour, Guernica, Post Road, Salon, The New York Times, Hunger Mountain, Portland Review, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Bitch Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Drunken Boat, and Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York.

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First Draft - Dan Chaon Mar 20, 2017

Dan Chaon’s most recent book is Ill Will, a novel. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize; the national bestseller Await Your Reply and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.

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First Draft - Deborah Willis Mar 13, 2017

Deborah Willis was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta. Her first book, Vanishing and Other Stories, was named one of the the Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2009, and was nominated for the Governor General's Award. Her latest book is The Dark and Other Love Stories. She was a bookseller at Munro's Books in Victoria, BC, a writer-in-residence at Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, BC, and the 2012-2013 Calgary Distinguished Writers Program writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary.

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First Draft - Katie Kitamura Mar 06, 2017

Katie Kitamura is a critic and novelist living in New York City. She is the author of Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, both of which were finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of a Lannan Residency Fellowship, Kitamura has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and is a regular contributor to Frieze. Her most recent novel is A Separation.

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First Draft - Lily King Feb 27, 2017

Lily King is the author of Euphoria.

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First Draft - Sarah Manguso Feb 20, 2017

Sarah Manguso is the author of seven books including 300 Arguments, a genre-defying work of nonfiction; Ongoingness, a meditation on motherhood and time; The Guardians, an investigation of friendship and suicide; The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir of her experience with a chronic autoimmune disease, and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, a collection of very short stories. She is also the author of the poetry collections Siste Viatorand The Captain Lands in Paradise, poems from which have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in several editions of the Best American Poetry series.

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First Draft - Anuk Arudpragasam Feb 13, 2017

Anuk Arudpragasam is from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and graduated with a BA from Stanford University in 2010. His first novel is called The Story of a Brief Marriage. He is also working on his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University about the theorization and idealization of the individual in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and John Dewey.

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First Draft - Marcy Dermansky Jan 30, 2017

Marcy Dermansky is the author of the novels The Red Car, Bad Marie and Twins.

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First Draft - Melanie Finn Jan 25, 2017

Melanie Finn was born in Kenya in 1964. She spent her childhood largely unsupervised, roaming suburban Nairobi’s remnant woodlands and back roads. When she was 11, she moved to Connecticut with her mother and stepfather, and later attended New York University, graduating with a BA in journalism. She is the author of the novels Away From You and The Gloaming.

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First Draft - Joshua Mohr Jan 16, 2017

Joshua Mohr is the author of the memoir "Sirens", as well as five novels including "Damascus", which The New York Times called "Beat-poet cool." He’s also written "Fight Song" and "Some Things that Meant the World to Me," one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as "Termite Parade," an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times. His novel "All This Life" won the Northern California Book Award. He is the founder of Decant Editorial.

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First Draft - Peter Orner Jan 10, 2017

Peter Orner is the author of Am I Alone Here?

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First Draft - Gerrard Conley Jan 02, 2017

First Draft interview with Gerrard Conley, author of the memoir Boy Erased.

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First Draft - Akhil Sharma Dec 26, 2016

Akhil Sharma is an Indian-American author and professor of creative writing. His first published novel An Obedient Father won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His second, Family Life, won the 2015 Folio Prize and 2016 International Dublin Literary Award.

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First Draft - Benjamin Percy Dec 19, 2016

Benjamin Percy is the author of three novels, the most recent among them The Dead Lands, a post apocalyptic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark saga. He is also the author of Red Moon and The Wilding, as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk and the craft book Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction.

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First Draft - Anuradha Roy Dec 12, 2016

Anuradha Roy's latest book, Sleeping on Jupiter, won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016 and was nominated for the Man Booker prize 2015. She won the Economist Crossword Prize for her second novel, The Folded Earth. Her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, has been widely translated and was picked as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and the Seattle Times. It has been named by World Literature Today as one of the 60 most essential books on modern India and was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize.

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First Draft - Randa Jarrar Dec 05, 2016

Randa Jarrar’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Five Chapters, and others. Her first novel, A Map of Home was published in half a dozen languages & won a Hopwood Award, an Arab-American Book Award, and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes and Noble Review. Her new book is called Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. She has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Hedgebrook, and others, and in 2010 was named one of the most gifted writers of Arab origin under the age of 40. She runs RAWI (the Radius of Arab-American Writers) and loves coordinating events and strengthening communities.

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First Draft - Emily Witt Nov 28, 2016

Emily Witt is a writer in New York City. She has written for n+1, The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, the London Review of Books, and many other places. She has degrees from Brown, Columbia, and Cambridge, and was a Fulbright scholar in Mozambique. Her first book, Future Sex, was published in 2016

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First Draft - Teddy Wayne Nov 21, 2016

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (Simon & Schuster), and Kapitoil (Harper Perennial). He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A columnist for the New York Times, he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and McSweeney’s and has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in New York.

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First Draft - Robert Bausch Nov 14, 2016

Robert Bausch was born in Georgia, at the end of World War II, and was raised in the Washington, D.C., area. He has worked as a salesman--of automobiles, appliances, and hardware--a taxi driver, waiter, production planner, and library assistant. He was educated at George Mason University, earning a BA, an MA and an MFA, and he says he has been a writer all his life. He spent time in the military teaching survival, and worked his way through college. His eighth and latest novel is called The Legend of Jesse Smoke.

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First Draft - Patrick Ryan Nov 11, 2016

Patrick Ryan is the author of the short story collection The Dream Life of Astronauts and the novels Send Me and Saint Augustine among others.

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First Draft - Jane Smiley Oct 31, 2016

Jane Smiley is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Thousand Acres. She has written more than twenty books including Private Life, Moo, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.

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First Draft - Nicole Dennis-Benn Oct 24, 2016

Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Editors' Choice, which has received a starred Kirkus Review and is deemed one of the best books to read this summer and beyond by New York Times, NPR, BBC, BuzzFeed, Book Riot, Bookish, Miami Herald, Elle, O Magazine, Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, Flavorwire, After Ellen, BookPage, Cosmopolitan, Brooklyn Magazine, among others. Dennis-Benn has also been shortlisted for the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

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First Draft - Kevin Barry Oct 17, 2016

Kevin Barry was born in Limerick in 1969 and now lives in Dublin. He writes sketches and columns for the Sunday Herald in Glasgow and the Irish Examiner in Cork. He has written about travel and literature for the Guardian, the Irish Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications. His short fiction has appeared widely on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently in the New Yorker. His recent short story collection is called Dark Lies the Island.

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First Draft - Leigh Stein Oct 10, 2016

Leigh Stein is the author of the novel The Fallback Plan, a collection of poetry called Dispatch from the Future, and a memoir, Land of Enchantment. She is co-founder and Executive Director fo the nonprofit literary organization Out of the Binders, and lives outside New York City.

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First Draft - John Freeman Oct 05, 2016

John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic. He is the author of How to Read a Novelist.

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First Draft - Lev Grossman Oct 03, 2016

Lev Grossman's first novel, Warp, came out in 1997. His second, Codex, was published in 2004 and became an international bestseller. The Magicians was published in 2009 and was a New York Times bestseller and one of the New Yorker‘s best books of the year. The sequel, The Magician King, came out in 2011 and was a Times bestseller too. The third and (almost certainly) last Magicians book, The Magician’s Land, was published in 2014 and debuted at #1 on the bestseller list.

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First Draft - Ramona Ausubel Sep 26, 2016

Ramona Ausubel grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of a new novel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty as well as the novel No One is Here Except All of Us (2012), and a collection of short stories A Guide to Being Born (2013).

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First Draft - Debra Spark Sep 19, 2016

Debra Spark is the author of five books of fiction, including Unknown Caller, The Pretty Girl, and Good for the Jews. Other books include Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing, the anthology Twenty Under Thirty, and the recently reissued novel, Coconuts for the Saint.

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First Draft - Jennifer duBois Sep 16, 2016

Jennifer duBois is the recipient of a 2013 Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2012 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award. Her debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was the winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction and the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was the winner of the Housatonic Book Award for fiction and was a finalist for a New York Public Library Young Lions Award.

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First Draft - Jennifer Haigh Sep 12, 2016

Jennifer Haigh's new novel is called Heat and Light. She is the author of four previous novels: Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers and Mrs. Kimble, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her short story collection News From Heaven won the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction. Haigh's short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories and many other places. She lives in Boston.

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First Draft - Helen Schulman Aug 15, 2016

Helen Schulman is author of This Beautiful Life, four other novels and one short story collection.

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First Draft - Kim Addonizio Aug 08, 2016

Kim Addonizio is the author of six poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry, The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. She has received fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, two Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Award Finalist for her collection Tell Me. Her latest books are Mortal Trash: Poems (W.W. Norton) and a memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress (Penguin).

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First Draft - Anna Noyes Aug 01, 2016

Anna Noyes is the author of the debut story collection, Goodnight, Beautiful Women, which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Vice, A Public Space, and Guernica, among others. She has received the Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship, the James Merrill House Fellowship, and the Lighthouse Works Fellowship, and has served as writer-in-residence at the Polli Talu Arts Center in Estonia. Goodnight, Beautiful Women was awarded the 2013 Henfield Prize for Fiction and the 2016 Lotos Foundation Prize, and is a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and an Indie Next Great Reads pick for June. Noyes was raised in Downeast Maine.

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First Draft - Anna Solomon Jul 25, 2016

Anna Solomon is the author of The Little Bride, Leaving Lucy Pear and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, One Story, Ploughshares, Slate, The Boston Globe, and MORE, and she is co-editor with Eleanor Henderson of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers. Previously, Anna worked as an award-winning journalist for National Public Radio’s Living On Earth.

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First Draft - Charles Bock Jul 18, 2016

Charles Bock is the author of the novels Alice & Oliver and Beautiful Children, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate, as well as in numerous anthologies. He has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Yaddo, UCross, and the Vermont Studio Center. Charles is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives with his wife, Leslie Jamison, and his daughter in New York City.

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First Draft - Ethan Canin Jul 04, 2016

Highly regarded as both a novelist and a short story writer, Ethan Canin has ranged in his career from the "breathtaking" short stories of Emperor of the Air to the "stunning" novellas of The Palace Thief, from the "wise and beautiful" short novel Carry Me Across the Water to the "epic" America America. His short stories, which have been the basis for four Hollywood movies, have appeared in a wide range of magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Paris Review, and Granta, and have been selected for many prize anthologies. His latest novel is The Doubter's Almanac.

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First Draft - Joshua Ferris Jun 20, 2016

Joshua Ferris is the bestselling author of three novels, Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. He was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40”writers in 2010. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York.

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First Draft - Lauren Holmes Jun 13, 2016

Lauren Holmes grew up in upstate New York. She received a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA from Hunter College, where she was a Hertog Fellow and a teaching fellow. Her work has appeared in Granta, where she was a 2014 New Voice, and in Guernica. Holmes lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her short story collection is called Barbara the Slut.

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First Draft - Idra Novey Jun 06, 2016

Idra Novey is the author of the debut novel Ways to Disappear, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Born in western Pennsylvania, she has since lived in Chile, Brazil and New York. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian, selected by Patricia Smith for the 2011 National Poetry Series, The Next Country, a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award, and Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into eight languages and she’s written for The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, Slate, and The Paris Review.

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First Draft - Saeed Jones Jun 01, 2016

Saeed Jones was born in Memphis, TN and raised in Lewisville, Texas. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Rutgers University – Newark. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Western Kentucky University where he won the Jim Wayne Miller Award for Poetry. His collection Prelude to Bruise was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014 and the winner of the 2015 Pen Literary Award for Poetry. Jones is also the literary editor for BuzzFeed.

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First Draft - Dana Spiotta May 23, 2016

Dana Spiotta is the author of four novels: Innocents and Others, published by Scribner in 2016; Stone Arabia (2011), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in fiction; Eat the Document(2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and Lightning Field (2001). Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and won the 2008-9 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She lives in Syracuse with her daughter Agnes and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.

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First Draft - Dominic Smith May 16, 2016

Dominic grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Austin, Texas. He is the author, most recently, of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, a New York Times Bestseller and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice selection.
His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Texas Monthly, and the Chicago Tribune. His other novels are: The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, and Bright and Distant Shores.

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First Draft - Antonya Nelson May 12, 2016

First Draft interview with Antonya Nelson. Nelson is the author of seven short story collections and four novels. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program. Her awards include the Rea Award for Short Fiction, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, and an American Artists Award. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas.

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First Draft - Garth Greenwell May 02, 2016

Garth Greenwell is an American poet, author, literary critic, and educator. His debut novel is What Belongs to You. In 2013, Greenwell returned to the United States after living in Bulgaria to attend the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop as an Arts Fellow. He has published stories in The Paris Review and A Public Space and writes criticism for The New Yorker and The Atlantic.

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First Draft - A. Igoni Barrett Apr 25, 2016

A. Igoni Barrettwas born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria in 1979. He is the author of Blackass, as well as a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short stories have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Nigeria.

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First Draft - Rob Spillman Apr 18, 2016

Rob Spillman is the author of the memoir All Tomorrow's Parties.

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First Draft - James Hannaham Apr 11, 2016

Interview with James Hannah, author of Delicious Foods.

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First Draft - Rebecca Makkai Apr 04, 2016

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Hundred-Year House, winner of the Chicago Writers Association’s Novel of the Year award, and The Borrower, a Booklist Top Ten Debut which has been translated into eight languages. Her short story collection, Music for Wartime, will appear in June of 2015. Her short fiction was chosen for The Best American Short Stories for four consecutive years (2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008), and appears regularly in journals like Harper’s, Tin House, and New England Review. The recipient of a 2014 NEA fellowship, Makkai has taught at Northwestern University and at the Iowa Writer's Workshop.

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First Draft - Emily St. John Mandel Mar 29, 2016

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 and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.

Her fourth novel, Station Eleven, was a 2014 National Book Award Finalist. All four of her novels—previous books were Last Night in Montreal, The Singer's Gun, and The Lola Quartet—were Indie Next Picks, and 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. She lives in New York City with her husband.

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First Draft - Paul Lisicky Mar 28, 2016

Paul Lisicky is the author of five books: The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, Ecotone, Fence, The Offing, Ploughshares, Tin House, Unstuck, and in many other magazines and anthologies. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Fellow. He has taught in the creative writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Rutgers-Newark, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and elsewhere. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden, the low residency program at Sierra Nevada College, and at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. He is the editor of StoryQuarterly and serves on the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

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First Draft - Ada Limón Mar 14, 2016

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 and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her other books include Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the 24Pearl Street 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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First Draft - Mary Doria Russell Mar 07, 2016

Mary Doria Russell has written several novels including Thread of Grace, The Sparrow and Doc.

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First Draft - Christopher Castellani Feb 29, 2016

Christopher Castellani is the son of Italian immigrants and a native of Wilmington, Delaware. He resides in Boston, where he is the artistic director of Grub Street, one of the country's leading non-profit creative writing centers. He is the author of three critically-acclaimed novels, A Kiss from Maddalena (Algonquin Books, 2003)—winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in 2004— The Saint of Lost Things (Algonquin Books, 2005), a BookSense (IndieBound) Notable Book; and All This Talk of Love (Algonquin, 2013), a New York Times Editors' Choice and finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Literary Award. He is currently working on a new novel. The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story a collection of essays on writing, is now available from Graywolf.

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First Draft - Rachel Cantor Feb 22, 2016

Rachel Cantor's stories have appeared in magazines such as the Paris Review, One Story, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Fence, and Volume 1 Brooklyn. They have been anthologized, nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, short-listed by both the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories, and awarded runner-up Bridport and Graywolf/SLS Prizes.

She lives in New York, city of her heart, in the writerly borough of Brooklyn, but have at various points made her home in most U.S. states between Virginia and Vermont. Her novels include A Highly Unlikely Scenario and Good on Paper.

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First Draft - Sarah Gerard Feb 15, 2016

Sarah Gerard is the author of the novel Binary Star (Two Dollar Radio), the forthcoming essay collection Sunshine State (Harper Perennial), and two chapbooks, most recently BFF (Guillotine). Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine‘s “The Cut”, The Paris Review Daily, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, Joyland, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies for Joyland and The Saturday Evening Post. She writes a monthly column on artists' notebooks for Hazlitt and teaches writing in New York City.

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First Draft - Edan Lepucki Feb 13, 2016

First Draft interview with Edan Lepucki, author of California.

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First Draft - Adam Johnson Feb 08, 2016

Adam Johnson was born in South Dakota and raised in Arizona. He earned a BA in Journalism from Arizona State University in 1992; a MFA from the writing program at McNeese State University, and a PhD in English from Florida State University in 2000.
Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper's, Tin House, Granta, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories. His works include include Emporium, a short-story collection, Fortune Smiles, which won the National Book Awarad, and the novels Parasites Like Us and The Orphan Master's Son, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

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First Draft - Elizabeth McCracken Feb 01, 2016

First Draft interview with Elizabeth McCracken.

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First Draft - Jess Walter Jan 27, 2016

Jess Walter is the author of The Beautiful Ruins.

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First Draft - Sunil Yapa Jan 19, 2016

Sunil Yapa is the author of Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist.

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First Draft - Lauren Groff Dec 28, 2015

Lauren Groff is the author of the novel The Monsters of Templeton, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, Delicate Edible Birds, a collection of stories, and Arcadia, a New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award.
Her latest novel is Fates and Furies.

Her work has appeared in journals including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Tin House,One Story, McSweeney’s, and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three editions of theBest American Short Stories.

She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband and two sons.

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First Draft - Geraldine Brooks Dec 21, 2015

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks grew up in Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the mideast, Africa and the Balkans. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her second novel, March. Her novels Caleb’s Crossing and People of the Book were New York Times best sellers. Her first novel, Year of Wonders is an an international bestseller, translated into more than 25 languages and currently optioned for a major motion picture starring Andrew Lincoln.

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First Draft - Paul Harding Dec 20, 2015

Paul Harding is the author of the novel Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. He was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College.

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First Draft - Anthony Marra Dec 20, 2015

Anthony Marra is the New York Times-bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. It was selected as one of the ten best books of 2013 by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, New York Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, among numerous other year-end lists. He is the winner of the Whiting Award, the Pushcart Prize, and currently teaches at Stanford University. www.anthonymarra.net

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First Draft - Jack Driscoll Dec 20, 2015

Jack Driscoll is the author of four books of poems, two collections of short stories, and four novels. In addition, he is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, the NEH Independent Study Grant, two Pushcart Prizes and Best American Short Story citations, the PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Award, the Associated Writing Programs Short Fiction Award, and seven PEN Syndicated Project Short Fiction Awards.

His stories have been read frequently over NPR’s “The Sound of Writing,” and his work has appeared nationally in magazines, literary journals, and newspapers such as Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star, Civilization, Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares.

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First Draft - Celeste Ng Dec 20, 2015

Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You (Penguin Press), which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book, and Amazon's #1 Best Book of the Year 2014. She grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. Celeste attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize.

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First Draft - James Salter Dec 20, 2015

James Salter grew up in New York City and was a career officer and Air Force pilot until his mid-thirties, when the success of his first novel, The Hunters(1957), led to a fulltime writing career. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose has earned him acclaim from critics, readers, and fellow novelists. His novel, A Sport and a Pastime (1967), was hailed by the New York Times as “nearly perfect as any American fiction.” His latest book, All That Is, was published to critical acclaim in 2013. He died in 2015. This interview was recorded in November 2014.

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First Draft - Dani Shapiro Dec 14, 2015

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and has been broadcast on “This American Life”. Dani was recently Oprah Winfrey’s guest on”Super Soul Sunday,” and was chosen by Arianna Huffington to speak at the New York City “Thrive” conference. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School and Wesleyan University; she is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. A contributing editor at Condé Nast Traveler, Dani lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut. Her latest book is, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life.

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First Draft - Liam Callanan Dec 07, 2015

Liam is the author of The Cloud Atlas , All Saints and Listen. He serves in the English department of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and was previously its chair, as well as coordinator of its Ph.D. program in creative writing. He has regularly contributed to local and national public radio, and is possibly the only person now living (but consult your own Venn diagram) who has written for all of the following: the Wall Street Journal (on zeppelins, jetpacks, and touring Paris and Greece with children's books), The Awl, Medium, Commonweal, Esquire.com (on swimming and flying), Slate, the New York Times Book Review, the Times op-ed page, the Washington Post Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes FYI, Good Housekeeping, Parents, Milwaukee Magazine and elsewhere.

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First Draft - Ben Fountain Dec 06, 2015

Ben Fountain is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. He has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Writers' Award, among other honors and awards. He and his family live in Dallas.

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First Draft - Julia Fierro Nov 30, 2015

Julia Fierro is the author of the novels Cutting Teeth and the forthcoming The Gypsy Moth Summer.

A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, Julia founded The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop in 2002, and it has since become a creative home to over 2,500 NYC writers. Sackett Street was named a “Best NYC Writing Workshop” by The Village Voice, Time Out NY, and Brooklyn Magazine, and a “Best MFA-Alternative” by Poets & Writers and the L Magazine.

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First Draft - Michelle Brafman Nov 23, 2015

Michelle Brafman is the author of the novel Washing the Dead. Her short fiction short has won some awards, including a special mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and my essays and stories have appeared in Slate, The Washington Post, Tablet, Lilith Magazine, the minnesota review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and numerous other publications. She teaches fiction at Johns Hopkins University.

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First Draft - Ann Patchett Nov 21, 2015

Ann Patchett is the author of six novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician’s Assistant, Bel Canto, Run, and State of Wonder. She was the editor of Best American Short Stories, 2006, and has written three books of nonfiction, Truth & Beauty, about her friendship with the writer, Lucy Grealy, What now? an expansion of her graduation address at Sarah Lawrence College, and, most recently, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of essays that examines the theme of commitment.

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First Draft - Bill Clegg Nov 21, 2015

Bill Clegg is the author of two memoirs, Portrait of an Addict as A Young Man: A Memoir and Ninety Days. His novel, Did You Ever Have a Family, was long listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. Clegg is also a literary agent and owner of The Clegg Agency.

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First Draft - Vanessa Garcia Nov 16, 2015

Vanessa was born in the Cuban satellite city of Miami, to Cuban parents. Her plays have been produced in Edinburgh, Miami, New York, and Los Angeles, among other cities. These include The Cuban Spring (a full-length, Carbonell Award nominee for Best New Play, 2015). The Crocodile’s Bite (a short, included in numerous anthologies such as Smith & Kraus’ Best Ten Minute Plays of 2016; City Theatre’s National Short Playwriting Award Anthology, as a finalist; and the Writer’s Digest annual award anthology). And, her most recent play, Grace, Sponsored by Monteverde. Her visual art has been exhibited around the United States and the Caribbean. As a journalist, feature writer, and essayist, her pieces have appeared in the LA Times, The Miami Herald, The Washington Post, The Southern Humanities Review, The Art Basel Magazine, The Rumpus, and numerous other publications. She’s also a Huffington Post Blogger. Her first novel is called White Light. She is currently at work on a memoir entitled My Cuban Routes.

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First Draft: Edwidge Danticat Nov 15, 2015

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to Brooklyn when she was 12 years old. She now lives in Miami. She has taught creative writing at the New York University and the University of Miami.She has also worked with filmmakers Patricia Benoit and Jonathan Demme, on projects on Haitian art and documentaries about Haiti Her short stories have appeared in over 25 periodicals and have been anthologized several times. Her work has been translated into numerous other languages, including Japanese, French, Korean, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. Her books include Brother, I'm Dying, Claire of the Sea Light, The Dew Breaker and Breath, Eyes, Memory.

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First Draft: Charles Baxter Nov 10, 2015

Charles Baxter is the author of five novels, five short story collections, three collections of poetry and two essay collections on fiction. His novel The Feast of Love was nominated for a National Book Award. His most recent story collection is called There’s Something I Want You to Do. Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. www.charlesbaxter.com.

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First Draft: Leslie Jamison Nov 10, 2015

Leslie Jamison was born in Washington DC and grew up in Los Angeles. Since then, she's lived in Iowa, Nicaragua, New Haven, and New York. She's worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, and a medical actor. Every one of these was a world; they're still in her.

Jamison has written a novel, The Gin Closet, and a collection of essays, The Empathy Exams. Her work has appeared or will appear in places like Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. She's a columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and is currently finishing a doctoral dissertation at Yale about addiction narratives. She lives in Brooklyn, above a smoke shop.

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First Draft: Elliott Holt Nov 10, 2015

Elliott Holt was born and raised in Washington, D.C. A former copywriter who worked at advertising agencies in Moscow, London, and New York, Holt attended the MFA program at Brooklyn College (where she won the Himan Brown award) at night while working full time in Manhattan during the day. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, Salon, Guernica, Kenyon Review online, The Millions, Bellevue Literary Review, The Pushcart Prize XXXV (2011 anthology) and elsewhere. In addition to winning a Pushcart Prize, she was the runner-up of the 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award. Her first novel You Are One of Them was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

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First Draft: Bonnie Jo Campbell Nov 09, 2015

Bonnie Jo Campbell grew up on a small Michigan farm with her mother and four siblings in a house her grandfather Herlihy built in the shape of an H. She learned to castrate small pigs, milk Jersey cows, and, when she was snowed in with chocolate, butter, and vanilla, to make remarkable chocolate candy. When she left home for the University of Chicago to study philosophy, her mother rented out her room. She has since hitchhiked across the U.S. and Canada, scaled the Swiss alps on her bicycle, and traveled with the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus selling snow cones. As president of Goulash Tours Inc., she has organized and led adventure tours in Russia and the Baltics, and all the way south to Romania and Bulgaria.

Her collection Women and Other Animals details the lives of extraordinary females in rural and small town Michigan, and it won the AWP prize for short fiction; her story "The Smallest Man in the World" has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her novel Q Road investigates the lives of a rural community where development pressures are bringing unwelcome change in the character of the land. Her critically-acclaimed short fiction collection American Salvage, which consists of fourteen lush and rowdy stories of folks who are struggling to make sense of the twenty-first century, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Fiction.

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First Draft: Alan Lightman Nov 09, 2015

Alan Lightman is the author of six novels, including Einstein’s Dreams, which was an international best seller and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the author of two collections of essays and several books on science. A theoretical physicist as well as a writer, he has served on the faculties of Harvard and MIT, where he was the first person to receive a dual faculty appointment in science and the humanities. He lives in the Boston area.

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First Draft: Molly Antopol Nov 08, 2015

Molly Antopol’s debut story collection, The UnAmericans was longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award, named a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the National Jewish Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. It was chosen as a “Best Book of 2014” by over a dozen venues and will be published in seven countries. She teaches at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and lives in San Francisco. She’s at work on a novel.

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First Draft: Maria Semple Nov 07, 2015

Maria Semple is the author of This One Is Mine and Where’d You Go Bernadette. Before turning to fiction, she wrote for Mad About You, Ellen, and Arrested Development. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker. She lives in Seattle.

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First Draft: Russell Banks Nov 07, 2015

Russell Banks is the author of more than a dozen works, which include poetry, short stories, novels and essays. His novels Cloudsplitter and Continental Drift were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction were made into feature films. His latest work is a short story collection called A Permanent Member of the Family. Banks is the recipient of numerous literary awards, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Keene, New York and Miami, Florida.

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First Draft: Michael Cunningham Nov 07, 2015

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours(winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award & Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as the non-fiction book, Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown. His newest novel is, The Snow Queen. He lives in New York, and teaches at Yale University.

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First Draft: Anthony Doerr Nov 07, 2015

Anthony Doerr is the author of The Shell Collector, About Grace, Four Seasons in Rome, Memory Wall, and the new novel All the Light We Cannot See. Doerr’s fiction has won four O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, three Ohioana Book Awards, the 2010 Story Prize, which is considered the most prestigious prize in the U.S. for a collection of short stories, and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, which is the largest prize in the world for a single short story. His books have twice been a New York Times Notable Book, an American Library Association Book of the Year, and made lots of other year end “Best Of” lists. In 2007, the British literary magazine Granta placed Doerr on its list of 21 Best Young American novelists.

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First Draft: Elizabeth Gilbert Nov 07, 2015

Elizabeth Gilbert was born in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1969, and grew up on a small family Christmas tree farm. She attended New York University, where she studied political science by day and worked on her short stories by night. After college, she spent several years traveling around the country, working in bars, diners and ranches, collecting experiences to transform into fiction. Her books include Eat, Pray, Love, Pilgrims, Committed, The Last American Man and most recently The Signature of All Things. Elizabeth Gilbert lives in the small river town of Frenchtown, New Jersey, where she and her husband run a large and delightful imports store called Two Buttons.

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First Draft: Alice McDermott Nov 07, 2015

Alice McDermott is the author of seven novels including National Book Award Winner Charming Billy and three Pulitzer Prize finalists: After This, That Night and At Weddings and Wakes. She is Johns Hopkins University's Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities. She has a BA from SUNY Oswego and an MA from University of New Hampshire. Her new novel is Someone.

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