First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

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. Learn more about your ad choic...

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 Sta...

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...

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 c...

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 Nat...

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Pri...

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,...

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 incl...

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 Stori...

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 US...

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 f...

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...

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.f...

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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...

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’...

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 wr...

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 Tim...

Rebecca Kauffman is the author of four novels including The Gunners, which received the Premio Tribuk dei Librai award in Italy, and Chorus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices