First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

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

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

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

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap...

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

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

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

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

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

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.   Subscrib...

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

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 Statio...

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

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....

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

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. Learn more...

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 M...

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...

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 o...

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

George Hodgman is the author of Bettyville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

Rachel Howard is a writer of fiction, personal essays, memoir, and dance criticism. Her debut novel is called The Risk of Us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Mar...