First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

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,...

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...

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...

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 or...

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...

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 Wr...

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...

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...

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 i...

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, colonial...

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 Fe...

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 Hanni...

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 nove...

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...

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, t...

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 undergrad...

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 Ne...

Ayana Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times Bestseller, 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 Tim...

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...

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 Do...

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, Ar...

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 l...

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...

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...

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,...