First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

 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 Berl...

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 langua...

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

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 N...

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

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 Stor...

Peter Ho Davies is the author of three novels including A 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adc...

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. B...

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

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, Inte...

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...