First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

  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 delive...

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

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

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.   Learn...

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 collec...

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

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, wa...

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

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

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...