First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Lily King is the author of Euphoria. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Manguso is the author of seven books including 300 Arguments, a genre-defying work of nonfiction; Ongoingness, a meditation on motherhood and time; The Guardians, an investigation of friendship and suicide; The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir of her experience with a chronic autoimmune disease, and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, a collection of very short stories. She is also the author of...

Anuk Arudpragasam is from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and graduated with a BA from Stanford University in 2010. His first novel is called The Story of a Brief Marriage.  He is also working on his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University about the theorization and idealization of the individual in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and John Dewey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit mega...

Marcy Dermansky is the author of the novels The Red Car, Bad Marie and Twins.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Melanie Finn was born in Kenya in 1964.  She spent her childhood largely unsupervised, roaming suburban Nairobi’s remnant woodlands and back roads.  When she was 11, she moved to Connecticut with her mother and stepfather, and later attended New York University, graduating with a BA in journalism.  She is the author of the novels Away From You and The Gloaming. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Joshua Mohr is the author of the memoir "Sirens", as well as five novels including "Damascus", which The New York Times called "Beat-poet cool." He’s also written "Fight Song" and "Some Things that Meant the World to Me," one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as "Termite Parade," an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times.  His novel "All This Li...

Peter Orner is the author of Am I Alone Here? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First Draft interview with Gerrard Conley, author of the memoir Boy Erased. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Akhil Sharma is an Indian-American author and professor of creative writing. His first published novel An Obedient Father won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His second, Family Life, won the 2015 Folio Prize and 2016 International Dublin Literary Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin Percy is the author of three novels, the most recent among them The Dead Lands, a post apocalyptic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark saga. He is also the author of  Red Moon and The Wilding, as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk and the craft book Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anuradha Roy's latest book, Sleeping on Jupiter,  won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016 and was nominated for the Man Booker prize 2015. She won the Economist Crossword Prize for her second novel, The Folded Earth. Her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, has been widely translated and was picked as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and the Seattle Times. It has been na...

Randa Jarrar’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Five Chapters, and others. Her first novel, A Map of Home was published in half a dozen languages & won a Hopwood Award, an Arab-American Book Award, and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes and Noble Review. Her new book is called...

Emily Witt is a writer in New York City. She has written for n+1, The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, the London Review of Books, and many other places. She has degrees from Brown, Columbia, and Cambridge, and was a Fulbright scholar in Mozambique. Her first book, Future Sex, was published in 2016 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (Simon & Schuster), and Kapitoil (Harper Perennial). He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A columnist for the New York Times, he is a regular contributor to The New...

Robert Bausch was born in Georgia, at the end of World War II, and was raised in the Washington, D.C., area. He has worked as a salesman--of automobiles, appliances, and hardware--a taxi driver, waiter, production planner, and library assistant. He was educated at George Mason University, earning a BA, an MA and an MFA, and he says he has been a writer all his life. He spent time in the military t...

Patrick Ryan is the author of the short story collection The Dream Life of Astronauts and the novels Send Me and Saint Augustine among others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jane Smiley is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Thousand Acres.  She has written more than twenty books including Private Life, Moo, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Editors' Choice, which has received a starred Kirkus Review and is deemed one of the best books to read this summer and beyond by New York Times, NPR, BBC, BuzzFeed, Book Riot, Bookish, Miami Herald, Elle, O Magazine, Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, Flavorwire, After Ellen, BookPage, Cosm...

Kevin Barry was born in Limerick in 1969 and now lives in Dublin. He writes sketches and columns for the Sunday Herald in Glasgow and the Irish Examiner in Cork. He has written about travel and literature for the Guardian, the Irish Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications. His short fiction has appeared widely on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently in the New Yorker. His...

Leigh Stein is the author of the novel The Fallback Plan, a collection of poetry called Dispatch from the Future, and a memoir, Land of Enchantment. She is co-founder and Executive Director fo the nonprofit literary organization Out of the Binders, and lives outside New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic.  He is the author of How to Read a Novelist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lev Grossman's first novel, Warp, came out in 1997. His second, Codex, was published in 2004 and became an international bestseller. The Magicians was published in 2009 and was a New York Times bestseller and one of the New Yorker‘s best books of the year. The sequel, The Magician King, came out in 2011 and was a Times bestseller too. The third and (almost certainly) last Magicians book, The Magic...

Ramona Ausubel grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of a new novel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty as well as the novel No One is Here Except All of Us (2012), and a collection of short stories A Guide to Being Born (2013).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Debra Spark is the author of five books of fiction, including Unknown Caller, The Pretty Girl, and Good for the Jews. Other books include Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing, the anthology Twenty Under Thirty, and the recently reissued novel, Coconuts for the Saint. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer duBois is the recipient of a 2013 Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2012 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award. Her debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was the winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction and the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was the winner of th...