First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Elizabeth Strout is the author of the New York Times bestseller Olive Kitteridge, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; the national bestseller Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine and New Yo...

Morowa Yejidé is a native of Washington, DC, is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Time of the Locust, which was a 2012 finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, long listed for the 2015 PEN/Bingham Prize, and a 2015 NAACP Image Award nominee. Her most recent novel, Creatures of Passage, was shortlisted for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and a 2021 Notable Book selection...

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of eight books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, The Souvenir Museum and Hero of This Book. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center,...

Omer Friedlander was born in Jerusalem in 1994 and grew up in Tel Aviv. He earned a BA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, England, and an MFA from Boston University, where he was supported by the Saul Bellow Fellowship. His short stories have won numerous awards, and have been published in the United States, Canada, France, and Israel. A Starworks Fellow in Fiction at New York...

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. H...

Tracy K. Smith is the author of five poetry collections, including Such Color: New and Selected Poems; Wade in the Water, winner of the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize. Her debut collection, The Body’s Question, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2002. Her second book, Duende, won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Po...

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of five novels and one book of nonfiction. She has been the recipient of a Stegner Fellowship in fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, and a Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from Lambda Literary, among other awards. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, the Bo...

George Saunders is the author of eleven books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner was selected to represent each decade, from the fifty years since the Prize’s inception. His stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 1992. The short story coll...

Andrea Barrett is the author of nine previous works of fiction, including the National Book Award–winning Ship Fever and Pulitzer Prize finalist Servants of the Map. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship, as well as a finalist for the Story Prize and a recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Having lived in Rochester, New York, and w...

Kevin McIlvoy published six novels: One Kind Favor, A Waltz, Little Peg, Hyssop, At the Gate of All Wonder, and The Fifth Station, as well as two collections of stories, 57 Octaves Below Middle C and The Complete History of New Mexico. His work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Harper’s Magazine, The Collagist, The Southern Review, River City, Ploughshares, and The Missouri Review. He taught in the De...

Katie Runde is originally from the Jersey Shore, where her family ran boardwalk businesses. She has lived in Southern California, New York City, and Puerto Rico, and now lives in Iowa City with her husband and two daughters. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and attended the Tin House Summer Workshop. Her first novel is called The Shore. Learn more about your ad choic...

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the linked story collection, If I Survive You, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a National Book Award Nominee, and an Indie National Bestseller. Jonathan is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and is the recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts (Prose) Literature Fellowship. He is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Sta...

Jill Bialosky is a poet, editor, writer, and novelist. Her new poetry collection Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, four critically acclaimed novels, including The Prize, and most recently, The Deceptions, and two memoirs, Poetry Will Save Your Life and...

Carlos Allende is a media psychology scholar and a writer of fiction. He has written three novels: Cuadrillas y Contradanzas, a historical melodrama set during the War of Reform in Mexico, and Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle, a horror farce set in Venice, California and Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love. Based on his research on narrative persuasion and audience engagement, he developed the c...

Casey Parks is a reporter for The Washington Post who covers gender and family issues. She was previously a staff reporter at the Jackson Free Press and spent a decade at The Oregonian, where she wrote about race and LGBTQ+ issues and was a finalist for the Livingston Award. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, ESPN, USA Today, and The Nat...

Eric Nguyen earned an MFA in creative writing from McNeese State University in Louisiana. He has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary, Voices of Our Nation Arts (VONA), and the Tin House Writers Workshop. He is the editor-in-chief of diaCRITICS and lives in Washington, DC. His first novel is Things We Lost to the Water. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, and The O. Henry Pri...

Chinelo Okparanta was born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Her debut short story collection, Happiness, Like Water, was nominated for the Nigerian Writers Award, long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, as well as the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Her first novel, Under the Udala Trees,...

Poet, critic, and professor James Longenbach wrote primarily on modernist and contemporary poetry. He is the author of the critical works Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, Modern Poetry After Modernism, The Resistance to Poetry, The Art of the Poetic Line, The Virtues of Poetry, How Poems Get Made, and The Lyric Now. His poetry collections incl...

Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), First Light, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Soul Thief, and The Sun Collective, and the story collections Believers, Gryphon, Harmony of the World, A Relative Stranger, There’s Something I Want You to Do, and Through the Safety Net. His stories have been included in The Best American Short Stori...

Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award, Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader’s Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories of Violence. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center US...

Ben H. Winters is the author of the novels The Quiet Boy, Golden State; the New York Times bestselling Underground Airlines; The Last Policeman and its two sequels; the horror novel Bedbugs; and several works for young readers. His first novel, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, was also a Times bestseller. Ben has won the Edgar Award for mystery writing, the Philip K. Dick award in science f...

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third poetry collection is called O. Her second full-length collection, Louder than Hearts, won the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Zeina is also the author of two chapbooks: 3arabi Song, selected from 1720 manuscripts as winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and There Was and How Much There Was. Her first book, To Live in Autumn, centered...

Tsering Yangzom Lama is a Tibetan writer. She was born and raised in Nepal, and has since lived in Canada and the United States. Tsering earned her MFA in writing from Columbia University and a BA in Creative Writing and International Relations from the University of British Columbia. Tsering’s debut novel is We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.f...

Nathanial White grew up in Maine and has lived in Mexico, Brazil, and Ecuador. His speculative fiction explores the human psyche, physical disability, culture, technology and consumerism. He currently teaches high school English in the Rocky Mountains of Western Colorado. His novella is called Conscious Designs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices