Ben Purkert is the author of the debut novel The Men Can’t Be Saved, named one of Vanity Fair‘s Top 20 Books of 2023, and the poetry collection For the Love of Endings. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and he’s been featured by NPR, Esquire, and The Boston Globe. He holds degrees from Harvard and NYU, where he was a New York Times Fellow. He teaches in the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program.
Tessa Fontaine is the author of THE ELECTRIC WOMAN: A MEMOIR IN DEATH-DEFYING ACTS, a New York Times Editors’ Choice; Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and best book of the year by Southern Living, Refinery29, Amazon Editors’, and The New York Post. THE RED GROVE, her debut novel, was named a best book by Amazon Editors’ and People Magazine and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Other writing can be found in Outside, The New York Times, Glamour, AGNI, The Believer, People, LitHub, Creative Nonfiction, and more. Raised outside San Francisco, Tessa is a former professor and has taught in jails and prisons. She co-founded and teaches the Accountability Workshops with writer and pal Annie Hartnett, and lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her daughter, goofy dog and sassy cat.
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He is the author of a new, critically acclaimed novel, The Road to the Salt Sea, a finalist for the International Book awards, and currently longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize. His work has appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, Image Journal, and other literary publications. He has received numerous residencies and fellowships and has been a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing, Graywolf Press Africa Prize, and UK’s The First Novel Prize. He won an Editor-Writer Mentorship Program Award for Diverse Writers. He studied at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa; is graduate of the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts; and earned his PhD in English and Creative Writing from Georgia State University. He has taught creative writing in Africa, Sweden, and the United States and was visiting faculty at Vermont College of Fine Art’s MFA in Creative Writing. He currently teaches fiction writing as an Assistant Professor of English and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University and as Fiction Faculty in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Dan Chaon’s most recent book is Sleepwalk (2022.) He is the author of six previous books, including Ill Will, a national bestseller, named one of the ten best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize; the national bestseller Await Your Reply; and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and the O.Henry Collection. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction and the Shirley Jackson Award, and he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland.
Deepa Anappara’s first novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time and NPR. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature. It has been translated into over twenty languages. Anappara is the co-editor of Letters to a Writer of Colour, a collection of personal essays on fiction, race, and culture, published in March 2023. Her second novel, The Last of Earth, will be published in 2025. Anappara has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative-Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She previously worked as a journalist in India, where she lived until moving to the UK. She now teaches creative writing in London.
Tim Horvath is the author of Understories (Bellevue Literary Press), which won the New Hampshire Literary Award, and Circulation (sunnyoutside). His fiction appears in or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, AGNI, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Best Small Fictions 2021, and elsewhere; his reviews appear in Georgia Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and American Book Review. He teaches at Phillips Exeter and in the Stony Brook MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literature, as well as GrubStreet. He is a Senior Editor at Conjunctions and a co-founder of One Book, One Manchester. He is currently working on a novel called The Spinal Descent, an excerpt of which can be found in Ten Piscataqua Writers 2023.
Edie Meidav is the author of novels such as Lola,California (FSG) and Crawl Space (FSG), story collections, and the recent hybrid lyric novel, Another Love Discourse (MIT Press/2022), which won the Big Other Fiction prize. Her work has received the Bard Fiction Prize for writers under 40, the Kafka Award for best novel by an American women, the Howard Fellowship, support from Lannan, Whiting, and Fulbright organizations (Sri Lanka, Cyprus), and elsewhere, and has been called an editorial pick by the New York Times, the L.A. Times and elsewhere. She directs the MFA for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst where she is provost professor.
Fernanda Eberstadt has published five novels and two books of non-fiction. Her most recent book, BITE YOUR FRIENDS: STORIES OF THE BODY MILITANT, was published by Europa Editions in the US and the UK in March 2024. She writes for publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Vogue, frieze, Granta, and Literary Hub, and is an editor at large for the European Review of Books. She got a BA and an MA in English Language and Literature from Magdalen College, Oxford, and has taught at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zelle MFA program. She lives in London.
Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her collection of 40 palindromic sonnets, titled This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, is forthcoming from Penguin Poets in Spring 2027. She’s the winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry for O, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. She’s also the author of Louder than Hearts and To Live in Autumn, as well as the chapbooks 3arabi Song and There Was and How Much There Was. Her work has appeared in LARB, Lithub, The Nation, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She’s the co-editor, with Hala Alyan, of the anthology We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. Zeina currently resides in California.
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award, and Leaving Biddle City (Sarabande Books, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Old Dominion University and teaches poetry in the Warren Wilson College MFA program for Writers.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
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