Lysley Tenorio is the author of the novel The Son of Good Fortune, winner of the New American Voices Award, and the story collection Monstress, named a book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Stegner fellowship, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as residencies from the MacDowell Colony,
Yaddo, and the Bogliasco Foundation. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and have been adapted for the stage by The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the Ma-Yi Theater in New York City. He was a 2021 finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and will be a 2021-22 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. He is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Robert Boswell is the author of six novels, three story collections, a play, a cyberpunk novel, and two books of nonfiction. He has received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, the John Gassner Prize for Playwriting, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harpers, and many other magazines. He is married to Antonya Nelson. They share the Cullen Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man, finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the PEN Oakland Prize and the Ernest J Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Maud Casey is the author of five works of fiction, most recently City of Incurable Women, and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in A Public Space, Literary Imagination, New England Review, The New York Times, Poetry Daily, and The Sewannee Review. She is the recipient of the Calvino Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland.
Christopher Castellani’s fourth novel, Leading Men — for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the MacDowell Colony — was published by Viking in February 2019. His collection of essays on point of view in fiction, The Art of Perspective, was published by Graywolf in 2016. His three previous novels, a trilogy that follows an immigrant Italian family, were published by Algonquin. Castellani has just finished his two-year term as the Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, and has been a fiction supervisor and frequent member of the academic board at Warren Wilson since 2008. In 2024, he was awarded a Literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives mostly in Provincetown, MA.
Adrienne Celt Adrienne Celt’s debut novel, The Daughters, won the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the 2016 Crawford Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and the NYPL. Her second novel, Invitation to a Bonfire, was an Indie Next Pick for June 2018, an Amazon Top 10 Book of the Month, and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Financial Times of London and Electric Literature—it’s currently being adapted for television by AMC. Her latest novel, End of the World House (April 2022) has been named a Best Book of Spring 2022 by Town & Country, Lit Hub, The Millions, the Chicago Review of Books, PopSugar, Bustle, and elsewhere. Also a cartoonist, her collection of comics, Apocalypse How? An Existential Bestiary was released by Diagram/New Michigan Press in 2016. The recipient of an O. Henry Prize, a Glenna Luschei Award, the Swarthout Prize, and residencies from The Lighthouse Works, Jentel, Ragdale, and the Willapa Bay AiR, her work has appeared in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Strange Horizons, the Paris Review Daily, the Tin House Open Bar, The Rumpus, Ecotone, Epoch, and many other places. She received her MFA from Arizona State University in 2012, and was the Pima County Library Writer in Residence during the summer of 2016. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and has been publishing the webcomic loveamongthelampreys.com since 2011.
Lan Samantha Chang is the author of Inheritance, a collection of stories, and two novels, Hunger and All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost. The director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of numerous awards, she has taught in our program since 2000.
Sonya Chung is the author of the novels Long for This World (Scribner, 2010) and The Loved Ones (Relegation Books, 2016), which was a selection for Kirkus Best Fiction, NYTimes Matchbook Recommends, IndieNext, Library Journal Best Indie, The Nervous Breakdown Book Club, and Buzzfeed Books Recommends, among others. She is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Key West Literary Seminars residency, and an Escape to Create artist residency. Her essays have appeared at Tin House, Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, The Threepenny Review, and in the anthologies This is The Place: Women Writing About Home, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, Conversations with James Salter, and Short: An International Anthology. Sonya is a staff writer for The Millions, founding editor of Bloom, and has taught writing at Columbia University, NYU, the Gotham Writers Workshop, and Skidmore College, where currently she is Artist-in-Residence. She lives in New York City, where she also works as Deputy Director at Film Forum, a nonprofit art cinema.
Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She was the Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the NY Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers.
Daisy Fried is the author of four books of poetry: The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships. An occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation and elsewhere; poetry editor for the journal Scoundrel Time; and a member of the faculty of the BFA Program in Creative Writing at University of the Arts. She lives in Philadelphia.