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 five books of poetry: My Destination (forthcoming from Flood Editions and Carcanet Press in 2026), The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, 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, she lives in Philadelphia, but will be moving to San Francisco later this year. 

Jennifer Grotz received her BA in French, English, and Art History from Tulane University, her MA in English and MFA in Poetry from Indiana University, and her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Still Falling, her fourth collection of poems, appeared from Graywolf Press in 2023. She is also the author of Window Left Open; The Needle, winner of the Helen C. Smith Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Nassar Prize; and Cusp, winner of the Bakeless Prize for Poetry and the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters, both published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; as well as the limited edition letterpress chapbook Not Body, available from Urban Editions. Psalms of All My Days, her translations from the French of Patrice de La Tour du Pin, appeared from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2013. The novel Rochester Knockings, translated from the French of Hubert Haddad, appeared in 2015 from Open Letter. And Everything I Don’t Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, is co-translated from the Polish with Piotr Sommer and appeared in 2021 from World Poetry Books and received the PEN Foundation Best Book of Poetry in Translation Award. Her poems and translations have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and in five volumes of Best American Poetry.  Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and The Washington Post. She has received awards from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Camargo Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches at the University of Rochester is director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.

Jane Hamilton is the author of seven novels, most recently The Excellent Lombards. Her first book, The Book of Ruth, won the Pen/Hemingway Award and the GLCA New Writer’s Award, and that novel and A Map of the World were Oprah selections.   

Brooks Haxton has published seven collections of shorter poems, two book-length narrative poems, one book of creative nonfiction, and four books of translations. He has received grants and awards from the NEA, the NEH, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and others. He lives with his wife in Syracuse and teaches at Syracuse University.

David Haynes is the author of seven novels for adults and five books for younger readers.  He is an emeritus professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he directed the creative writing program for ten years. Since 1996 he has taught regularly in MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and has also taught writing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Hamline University, at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, and at the Writers’ Garret in Dallas. He has received a fellowship from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and several of his short stories have been read and recorded for the National Public Radio series “Selected Shorts.” His seventh and most recently novel is A STAR IN THE FACE OF THE SKY. He is also the author of a series for children called “The West Seventh Wildcats.” His upcoming book is a collection, MARTHA’S DAUGHTER: A NOVELLA AND STORIES.

David spent fifteen years as a K-12 teacher in urban schools, mostly teaching middle grades in Saint Paul, Minnesota.  He worked on numerous school reform efforts, including developing the influential Saturn School of Tomorrow, where he served as Associate Teacher for Humanities.  He has been involved in the work of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, coordinating efforts of the nation’s finest educators to develop standards in the fields of social studies, vocational education, early childhood education and for teachers of students whose first language is not English.

David Haynes co-founded and serves as the Board Chair for Kimbilio, a community of writers and scholars committed to developing, empowering and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora and their stories.

Caitlin Horrocks is the author of a story collection, This is Not Your City (2011) and a novel, The Vexations (2019). Her forthcoming story collection is Life Among the Terranauts.  She teaches at Grand Valley State and joined our faculty in 2013.

Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Imperial Liquor. A former Stegner Fellow and Cave Canem Fellow, his honors include the Hurston/Wright Legacy award, the Dorset Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin