Hanna Pylväinen is the author of the novel We Sinners, which received the 2012 Whiting Award, and the novel The End of Drum-Time, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and LitHub. She is the recipient of residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Lásságámmi Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others.
Robin Romm is the author of The Mercy Papers and The Mother Garden. She recently edited Double Bind: Women on Ambition, a collection of essays by brilliant women on the subject of female striving. She has taught in our Program since 2013.
Alan Shapiro is the author of fourteen books of poetry, as well as works of fiction and criticism. Among has awards are the Kingsley Tufts Award, an LA Times Book Award in poetry, two fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundations. Alan joined our faculty in 2008.
Joan Silber is the author of eight books of fiction and The Art of Time in Fiction. Her recent novel, Improvement, won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence and first taught in our program in 1986.
Bennett Sims is the author of the novel A Questionable Shape, which received the Bard Fiction Prize, and the story collection White Dialogues. He is a recipient of a fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. He teaches at the University of Iowa.
Anna Solomon is the author of the novels The Book of V., Leaving Lucy Pear, and The Little Bride. Her short stories, essays, and criticism have appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Tablet, The Los Angeles Times, and Slate, among other publications. Co-editor with Eleanor Henderson of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers, she is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and elsewhere, and has twice been awarded the Pushcart Prize. Previously she worked as an award-winning journalist for NPR’s Living On Earth. Anna holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Debra Spark is the author of six books of fiction, including, most recently, Unknown Caller, The Pretty Girl, and Good for the Jews. Other books include two essay collections on fiction writing (Curious Attractions and And Then Something Happened) and the anthology Twenty Under Thirty. Spark has published numerous articles, book reviews, short stories, essays, travel articles, food articles, and op-eds in publications like Agni, the Boston Globe, the Cincinnati Review, the Chicago Tribune, Epoch, Esquire, Five Points, Food and Wine, Harvard Review, the Huffington Post, Maine Magazine, Narrative, New England Travel and Life, the New England Review, the New York Times, Ploughshares, salon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, Yale Alumni Magazine, and Yankee, among other places. For a decade, she had a side specialty in writing about art, home and design for magazines like Décor, Dwell, Elysian, Interiors, New England Home, Maine Home+Design, and Down East, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a Maine Humanities Council “One State/One Read” program, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, a Wisconsin Institute Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Michigan Literary Fiction Award, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is a professor at Colby College and has taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1996. She lives north of Portland, Maine.
Mary Szybist won the National Book Award for her second collection, Incarnadine . Other accolades include a Witter Bynner Fellowship, an NEA, and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, She teaches at Lewis & Clark, and joined our faculty in 2011.
Alan Williamson recently retired from the University of California at Davis. He has also taught at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and Brandeis. His books of poems are Presence, The Muse of Distance, Love and the Soul, Res Publica, The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems and Franciscan Notes. He has also published five critical books: Introspection and Contemporary Poetry; Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell; Eloquence and Mere Life; Almost a Girl: Male Writers and Female Identification, and Westernness: A Meditation. He has done a number of translations from the Italian, including The Living Theatre: Selected Poems of Bianca Tarozzi, co-translated with Jeanne Foster. He has received grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre, Barter, and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She teaches at Princeton. She joined the Program faculty in 2012.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
701 Warren Wilson Rd. Swannanoa, NC 28778
[email protected] (828) 771-3715