C. Dale Young received his BS in Molecular Biology and English from Boston College and both his MFA and MD from the University of Florida. He completed his medical residency in Radiation Oncology at the University of California San Francisco. He currently administers his own medical practice, practices medicine full-time, and serves as President and Chief of Sequoia Hospital’s Medical Staff. A recipient of the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Literary Editing in 2014, he edited poetry for New England Review from 1995-2014. In 2017, he was awarded the Hanes Award in Poetry by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is the author of a novel and five collections of poetry, the most recent being Prometeo (2021). A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, his work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including several volumes of The Best American Poetry, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and Poetry.
Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of Night at the Fiestas. She is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Stegner Fellowship, and a fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. She joined the program faculty in 2016.
Sally Ball is the author of three collections of poems, Hold Sway, Wreck Me and Annus Mirabilis. She has published essays and reviews in Lithub, NOR, Pleiades, The Volta, and elsewhere. Her poems have appeared in APR, Bennington, Boston, and Harvard Reviews, Ploughshares, Tin House, Yale Review, and other magazines, as well as in The Best American Poetry anthology. Professor of English and director of creative writing at Arizona State University, Ball is also the associate director of Four Way Books. Her long poem “HOLD” has been made into a large-format artist’s book by the Czech printmaker Jan Vičar (2018).
Dominic Smith is the author of six novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and published in more than a dozen countries. His latest novel, Return to Valetto—set in the world of abandoned and dwindling Italian towns and villages—was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in June 2023 and received the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for Fiction. Dominic’s short stories, essays and criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Australian. A graduate of the University of Iowa and the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, Dominic is the recipient of the Australian Indie Book of the Year Award, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Australian Council for the Arts. He grew up in Australia and currently lives in Seattle.
Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from New York University and U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. The former managing director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and an NEA fellowship. She was most recently selected to receive a 2016 Lannan Literary Fellowship and the 2017 Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is currently an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Her first poetry collection, LOOK, published by Graywolf Press in 2016, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. She is an assistant professor at Arizona State University and has taught at Stanford University.
Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020), and including the forthcoming Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award, the Shestack Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is longtime co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile and a guest host for The Slowdown. He is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Martha Rhodes is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Thin Wall,
2017, University of Pittsburgh Press’s Pitt Poetry Series. Her work has been published
widely in anthologies and journals. She is currently at work on her New and Selected
Poems. Rhodes has taught at Emerson and Sarah Lawrence Colleges, and was a
visiting professor at the University of California at Irvine. From 2010-2018, she was the
director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and she serves on panels and
faculties at writing and publishing conferences around the country. Rhodes has been
awarded residencies at MacDowell, Millay Colony, Chesterwood, and in 2025, the T.S.
Eliot House. She is the publisher and executive editor at Four Way Books in New York
City.
Matthew Olzmann is the author of three collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, Contradictions in the Design, and Constellation Route, all from Alice James Books. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. His writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. Previously, he’s taught in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in New Hampshire and teaches at Dartmouth College.
Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels and seven short story collections, including Funny Once, released in May 2014. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, NEA, and USA Artists Fellowships, as well as the Rea Award for Short Fiction. She lives in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
Sandra Lim is the author of Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006) and The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), selected by Louise Glück for the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize. The Wilderness won the Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015. She is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Getty Research Institute, and the Jentel Foundation. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, VOLT, Literary Imagination, and The New York Times. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and lives in Cambridge, MA.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
701 Warren Wilson Rd. Swannanoa, NC 28778
[email protected] (828) 771-3715