Novelist and filmmaker T. Geronimo Johnson was born in New Orleans. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow, Johnson has taught writing at UC Berkeley, Stanford, the Writers’ Workshop, the Prague Summer Program, Oregon State University, San Quentin, Texas State, and elsewhere. He has worked on, at, or in brokerages, kitchens, construction sites, phone rooms, education non-profits, writing centers, summer camps,
ladies shoe stores, nightclubs, law firms, offset print shops, and a (pre-2016) political campaign that shall remain unnamed. He also wrote a couple of novels that have—between the two—been selected by the Wall Street Journal Book Club, named a 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, shortlisted for the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, named a finalist for The Bridge Book Award, named a finalist for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, adapted into a critically acclaimed play, included on Time Magazine’s list of the top ten books of 2015, awarded the Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and named the winner of the 2015 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Johnson was also a National Book Award judge in 2016, the recipient of the inaugural Simpson Family Literary Prize in 2017, and a 2017-2018 Rome Prize Fellow. He lives in Rome, Italy. geronimo1.com.
C.J. Hribal is the author of the novel The Company Car, which won the Anne Powers Book Award, and three other works of fiction. His collection of novellas and stories, The Clouds in Memphis, won the AWP Prize in Short Fiction. He is also the author of the novel American Beauty, the collection of stories and novellas, Matty’s Heart, and he edited the collection The Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing from the New World. His story, “Do I Look Sick to You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)” won the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bush Foundation. His BA is from St. Norbert College and his MA from Syracuse University. He is the Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
Lauren Groff received a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of two story collections and three novels. Her most recent collection, Florida, won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Kirkus prize; her most recent novel, Fates and Furies, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and won the American Booksellers’ Association Fiction Book of the Year Award, as well as France’s Grand Prix de L’héroïne. Her short fiction has won a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Paul Bowles Prize from Five Points, and her stories have appeared in journals including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, One Story and Ploughshares, as well as in five editions of the Best American Short Stories anthology and the book 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. She was a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellow, was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into thirty languages.
Jeremy Gavron’s fourth novel, Felix Culpa, was published in the US in 2019. His investigation into his mother’s suicide, A Woman on the Edge of Time, out now in paperback in the US, was a book of the year in newspapers in the UK, Australia, and the Netherlands, and a finalist for the Gordon Burn Prize. A BBC radio dramatization aired in June 2019. His previous books include King Leopold’s Dream, a New York Times Notable Book, and The Book of Israel, winner of the Encore Award. Educated at Cambridge University and NYU, he started out as a journalist and was a correspondent in Africa and Asia. He has been writer-in-residence in a prison, a hospice, and at University College in London, where he lives with his wife and sometimes their two daughters.
Carolyn Ferrell is the author of the novel Dear Miss Metropolitan (Holt, 2021) which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her story collection Don’t Erase Me was awarded the 1997 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the John C. Zacharis First Book Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. Ferrell’s stories and essays have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2018 and The Best American Short Stories 2020, edited by Roxane Gay and Curtis Sittenfeld, respectively; The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike; Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, edited by Gloria Naylor; Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents, edited by Lise Funderburg; and other places. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the Fulbright Association, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, and Sarah Lawrence College. Since 1996, she has been a faculty member in both the undergraduate and MFA programs at Sarah Lawrence; she joined the Warren Wilson faculty in January of 2020.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. Calvocoressi is the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022 – 2023.
Marisa Silver is the author, most recently, of the novel Little Nothing, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and winner of the 2017 Ohioana Award for Fiction. Her other novels include Mary Coin, a New York Times Bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller’s Award, The God of War, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and No Direction Home. Her first collection of short stories, Babe in Paradise was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. When her second collection, Alone With You was published, The New York Times called her “one of California’s most celebrated contemporary writers.” Silver has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Silver’s fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies. She received her MFA from The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson.
Daniel Tobin is the author of eight books of poems, Where the World is Made (Middlebury College Press, 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010), The Net (Four Way Books, 2014), From Nothing (Four Way Books, 2016), and Blood Labors (Four Way Books, 2018), which the New York Times named one of the Best Poetry Books of the year. His suite of versions of poems from the German of Paul Celan, The Stone in the Air, also appeared in 2018. He is the author of the critical studies Awake in America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (University of Kentucky Press, 1999), and On Serious Earth (Little Island Press, 2018), as well as the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge (Quale, 2007), Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Arts (University of Michigan Press, 2008, with Pimone Triplett), and To the Many: Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge (Little Island, 2018), which received a Special Commendation from the Poetry Society (U.K.) Among his awards are the “The Discovery/The Nation Award,” The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, the Julia Ward Howe Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Laura van den Berg’s most recent novel, The Third Hotel, was an ABA IndieNext Pick, named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen outlets, and a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award. She is also the author of the novel Find Me, longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and two story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, and The Isle of Youth. Both collections were finalists for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her honors include the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an O. Henry Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. The title story of her debut collection is currently being adapted for the screen by writer/producer Jenny Halper and director Claire McCarthy, with Naomi Watts and Sophie Lillis attached to star. Laura’s short fiction has recently appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, BOMB, McSweeney’s, The Best American Short Stories, and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA, where she is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard. This spring, she will be visiting faculty at the Michener Center for Writers. Laura’s next story collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, is forthcoming from FSG in June 2020.
Connie Voisine is the author of the book of poems, The Bower, begun on a Fulbright Fellowship to Northern Ireland. A previous book, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her first book, Cathedral of the North, won the Associated Writing Program’s Award in Poetry. She has poems published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Educated at Yale University, University of California at Irvine, and University of Utah, Voisine directs the creative writing program at New Mexico State University. She was a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
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