Vanessa Hua is the author of the national bestsellers A River of Stars and Forbidden City, as well as Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, and a de Groot Foundation Writer of Note grant, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, among others. A former longtime columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic. A Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College of California, she teaches at the Sewanee Writers Conference and elsewhere. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
Liam Callanan’s most recent book, When in Rome, came out in March 2023 from Dutton. His novel Paris by the Book was a national bestseller and was translated into German, Italian and Chinese. His story collection, Listen & Other Stories won George W. Hunt, SJ Prize in Arts & Letters, and his novel The Cloud Atlas was a finalist for the Edgar Award. He’s written for Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and about chasing children’s books (in France and Greece) for the Wall Street Journal. Liam was also the founder and executive producer of the nationwide Poetry Everywhere animated film project. He teaches in the English department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he was previously department chair and director of its doctoral program in creative writing.
Marianne Boruch has published ten collections of poems including The Book of Hours (2011), Cadaver, Speak (2014), and Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (2016), and most recently The Anti-Grief (2019) all from Copper Canyon Press. Her prose includes a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011), and three essay collections, Poetry’s Old Air (Michigan’s “Poets on Poetry” series, 1993), In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity, 2005), and The Little Death of Self (again that Michigan series, 2017). Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry London, American Poetry Review, Narrative, The London Review of Books, Field, Poetry, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere, and she’s been given the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award for The Book of Hours, four Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, as well as stints as artist-in-residence at two national parks, Isle Royale and Denali. She was a Fulbright/visiting professor in the UK at the University of Edinburgh in 2012, and in 2019, a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Canberra in Australia, closely observing the astonishing wildlife there. Having taught for the last 34 years at Purdue University, she has now gone rogue and emeritus.
Dean Bakopoulos’ first novel, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (Harcourt, 2005), was a New York Times Notable Book; Bakopoulos co-wrote the film adaptation, which premiered last year at the Los Angeles Film Festival. His second novel, My American Unhappiness (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) was named one of the year’s best novels by The Chicago Tribune, and his latest novel Summerlong (Ecco, 2015) made the independent bookstore bestseller list. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Dean is now writer-in-residence at Grinnell College in Iowa, where he lives with his spouse, novelist Alissa Nutting, and their blended family of three kids. Dean and Alissa are now at work on a television series based on Alissa’s novel, Made For Love.
Lesley Nneka Arimah is the author of What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, a collection of short stories from Riverhead Books. Her collection was named one of the best books of 2017 by NPR, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, Shelf Awareness, LitHub, and more. Her stories have been honored with a National Magazine Award, the Caine Prize, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and an O. Henry Award. Arimah’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and GRANTA among other publications, and has received support from The Elizabeth George Foundation, MacDowell, Breadloaf and others. What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and won the 2017 Kirkus Prize, the 2018 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club among other honors. Arimah is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Writing. She lives in the Midwest and is working on a novel about you.
is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf, 2021). The recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and many other awards, he was born in Tehran, Iran. He joined the Program faculty in 2018.
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