Deepa Anappara’s first novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time and NPR. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature. It has been translated into over twenty languages. Anappara is the co-editor of Letters to a Writer of Colour, a collection of personal essays on fiction, race, and culture, published in March 2023. Her second novel, The Last of Earth, will be published in 2025. Anappara has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative-Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She previously worked as a journalist in India, where she lived until moving to the UK. She now teaches creative writing in London.
Tim Horvath is the author of Understories (Bellevue Literary Press), which won the New Hampshire Literary Award, and Circulation (sunnyoutside). His fiction appears in or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, AGNI, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Best Small Fictions 2021, and elsewhere; his reviews appear in Georgia Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and American Book Review. He teaches at Phillips Exeter and in the Stony Brook MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literature, as well as GrubStreet. He is a Senior Editor at Conjunctions and a co-founder of One Book, One Manchester. He is currently working on a novel called The Spinal Descent, an excerpt of which can be found in Ten Piscataqua Writers 2023.
Edie Meidav is the author of novels such as Lola,California (FSG) and Crawl Space (FSG), story collections, and the recent hybrid lyric novel, Another Love Discourse (MIT Press/2022), which won the Big Other Fiction prize. Her work has received the Bard Fiction Prize for writers under 40, the Kafka Award for best novel by an American women, the Howard Fellowship, support from Lannan, Whiting, and Fulbright organizations (Sri Lanka, Cyprus), and elsewhere, and has been called an editorial pick by the New York Times, the L.A. Times and elsewhere. She directs the MFA for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst where she is provost professor.
Fernanda Eberstadt has published five novels and two books of non-fiction. Her most recent book, BITE YOUR FRIENDS: STORIES OF THE BODY MILITANT, was published by Europa Editions in the US and the UK in March 2024. She writes for publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Vogue, frieze, Granta, and Literary Hub, and is an editor at large for the European Review of Books. She got a BA and an MA in English Language and Literature from Magdalen College, Oxford, and has taught at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zelle MFA program. She lives in London.
Poet, fiction writer and memoirist, Karen Brennan is the author of nine books including the forthcoming Rabbit in the Moon: The Mexico Stories, and, most recently, Television, a Memoir, a hybrid collection of micro-memoir and lyric essays. Her work has been appeared in anthologies from Norton, Penguin, Greywolf, Michigan, Georgia and Spuyten Duyvil, among others. She is a recipient of an AWP award in fiction, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. A Professor Emerita from The University of Utah, Brennan lives in Tucson where she paints, writes and ruminates abstractly and expressionistically.
Yanyi is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World 2022) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale 2019), winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His work has been featured in or at NPR’s All Things Considered, New York Public Library, New England Review, Granta, and West Branch. The recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poets House, he holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University. From 2016-2021, he was the poetry editor at Foundry. Most recently, he is the recipient of a 2023 Vermont Arts Council Grant and a 2022 Tanne Foundation Award. He gives creative writing advice at his newsletter, The Reading, and is the founder of the Asian American Literary Archive.
Rita Banerjee is the author of the poetry collections Echo in Four Beats, which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018,” and Cracklers at Night. She is also editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, and author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and has taught creative writing, pedagogy, publishing, foreign language, and literature courses at Harvard, UC Berkeley, LMU Munich, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and elsewhere. She received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University and is a recipient of the Tom and Laurel Nebel Fellowship, South Asia Initiative Grants, and Tata Grants among other awards. She serves as Editor-at-Large of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Her work appears in Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, VIDA, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto Merchants of Cool: How Female Cool Could Not Be Sold, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Oliver Baez Bendorf forthcoming book of poems is Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, September 10, 2024), which Brian Teare called a “visionary book of queer ecological thought.” He is the author of two previous books of poetry: Advantages of Being Evergreen and The Spectral Wilderness, and a chapbook The Gospel According to X, selected for the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series. His work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Publishing Triangle Award, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Vermont Studio Center, Lambda Literary, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems have been featured in publications like American Poetry Review, BOMB, The Nation, and Orion, and across various anthologies including Best American Poetry, Latino Poetry: A New Anthology, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Since 2011, he has taught poetry writing to people of all ages, including at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Kalamazoo College, and through workshops across the country. He received an MFA in poetry from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BA from University of Iowa. Born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, he now lives along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in Colorado.
CM Burroughs is associate professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and author of The Vital System (Tupelo, 2012) and Master Suffering (Tupelo, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Book Award and L.A. Times Book Award. Burroughs’ poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Poetry, Ploughshares, Cave Canem’s Gathering Ground, and Best American Experimental Writing. Burroughs has been awarded fellowships and grants from Yaddo, MacDowell, Djerassi Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Cave Canem Foundation.
Robert Boswell is the author of six novels, three story collections, a play, a cyberpunk novel, and two books of nonfiction. He has received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, the John Gassner Prize for Playwriting, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harpers, and many other magazines. He is married to Antonya Nelson. They share the Cullen Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
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