Christopher Castellani’s fourth novel, Leading Men — for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the MacDowell Colony — was published by Viking in February 2019. His collection of essays on point of view in fiction, The Art of Perspective, was published by Graywolf in 2016. His three previous novels, a trilogy that follows an immigrant Italian family, were published by Algonquin. Castellani has just finished his two-year term as the Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, and has been a fiction supervisor and frequent member of the academic board at Warren Wilson since 2008. In 2024, he was awarded a Literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives mostly in Provincetown, MA.
David Haynes is the author of seven novels for adults and five books for younger readers. He is an emeritus professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he directed the creative writing program for ten years. Since 1996 he has taught regularly in MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and has also taught writing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Hamline University, at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, and at the Writers’ Garret in Dallas. He has received a fellowship from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and several of his short stories have been read and recorded for the National Public Radio series “Selected Shorts.” His seventh and most recently novel is A STAR IN THE FACE OF THE SKY. He is also the author of a series for children called “The West Seventh Wildcats.” His upcoming book is a collection, MARTHA’S DAUGHTER: A NOVELLA AND STORIES.
David spent fifteen years as a K-12 teacher in urban schools, mostly teaching middle grades in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He worked on numerous school reform efforts, including developing the influential Saturn School of Tomorrow, where he served as Associate Teacher for Humanities. He has been involved in the work of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, coordinating efforts of the nation’s finest educators to develop standards in the fields of social studies, vocational education, early childhood education and for teachers of students whose first language is not English.
David Haynes co-founded and serves as the Board Chair for Kimbilio, a community of writers and scholars committed to developing, empowering and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora and their stories.
Christine Kitano is the author of the poetry collections Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press) and Sky Country (BOA Editions), which won the Central New York Book Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Dumb Luck & other poems (Texas Review Press) won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. She is co-editor of They Rise Like a Wave (Blue Oak Press), an anthology of Asian American women and nonbinary poets. She is an associate professor in the Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University.
Alix Ohlin is the author of six books, most recently We Want What We Want: Stories (2021). Her 2019 novel Dual Citizens, like her novel Inside, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and many other places. She lives in Vancouver, where she is the Director of the UBC School of Creative Writing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
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