2023 Authors

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Matt Bell

Matt Bell

Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) published by Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. His novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indies Choice Adult Book of the Year Honor Recipient, and was selected as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award, among other honors. Both In the House and Scrapper were selected by the Library of Michigan as Michigan Notable Books.

Selected Writings:

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Peter Ho Davies

Peter Ho Davies

​​Peter Ho Davies’ most recent books are the novel A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and The Art of Revision: The Last Word, his first work of non-fiction. His previous novel, The Fortunes, a New York Times Notable Book, won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and the Chautauqua Prize, and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His first novel, The Welsh Girl, a London Times Best Seller, was long-listed for the Booker Prize. He has also published two short story collections, The Ugliest House in the World (winner of the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, and the Oregon Book Award) and Equal Love (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a New York Times Notable Book). Davies’ work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, among others, and been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. In 2003 Granta magazine named him among its “Best of Young British Novelists.” Davies is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts and a winner of the PEN/Malamud and PEN/Macmillan Awards. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, he now makes his home in the US. He has taught at the University of Oregon, Northwestern and Emory University, and is currently on faculty at the University of Michigan.

Selected Writings:​

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Charles Baxter

Charles Baxter

Cha​rles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), First Light, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Soul Thief, and most recently, The Sun Collective, as well as the story collections Believers, Gryphon, Harmony of the World, A Relative Stranger, There’s Something I Want You to Do, and Through the Safety Net. He’s also published several collections of essays, including Wonderlands, Burning Down the House, and The Art of Subtext. His stories have appeared in several anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The O. Henry Prize Story Anthology. He has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Baxter currently lives in Minneapolis.

Selected Writings:


Lan Samantha Chang

Lan Samantha Chang

La​n Samantha Chang’s new novel, The Family Chao, was published by Norton in 2022. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger, and two novels, Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her work has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and has been translated into nine languages. She’s been chosen twice for The Best American Short Stories and has received creative writing fellowships from Stanford University, Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Chang is the director of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she currently live in Iowa City with her husband and daughter.

Selected Writings:

January Gill O'Neil

January Gill O'Neil

Jan​uary Gill O'Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University, and the author of Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and currently serves on the boards of AWP and Montserrat College of Art. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. Her poem, “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial,” was a co-winner of the 2022 Allen Ginsberg Poetry award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O'Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. O’Neil is one of five judges for the 2022 National Book Award in poetry. She lives with her two children in Beverly, MA.

Selected Writings:

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Lynn Melnick

Lynn Melnick

L​ynn Melnick is the author of the memoir, I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton, from the University of Texas Press's American Music Series/Spiegel & Grau Audio (October 2022). She is also the author of three poetry collections, Refusenik (2022), Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017), and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), all with YesYes Books, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). Her work has appeared in APR, LA Review of Books, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, A Public Space, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. She has received grants from the Cafe Royal Cultural Society and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University, Princeton University, and the 92Y. Born in Indianapolis, she grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Selected Writings:

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Tyehimba Jess

Tyehimba Jess

Tyehi​mba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Jess is a Professor of English at College of Staten Island. Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.

Selected Writings:

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Nikky Finney

Nikky Finney

Nikky Finney has been a faculty member at Cave Canem summer workshop for African American poets; a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a particular place for poets of visiting professor at Berea and Smith Colleges. She won the PEN American Open Book Award in 1996 and the Elizabeth O'Neill Verner Award for the Arts in South Carolina in 2016. She edited Black Poets Lean South, a Cave Canem anthology (2007) authored On Wings Made of Gauze (1985), Rice (1995), Heartwood (1997), The World Is Round (2003), and Head Off & Split, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry. Her acceptance speech has become a thing of legend, described by the 2011 NBA host, John Lithgow, as "the best acceptance speech ever–for anything." In her home state of South Carolina, she involves herself in the day-to-day battles for truth and justice while also guiding both undergraduates and MFA students at the University of South Carolina where she is the John H. Bennett, Jr., Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters, with appointments in both the Department of English Language and Literature and the African American Studies Program. Nikky Finney's work, in book form and video, including her now legendary acceptance speech, is on display in the inaugural exhibition of the African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Finney's work includes the arenas of Black girl genius unrecognized, Black history misplaced and forgotten, and the stories of women who prefer to jump instead of ride the traditional tracks of polite and acceptable society. In her full body of poetry and storytelling, she explores the whispers and shouts of sexuality, the invisibility of poverty in a world continually smitten by the rich and the powerful, the graciousness of Black family perseverance, the truth of history, the grace and necessity of memory, as well as the titanic loss of habitat for all things precious and wild. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, was released in 2020 from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.

Selected Writings:

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Ron Rash

Ron Rash

​Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena (which was made into a motion picture, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper) and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four prizewinning novels, including The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, as well as featured in Best American Short Stories multiple times, he teaches at Western Carolina University

Selected Writings:

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Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo C​​ampbell is the author of the novels Once Upon a River, a National Bestseller, and Q Road. Her critically-acclaimed short fiction collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP prize for short fiction; and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters (Autumn 2015). Her story “The Smallest Man in the World” was awarded a Pushcart Prize and her story “The Inventor, 1972″ was awarded the 2009 Eudora Welty Prize from Southern Review. She was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.

Selected Writings

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Traci Brimhall

Traci Brimhall

Traci Brimhall is the author of four collections of poetry: Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press, 2020); Saudade (Copper Canyon Press, 2017); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), selected for the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her children’s book, Sophia & The Boy Who Fell, was published by SeedStar Books in 2017.Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, Ploughshares, and New York Times Magazine. Her essays have appeared in Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Gulf Coast. Some of her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best of the Net, PBS Newshour, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She has also received the Just Desserts Short Fiction Prize (selected by Roxane Gay), the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Jane Geske Award for poetry (selected by Kwame Dawes), and a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry comic collaborations with Eryn Cruft can be found in Guernica, The Poetry Comics, and Nashville Review. She is also a co-author of two collaborative chapbooks with Brynn Saito: Bright Power, Dark Peace (Diode Editions, 2013) and Wild Recovery (Tupelo Press, 2020). She received a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry and the Karnes Fellowship from Purdue Libraries to research Amelia Earhart’s unpublished poems. She currently teaches at Kansas State University and was recently selected as the Poet Laureate of Kansas.

Selected Writings

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Chigozie Obioma

Chigozie Obioma

Chigozie O​bioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His two novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) were shortlisted for The Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into more than 29 languages. They have won awards including the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and the LA Times Book Prize, and been nominated for many others. The Fishermen was adapted into an award-winning stage play by Gbolahan Obisesan that played in the UK and South Africa between 2018-2019. He was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015. Obioma is the Program Director and a mentor at Oxbelly Writers Retreat. He is the James E. Ryan Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and divides his time between the US and Nigeria.

Selected Writings: