2022 Authors

Alix Ohlin

Alix Ohlin has written 6 books of fiction, most recently a story collection called We Want What We Want. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and many other places. She lives in Vancouver and is the Director of the UBC School of Creative Writing.

Selected Writings:

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Steven Schwartz

Steven Schwartz grew up in Chester, Pennsylvania, and has lived in Colorado for the past 35 years. He is the author of four collections of stories, To Leningrad in Winter, Lives of the Fathers, Little Raw Souls, and Madagascar: New and Selected Stories, and the novels Therapy and A Good Doctor’s Son. His fiction has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, the Ploughshares Cohen Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Colorado Book Award for the Novel and for Literary Fiction, and two O. Henry Prize Story Awards. His nonfiction has been published in the Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, Image, and has received the Cleanth Brooks Prize in Nonfiction from the Southern Review. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Colorado State where he taught in the MFA Creative Writing Program for 30 years and now serves as fiction editor for Colorado Review. His latest book is The Tenderest of Strings, a novel.

Selected Writings:

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Matthew Olzmann

Matthew Olzmann is the author of three collections of poems from Alice James Books: Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, Contradictions in the Design, and Constellation Route. His writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity and elsewhere. He’s been awarded fellowships from the Kresge Arts Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony. Currently, he teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Selected Writings:

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Dilruba Ahmed

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama. Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Re-view, and Ploughshares. Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books), Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s) and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. She has taught with Chatham University’s MFA Program and Hugo House in Seattle, and joined the faculty at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers in January 2021

Selected Writings:

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Amy Hempel

Amy Hempel is a recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Artists Foundation, and the Academy of Arts and Letters, Hempel is the author of Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage, and is co-editor of Unleashed. Her stories have appeared in Harper's, GQ, Vanity Fair, and many other publications, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Her Collected Stories was named by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2007, and won the Ambassador Book Award for best fiction of the year. In 2008 she received the REA Award for the Short Story, and in 2009 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She has a BA in Journalism from San Jose State University, and has taught at Sarah Lawrence, The New School, Duke, Princeton, and currently teaches at Harvard, too. She lives in New York City.

Selected Writings

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Megan Mayhew Bergman

Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of three books, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, and How Strange a Season, forthcoming from Scribner in March 2022. She is currently writing a book on the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, also with Scribner. Megan is a journalist, essayist, and critic. She has written columns on climate change and the natural world for The Guardian and The Paris Review. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Orion, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2011 and 2015, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She was awarded the Garrett Award for Fiction and the Phil Reed Environmental Writing Award for Journalism, and, previously, fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the American Library in Paris. She currently teaches literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College, where she also serves as Director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference.

Selected Writings

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Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith is the author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestseller Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. Her latest collection of poems, Goldenrod, will be released in July 2021. Smith’s poems and essays are widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and elsewhere. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Public Radio International called it “the official poem of 2016.”

Selected Writings

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Ada Limón

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2022.

Selected Writings

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Paul Harding

Paul Harding is the author of three novels, Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Enon, and the forthcoming This Other Eden (W. W. Norton, 2023). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and PEN America. He has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, The Michener Center for Writers, and Harvard University. Currently, he is the Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University.

Selected Writings:

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Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett is the author of three works of fiction: Imagine Me Gone, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and the novel Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. His journalism on culture and politics have appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic Monthly, among others. He has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and the PEN/Malamud and PEN/Winship Awards. In 2016, he received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Yale Law School, he has been a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

Selected Writings:

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Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of seven books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, The Souvenir Museum, and the forthcoming novel, entitled, The Hero of This Book. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Thunderstruck & Other Stories won the 2015 Story Prize. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places

Selected Writings:

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Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill is an acclaimed fiction writer whose debut novel, Last Things (1999), was named a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the LA Times First Book Award. The New York Times named her second novel, Dept. of Speculation, one of the 10 Best Books of 2014, and her latest novel, Weather, was published in 2020 Her critical work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and Slate. She is coeditor of multiple anthologies and the author of a number of children’s books. Her honors include a Stegner Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, New York Film Academy Fellowship in Fiction, and resident fellowships at Macdowell Colony and Yaddo. Offill previously taught in the MFA programs at Brooklyn College, Syracuse University, Columbia University, and served as Visiting Writer for Sarah Lawrence College, and as Writer in Residence at Vassar College.

Selected Writings:

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Jess Walter

Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper's, McSweeney's, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

Selected Writings

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Kevin Wilson

Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and three novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South.

Selected Writings

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Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished professor at Florida International University in Miami.

Selected Writings:

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Gary Jackson

Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collections origin story (University of New Mexico Press, 2021) and Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf Press, 2010), which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He’s also the co-editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Publishing, 2021). The recipient of Cave Canem and Bread Loaf fellowships, he’s also an associate professor in English and creative writing at the College of Charleston where he’s currently the Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing and teaches in the MFA program.

Selected Writings:

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Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize, and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and several others. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine. She recently completed a term as President of PEN America. Her new novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit From the Goon Squad, will be published on April 5, 2022.

Selected Writings:

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Grant Tracey

Grant Tracey is the author of several collections of literary and crime fiction. His latest book, Five Hard Bites: a collection of Hayden Fuller Mysteries is a crime fiction omnibus of three novels and two stories following the Canadian hockey-player-turned-detective, Hayden Fuller. Tracey teaches creative writing and film at the University of Northern Iowa where he also edits the North American Review.

Selected Writings:

J. D. Schraffenberger

J. D. Schraffenberger is editor of the North American Review and a professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author of two books of poems, The Waxen Poor and Saint Joe's Passion, and his other work has appeared in Best of Brevity, Best Creative Nonfiction, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

Selected Writings:

Jim O'Loughlin

Jim O'Loughlin is the author of the forthcoming science fiction novel, The Cord, which takes place along both ends of a future space elevator. He is also the author of the flash fiction collection, Dean Dean Dean Dean. He is the publisher of Final Thursday Press and head of the Department of Languages & Literatures at the University of Northern Iowa where he teaches creative writing, American literature and digital humanities

Selected Writings: