Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third poetry collection, O, won the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry and was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. Her previous full-length collections are Louder than Hearts, winner of the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, and To Live in Autumn, winner of the 2013 Backwaters Prize. She’s also the author of two chapbooks: 3arabi Song, winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook prize, and There Was and How Much There Was, a 2016 Laureate’s Choice selected by Carol Ann Duffy. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares, World Literature Today, The Nation, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Zeina’s invented The Duet, a bilingual poetic form where English and Arabic exist separately and in relationship to each other. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. After a lifetime in Lebanon and a decade in Dubai, Zeina has recently moved with her family to California.
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award. Her second collection, Leaving Biddle City, will be published in 2024. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches poetry and nonfiction at Old Dominion University.
Tom Drury is the author of five novels, two screenplays, and numerous short stories. He received an MFA from Brown University, and eleven chapters of his first novel, The End of Vandalism, appeared serially in The New Yorker. His short fiction and essays have also appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Harper’s, The Mississippi Review, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and the anthologies Best of BBC Radio’s Recent Short Fiction and Reverse Engineering II. His novels have been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, and German, and his work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and MacDowell. He’s taught fiction writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Bard College Berlin, the University of Leipzig, Hollins University, and Wesleyan University. His novel Pacific was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2013.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of three books: the novel Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize and the Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel; a short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary; and The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA. In her writing, she explores the links between language, imagination, and bodily life in Black queer and feminist experience. Her work has earned honors and support from Bread Loaf, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Fiction, the NEA and others. Originally from Harlem, NY, she is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University and lives in Washington DC.
Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of two novels: Scorpionfish (Tin House, 2020) and The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Tin House, VQR, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, MQR, The Mississippi Review, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and in 2015 she was a Fulbright scholar in Athens. She’s an associate professor at Wayne State University in Detroit.
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.
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.
A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and six critically acclaimed books, including Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards. His most recent publication is the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven; his seventh book, Poem Bitten by a Man, is forthcoming in the fall of 2023. His honors include Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, and fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the MacDowell Colony. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. An editorial board member of Poetry Daily, he lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
Daisy Fried is the author of four books of poetry: The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships. An occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation and elsewhere; poetry editor for the journal Scoundrel Time; and a member of the faculty of the BFA Program in Creative Writing at University of the Arts. She lives in Philadelphia.
Hanna Pylväinen is the author of the novel We Sinners, which received the 2012 Whiting Award, and the novel The End of Drum-Time, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and LitHub. She is the recipient of residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Lásságámmi Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
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