First Draft: A Dialogue On Writing

Anuradha Roy's latest book, Sleeping on Jupiter,  won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016 and was nominated for the Man Booker prize 2015. She won the Economist Crossword Prize for her second novel, The Folded Earth. Her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, has been widely translated and was picked as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and the Seattle Times. It has been named by World Literature Today as one of the 60 most essential books on modern India and was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize.

Randa Jarrar’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Five Chapters, and others. Her first novel, A Map of Home was published in half a dozen languages & won a Hopwood Award, an Arab-American Book Award, and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes and Noble Review. Her new book is called Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. She has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Hedgebrook, and others, and in 2010 was named one of the most gifted writers of Arab origin under the age of 40. She runs RAWI (the Radius of Arab-American Writers) and loves coordinating events and strengthening communities.

Emily Witt is a writer in New York City. She has written for n+1, The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, the London Review of Books, and many other places. She has degrees from Brown, Columbia, and Cambridge, and was a Fulbright scholar in Mozambique. Her first book, Future Sex, was published in 2016

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (Simon & Schuster), and Kapitoil (Harper Perennial). He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A columnist for the New York Times, he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and McSweeney’s and has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in New York.

Robert Bausch was born in Georgia, at the end of World War II, and was raised in the Washington, D.C., area. He has worked as a salesman--of automobiles, appliances, and hardware--a taxi driver, waiter, production planner, and library assistant. He was educated at George Mason University, earning a BA, an MA and an MFA, and he says he has been a writer all his life. He spent time in the military teaching survival, and worked his way through college.   His eighth and latest novel is called The Legend of Jesse Smoke.

Patrick Ryan is the author of the short story collection The Dream Life of Astronauts and the novels Send Me and Saint Augustine among others.

Jane Smiley is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Thousand Acres.  She has written more than twenty books including Private Life, Moo, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.

Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Editors' Choice, which has received a starred Kirkus Review and is deemed one of the best books to read this summer and beyond by New York Times, NPR, BBC, BuzzFeed, Book Riot, Bookish, Miami Herald, Elle, O Magazine, Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, Flavorwire, After Ellen, BookPage, Cosmopolitan, Brooklyn Magazine, among others. Dennis-Benn has also been shortlisted for the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Kevin Barry was born in Limerick in 1969 and now lives in Dublin. He writes sketches and columns for the Sunday Herald in Glasgow and the Irish Examiner in Cork. He has written about travel and literature for the Guardian, the Irish Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications. His short fiction has appeared widely on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently in the New Yorker. His recent short story collection is called Dark Lies the Island.

Leigh Stein is the author of the novel The Fallback Plan, a collection of poetry called Dispatch from the Future, and a memoir, Land of Enchantment. She is co-founder and Executive Director fo the nonprofit literary organization Out of the Binders, and lives outside New York City.

John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic.  He is the author of How to Read a Novelist.

Lev Grossman's first novel, Warp, came out in 1997. His second, Codex, was published in 2004 and became an international bestseller. The Magicians was published in 2009 and was a New York Times bestseller and one of the New Yorker‘s best books of the year. The sequel, The Magician King, came out in 2011 and was a Times bestseller too. The third and (almost certainly) last Magicians book, The Magician’s Land, was published in 2014 and debuted at #1 on the bestseller list.

Ramona Ausubel grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of a new novel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty as well as the novel No One is Here Except All of Us (2012), and a collection of short stories A Guide to Being Born (2013). 

Debra Spark is the author of five books of fiction, including Unknown Caller, The Pretty Girl, and Good for the Jews. Other books include Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing, the anthology Twenty Under Thirty, and the recently reissued novel, Coconuts for the Saint.

Jennifer duBois is the recipient of a 2013 Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2012 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award. Her debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was the winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction and the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was the winner of the Housatonic Book Award for fiction and was a finalist for a New York Public Library Young Lions Award.

Jennifer Haigh's new novel is called Heat and Light. She is the author of four previous novels: Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers and Mrs. Kimble, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her short story collection News From Heaven won the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction.  Haigh's short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories and many other places.  She lives in Boston.

Helen Schulman is author of This Beautiful Life, four other novels and one short story collection.

Kim Addonizio is the author of six poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry, The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. She has received fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, two Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Award Finalist for her collection Tell Me. Her latest books are Mortal Trash: Poems (W.W. Norton) and a memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress (Penguin).

Anna Noyes is the author of the debut story collection, Goodnight, Beautiful Women, which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Vice, A Public Space, and Guernica, among others. She has received the Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship, the James Merrill House Fellowship, and the Lighthouse Works Fellowship, and has served as writer-in-residence at the Polli Talu Arts Center in Estonia. Goodnight, Beautiful Women was awarded the 2013 Henfield Prize for Fiction and the 2016 Lotos Foundation Prize, and is a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and an Indie Next Great Reads pick for June. Noyes was raised in Downeast Maine.

Anna Solomon is the author of The Little Bride, Leaving Lucy Pear and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, One Story, Ploughshares, Slate, The Boston Globe, and MORE, and she is co-editor with Eleanor Henderson of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers. Previously, Anna worked as an award-winning journalist for National Public Radio’s Living On Earth.