Festival Authors
Headliners
Erik Larson is a master of narrative non-fiction. His vividly written, bestselling books have won several awards and been published worldwide. His books include The Demon of Unrest, The Splendid and the Vile, In the Garden of Beasts, Devil in the White City, Dead Wake, and Isaac’s Storm.
Ariel Lawhon is a critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction. Her novels include: The Wife the Maid and the Mistress, Flight of Dreams, I Was Anastasia, Code Name Hélène, When We Had Wings (co-written with Kristina McMorris and Susan Meissner), and The Frozen River, which has sold over one million copies. Her books have been translated into numerous languages and have been Good Morning America Book Club, Library Reads, One Book One County, Indie Next, Costco, Amazon Spotlight, and Book of the Month Club selections. She lives in the rolling hills outside Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband and four sons. She splits her time between the grocery store and the baseball field.
Jeff Goodell’s latest book is the New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. He is the author of six previous books, including The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, which was a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2017. He has covered climate change for more than two decades at Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. As a commentator on climate and energy issues, he has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News and The Oprah Winfrey Show. He is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
Liza Achilles is the author of Two Novembers: A Memoir of Love ’n’ Sex in Sonnets (Beltway Editions, 2024). DCTRENDING selected this sonnet sequence for its Summer Booklist 2024. Her writing has appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Headlight Review, Tofu Ink Arts Press, Brief Wilderness, The Big Windows Review, Burrow, Exacting Clam, Washington Independent Review of Books, and the Silent Book Club blog. The Blog for the Discerning Reader at lizaachilles.com, which features great modern books, attracts thousands of readers each month. She works as an author, book editor, small website designer, speaker, and blogger, and she lives near Washington, DC.
Camille U. Adams, PhD, is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Her memoir, How to Be Unmothered, was recognized as a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2023. She earned her MFA in Poetry from City College, CUNY, and a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from Florida State University. Honors for her work include Best of The Net: Nonfiction 2024, five nominations for the Pushcart Prize, three Best of the Net: Nonfiction nominations, and recognition for a notable essay in Best American Essays 2022. Among Adams’ awarded fellowships are a Tin House Reading Fellowship, a Granta Nature Writing Workshop fellowship, an Anaphora Arts Italy Writing Retreat Fellowship, a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, a Community of Writers Fellowship, and a Roots Wounds Words Fellowship.
Jennifer Atkinson is the author of six collections of poetry—most recently A Gray Realm the Ocean, which won the 2021 Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press. She is newly retired from George Mason University, where she taught in the MFA and BFA programs in Poetry Writing. She lives in northern Virginia.
Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of The Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont. She serves as the Writing Program Director at Vermont Studio Center.
Supriya Baily is an activist, scholar, and educator. Her work began while she was a teenager in India as a community organizer and leader. Currently, she is Professor of Education at George Mason University, focusing social justice issues in education, the marginalization of girls and women in educational policy and practice, and the role of teacher education to address educational inequity. Prior to joining academia, she spent a decade working for development and social justice organizations cementing her lifelong interest to the better understand the processes of agency and voice that promote grassroots transformation in marginalized communities.
Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer, and author of the debut novel The Edge of Water (Tin House). A graduate of Harvard Law School, and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, and Stand Magazine. She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View, and has received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Brian Buckbee lives in Missoula, Montana. He is co-founder of The 406 Writers’ Workshop. His stories have appeared in The Sun, The Georgia Review, The Mid-American Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is the co-author of We Should All Be Birds: A Memoir with Carol Ann Fitzgerald.
Marina Budhos is the author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction. Her novels for young people are The Long Ride, Watched, Tell Us We’re Home, and Ask Me No Questions. Her nonfiction books are Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers and two coauthored books, Eyes of the World: Robert Capa, Gerda Taro & the Invention of Modern Photojournalism and Sugar Changed the World, written with her husband, Marc Aronson. Budhos has received an NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing and has been a Fulbright Scholar to India and was a professor of English at William Paterson University.
Nat Cassidy is the author of the acclaimed novels Mary, Nestlings, and the Stoker Award-nominated Rest Stop. Esquire named him as one “of the best horror writers of this generation” and among those “shaping horror’s next golden age.” His award-winning plays have been produced across the country, including Off-Broadway and the Kennedy Center. He can also be found guest-starring on shows like Law & Order, Blue Bloods, Quantico, and many others. His newest novel, When the Wolf Comes Home, was named “a classic” by Stephen King and was an instant USA Today bestseller.
Cynthia Cliff grew up in a tiny historic village in rural Virginia surrounded by farms and woodlands where she spent every waking hour. This upbringing provided her with a love of history, nature, and folklore—themes reflected in much of her whimsical, folk-art inspired and optimistic work. She is a self-taught artist and illustrator who began her illustration career in 2019 after living many other lives and is now the author and illustrator of several children’s books printed both in English and German. She is represented by Andrea Brown Literary and resides in northern Virginia just outside of Washington, D.C.
Rita Colbert is a co-author of Black Communities of Fairfax: A History.
Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Fulbright, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Emory, Hedgebrook, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, and VQR. They are an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, is forthcoming in June 2025 from Catapult in the US and Vintage in the UK.
Patricia Coral is a bilingual Puerto Rican writer. She holds an MFA in creative writing from American University, where she received the Myra Sklarew Award and where she was Editor in Chief of FOLIO. Coral writes creative nonfiction and poetry, but frequently her words find their home in between. The former events director for Politics and Prose Bookstore, she has contributed to numerous literary magazines. Women Surrounded by Water is her first book.
E.N. Couturier is an award-winning journalist and recreational farmer. Organic Matter is her first book. Her work has appeared in numerous Maine news outlets, on local radio and in publications including New World Writing, Peripheries, Eclectica Magazine, FRiGG, and jmww, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize
Lori D’Angelo is a grant recipient from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a fellow at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, and an alumna of the Community of Writers. She is associate flash fiction editor at JMWW and holds an MA from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and an MFA from West Virginia University. Her work has appeared in various literary journals including BULL, Gargoyle, Drunken Boat, Moon City Review, and Rejection Letters. Her first book, a collection called The Monsters Are Here, was recently published by ELJ Editions in October 2024.
Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border, then raised in England and Tennessee. Her poetry debut, Mass for Shut-Ins (2023), won the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize and a California Book Award. In 2022, Ecco/HarperCollins published her tricontinental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing, which was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. A Cave Canem Fellow and an alumna of Yale University (BA) and the University of Michigan (MFA), she received a PhD in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, she held the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College. She turns to her third and fourth books of poetry + prose as a scholar at Princeton University.
Ms. Dixon is the author of the novels, A Taste for More, Intermission, Down Home Blues, Forty Acres and the forthcoming Something in the Water. She is also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the African American Woman’s Soul. Originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she has lived in Texas and Arkansas, and now resides in Memphis, Tennessee. She is a former bank regulator and has also owned a bookstore. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and a former Greater Memphis YWCA board member. When not reading or writing, she enjoys sports, classic movies, and chocolate.
Lacey N. Dunham is the author of The Belles. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Sewanee Writers Conference as a Tennessee Williams scholar, and Catapult as a merit scholar. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and more. She lives in Washington, DC. Find out more at LaceyNDunham.com.
Jean Ende is a native NYer who is trying to exorcise her background by writing fiction largely based on her immigrant Jewish family. Formerly a newspaper reporter in NY and NJ, Jean was also a press secretary for the City of NY and various political candidates and non-profit organizations. She subsequently decided to go over to the dark side, got an MBA and became a VP at Citibank, wrote for business magazines and taught marketing in college management departments. Her novel is Houses of Detention.
Jennifer Fawcett is a playwright and novelist. Originally from Canada, she now lives in the Hudson Valley, NY. Her debut novel, Beneath the Stairs, was published by Atria and optioned for television by Black Bear Pictures. Her second book, Keep This for Me, comes out from Atria in October 2025.
Alex Finlay is the bestselling author of several novels, including If Something Happens to Me and most recently, Parents Weekend. His work regularly appears on best-of-the-year lists and has been translated into twenty-five languages. Alex’s books are optioned for film and television, and Every Last Fear is in development for a major limited series. Alex lives in Washington, D.C., and Virginia.
Carol Ann Fitzgerald is a former editor at The Sun and The Oxford American. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Ploughshares, The Oxford American, The Sun, The OA Book of Great Music Writing, and elsewhere. She lives in Chapel Hill. She is the co-author of We Should All Be Birds: A Memoir with Brian Buckbee.
Taylor Franson-Thiel is the author of “Bone Valley Hymnal” (ELJ Editions 2025). She is an editorial reader for Poetry Daily, the Assistant Poetry Editor for phoebe and the EIC of BRAWL. She can be found on Twitter @TaylorFranson and at taylorfranson-thiel.com.
Majda Gama is the award-winning author of In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls (Wandering Aengus Press) and The Call of Paradise, selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the Two Sylvia’s chapbook prize. Her poetry has been honored with the Graybeal Gowen award for Virginia poets from Shenandoah literary journal and the Gregory Djanikian scholar award for poetry from Adroit. Her poems have recently been published in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and Tupelo Quarterly.
Varun Gauri was born in India and raised in the American Midwest. After studying philosophy in college and public policy in graduate school, he worked for more than two decades on global poverty and human rights, publishing academic articles and books on development economics and behavioral economics. He now teaches at Princeton University and lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland. His short fiction was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized in Best American Nonrequired Reading. His debut novel, For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus, won the 2024 Carol Trawick Fiction Prize, was selected for NPR’s Books We Love 2024, and is a finalist for Foreword INDIES 2024 Book of the Year in General Adult Fiction.
James Geary is the author of Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It (W.W. Norton), I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (HarperCollins), and Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists (Bloomsbury). He is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has given talks at Live from the New York Public Library, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Sun Valley Writers Conference, the Iowa City Book Festival, the Edinburgh Book Festival and at bookstores throughout the US.
Carmen Giménez joined Graywolf as Publisher and Director in August 2022. She was previously the founder and publisher of Noemi Press and Professor of English at Virginia Tech. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including Be Recorder, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. She has been awarded fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Guggenheim Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the Hermitage Foundation.
Lisa Marie Gring-Pemble is an associate professor at George Mason University. She is author of Grim Fairy Tales: The Rhetorical Construction of American Welfare Policy, and her writing has appeared in journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Speech and Rhetoric and Public Affairs.
Christina Hillsberg is a former CIA intelligence officer, writer, and recognized expert on women in espionage and intelligence tradecraft. The recipient of multiple CIA Exceptional Performance Awards, her work at the CIA included specializing in African politics and leaders as one of the Intelligence Community’s few Swahili and Zulu linguists, producing analytic assessments for senior-level policymakers including the President and his Cabinet, and serving in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, clandestinely collecting intelligence from the field. She now writes full-time and is the author of License to Parent: How My Career as a Spy Helped Me Raise Resourceful, Self-Sufficient Kids as well as Agents of Change.
Margaret Hutton is a writer and artist whose short fiction has appeared in the South Carolina Review, the Sun, and the Chattahoochee Review. In addition to working as an environmental reporter and a marketing copywriter, she earned an MFA from George Mason University. A native North Carolinian, she attended UNC-Chapel Hill. Now she divides her time between the Washington, D.C. area and rural Pennsylvania. If You Leave is her first novel.
Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her debut novel The Tiny Things are Heavier was a Vogue 2025 Best Books. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from Florida State University. She’s a recipient of a 2021 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Home for her is Lagos, Nigeria. She lives in Detroit, Michigan.
Cristina Jiménez is an award-winning community organizer and a leading voice in movements for social justice. She is Co-Founder and former Executive Director of United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country. A Distinguished Lecturer at the City University of New York, Jimenez received a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship and a spot on the 2018 TIME 100 Most Influential People List. She came to the U.S from Ecuador in 1998 and grew up undocumented in Queens, N.Y.
Forest Issac Jones is an award-winning author of non-fiction and essays, specializing in the study of Irish History, the US Civil Rights Movement and Northern Ireland. His latest essay, ‘The Civil Rights Connection Between The USA and Northern Ireland’ was awarded honorable mention in the category of nonfiction essay by Writer’s Digest in their 93rd annual writing competition. Over the years, Jones has won awards from Writer’s Digest in 2022 and 2023. His award winning essay about African Americans at D-Day was published in 2024 by WWII History Magazine. He is the author of Good Trouble: The Selma, Alabama and Derry, Northern Ireland Connection 1963-1972.
Alma Katsu is the award-winning author of nine novels, including The Hunger and Red Widow. Her newest book is Fiend. Her books have been featured in the New York Times, NPR, Oprah, Goodreads, and more. She’s also a contributing reviewer for the Washington Post.
Vanda Krefft has written about women’s issues and popular culture for leading national magazines, including Elle, Redbook, Woman’s Day, and Woman’s World, as well as newspapers worldwide through syndication. Expect Great Things!, a social history of the Katharine Gibbs School for women, is her second book. She is also the author of The Man Who Made the Movies, the first in-depth biography of Twentieth Century Fox founder William Fox. Vanda has a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Communication, both from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She lives in Santa Monica, CA.
Sarah LaBrie is the author of No One Gets to Fall Apart, a 2024 New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Pick and a best memoir of the year according to NPR, Elle and Esquire. Born in the Bay Area and raised in Third Ward in Houston, Texas, she lives in Los Angeles where she works as a TV writer. Her work appears in The Guardian, Guernica, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. She’s held residencies at Yaddo, UCross and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She holds an MFA from NYU.
Jenee Lindner is a co-author of Black Communities of Fairfax: A History.
Yiming Ma holds an MBA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was the Carol Houck Smith Scholar. His stories and essays appear in the New York Times, the Guardian, The Florida Review, Ricepaper, and elsewhere. His story SWIMMER OF YANGTZE won the 2018 Guardian 4th Estate Short Story Prize. Born in Shanghai, he now lives in Toronto. These Memories Do Not Belong to Us is his first novel.
Samantha Mann is a Brooklyn based writer covering queer life, popular culture, mental health, and motherhood. Samantha is the author of the essay collection, Putting Out: Essays on Otherness. In 2023, Putting Out was added to CLMPS recommended reading list for Women’s History Month. Samantha edited and curated the anthology, I Feel Love: Notes on Queer Joy. Buzzfeed Book review said, “This is the perfect collection for readers looking to appreciate and celebrate the many talented writers within the LGBTQIA+ community.” Her Newest book is Dyke Delusions: Essays and Observations.
A former teacher with a master’s degree in education, Ann McCallum Staats has dedicated two decades to writing for children, mostly nonfiction. Her debut, The Secret Life of Math, won ForeWord Review’s Gold Book of the Year. Her Eat Your Homework series earned awards from Junior Library Guild and Bank Street College of Education. Her latest book is Fantastic Flora: The World’s Biggest, Baddest, and Smelliest Plants. Next, co-written with astronaut Karen Nyberg, A Quilt of Stars will publish in 2026. Originally from the wilds of British Columbia, Canada, Ann now lives in not so wild Virginia with her family.
Carrie R. Moore’s fiction has appeared in One Story, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications. A recipient of the Keene Prize and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Steinbeck Writers’ Retreat, she earned her MFA at the Michener Center for Writers. Born in Georgia, she currently resides in Texas with her husband. She is the author of Make Your Way Home: Stories.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean American writer and author of the novel The Evening Hero, which looks at the future of medicine, immigration, North Korea. She graduated from Brown University and was a Writer in Residence there, before she began teaching at Columbia University’s Writing Division and is also core faculty at the Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity. She is one of the few journalists who have been allowed to travel to North Korea since the Korean War. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, including an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. She is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.
Linneall Naylor is a co-author of Black Communities of Fairfax: A History.
Molly Olguín is a queer writer, educator, and monster aficionado. She has stories in magazines like Quarterly West and the Normal School. She was the recipient of the Loft Mentor Series Fellowship in 2019. With Jackie Hedeman, she is the creator of the audio drama The Pasithea Powder. She teaches English and creative writing to high school students in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of The Sea Gives Up the Dead.
Angelique Palmer is the current Fairfax County Poet Laureate, a performance poet, and kindergarten teacher. A Spoken Word instructor at Wilkes University Maslow Family Creative Writing Graduate Program, Ms. Palmer was the 5th-ranked woman poet in the world in 2015 and is currently ranked 19th among the top 96 poets in the world. After 10 self-published chapbooks, Ms. Palmer’s first full-length book, The Chambermaid’s Style Guide, debuted on Sargent Press in 2016. Her second book is the 2021 follow-up Also Dark on Etruscan Press. Honored to be a part of such anthologies as The Queer Cookies Poetry Cookbook, and Sign & Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition, she has also published online in Drunk in A Midnight Choir; Wus Good?: A POC Magazine; Borderline; and The Mud Review. The New Orleans native and Florida State University Creative Writing graduate has called Virginia home since 2010 and Fairfax County home since 2017.
Eric Pankey is the author of many collections of poems: For the New Year, which was selected as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Heartwood, Apocrypha, The Late Romances, Cenotaph, Oracle Figures, Reliquaries, The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems, Trace, Dismantling the Angel, which won the New Measures Prize, Crow-Work, Augury, The Owl of Minerva, Vestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988-2018, Alias: Prose Poems, Not Yet Transfigured and The History of the Siege. He taught from 1996 to 2024 in the MFA Program at George Mason University, where he is Heritage Chair and Professor Emeritus of English.
Martheaus Perkins was born to a single mother in Center, Texas. After a childhood in and out of homes in Houston, he graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University as a first-generation student. He is the author of The Grace of Black Mothers, the co-editor of BRAWL Lit, and an instructor at George Mason University.
Rondia Prescott is a co-author of Black Communities of Fairfax: A History.
Darby Price grew up in Southeastern Louisiana. She earned her MFA from George Mason University (’14), where she was a Heritage Fellow and the Poetry Editor for Phoebe. Her work has since appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, No Contact, RHINO, In Short, and Zócalo Public Square, among others. Darby is the author of the lyric memoir All the Lands We Inherit (Black Lawrence Press, 2025). She currently serves as a Continuing Lecturer at UC Irvine and makes her home in Long Beach, CA.
Katie Richards (she/her) is a poet based out of the DC metro area. Her first book Apple Mind (Harbor Editions) was selected as an editors’ pick for the Laureate Prize. It was also a semi-finalist for the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her poetry has previously appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Harbor Review, DIALOGIST, Softblow, South Dakota Review, and Sweet Tree Review among other places. She received her MFA from George Mason University. Connect with her on Tiktok @KatieRichardsPoet.
Misako Rocks is a Japanese manga comic artist who’s published several manga books all over the world, including manga graphic novels, Bounce Back and No Such Thing as Perfect with Feiwel & Friends at Macmillan. Bounce Back was selected to be on the list of 2021 Best Graphic Novels for Children by the American Library Association. She has also recently released a new activity book series, How To Draw Kawaii Manga with Misako Rocks to show bubbly and kawaii manga character making. Her new book, Sew Totally Nala (Bounce Back Vol.3) is set to be released on Oct 7th 2025!
Chet’la Sebree is the author of Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress. Raised in the mid-Atlantic, she earned an MFA in creative writing, with a focus in poetry, from American University. Chet’la’s poetry and prose have appeared in Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, Pleiades, Guernica, Poetry International, and The Yale Review. Currently, Chet’la is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College. Her debut essay collection is forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2026.
Dr. Jagadish Shukla is a Professor of Climate Dynamics at George Mason University. Internationally recognized for his role in the development of weather and climate science, he has received the International Meteorological Prize by the UN and the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal of NASA, the highest honor given to a civilian by NASA. For his work as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 4th assessment, his team was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the author of A Billion Butterflies: A Life in Climate and Chaos Theory.
Brando Skyhorse’s debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The book was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Take This Man: A Memoir was an Amazon Best Book of the Month selection and named by Kirkus Reviews as one the Best Nonfiction Books of the year. His latest novel, My Name Is Iris, was named one of the Washington Post’s Fifty Notable Works of Fiction in 2023. Skyhorse has also co-edited an anthology, We Wear The Mask: 15 True Stories Of Passing in America. Professor of English at Indiana University in Bloomington where he directs the Creative Writing program.
Maggie Stiefvater is the New York Times bestselling author of the Shiver trilogy, The Raven Cycle, and The Scorpio Races, among dozens of other YA fantasy novels. Her latest books are The Listeners, her adult debut, and a graphic novel adaptation of The Raven Boys, both hitting shelves in 2025. Stiefvater’s books have sold over five million copies around the world, and she lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband and their two children.
Marie Still, bestselling thriller and horror author, torments her characters from Tampa Bay. She also writes under Kristen Seeley. Her novels include Bad Things Happened in This Room, My Darlings, We’re All Lying, and Beverly Bonnefinche is Dead. Off the page, Marie can be found attempting to corral her three mostly friendly cats for a cuddle or keeping up with her four children.
Shubha Sunder is the author of Boomtown Girl, a story collection set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, that won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with her family.
Kristina Ten’s stories appear in McSweeney’s, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, Nightmare, Lightspeed, Uncanny, and elsewhere. She has won the McSweeney’s Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction, the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award, and the F(r)iction Writing Contest, and was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Locus Award. Ten is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and the University of Colorado Boulder’s MFA program in fiction, and was a 2024 Ragdale writer-in-residence. Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is her debut collection.
Olufemi Terry is a Sierra Leone–born writer, essayist, and journalist. His short fiction has been published in Guernica, The Georgia Review, Chimurenga, and The Granta Book of the African Short Story, and translated into French and German. His nonfiction essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Africa is a Country, and The Guardian. He has been the International Writer-in-Residence at Cove Park, Scotland, and a Writer-in-Residence at Georgetown University’s Lannan Center for Poetics & Social Practice in Washington, D. C. In 2019, he received a grant from the Washington, D. C., Commission on the Arts & Humanities. A former juror of the Miles Morland Scholarship and the AKO Caine Prize for African writing, he is the 2010 winner of the Caine Prize for his story “Stickfighting Days.” He lives in Germany and Côte d’Ivoire.
Natalia Theodoridou is a queer writer, editor, and game designer. He is the winner of Moniack Mhor’s 2022 Emerging Writer Award, the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and a 2025 Nebula Award. He is also a Clarion West Graduate and holds a PhD in Media & Cultural Studies from SOAS University of London. Sour Cherry is his debut novel.
Corinna Vallianatos is the author of the novel The Beforeland, and two collections of stories, My Escapee, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and Origin Stories, described by the New York Times as “shrewd meditations on ambition, shame, artistic boundaries and more.” Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, BOMB, McSweeney’s, A Public Space, VQR, and elsewhere, and she’s a MacDowell and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellow. She teaches at the University of Virginia.
Vicki Valosik is the author of Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water (W.W. Norton, 2024). She is a masters synchronized swimmer and an editorial director at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where she also teaches graduate-level writing courses. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Time, and Slate. Swimming Pretty is her debut book and was selected as a Staff Pick for NPR Books We Love 2024 as well as an Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best History Books.
Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs A Silent Treatmetn, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, and The Glass Eye. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.
Jeff Weiss is the author of the new book Waiting for Brittney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly. He’s a music writer and cultural critic whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, The FADER, and many other outlets. A former columnist for LA Weekly, he is the cofounder of The LAnd magazine and the founder of the pioneering hip-hop blog Passion of the Weiss, along with its record label, POW Recordings. He lives in Los Angeles.
Etta Willson is co-author of Black Communities of Fairfax: A History.
Thomas Wolf is the author of The Called Shot: Babe Ruth, the Chicago Cubs, and the Unforgettable Major League Baseball Season of 1932 (Nebraska, 2020), finalist for the Seymour Medal from the Society for American Baseball Research, and coauthor, with Patricia Bryan, of Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland.