Chen Chen is an American poet. His book, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry. Chen serves on the poetry faculty for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast. He served as Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University from 2018 to 2022.
Susan Choi is an American novelist.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Kelly Link is an American editor and writer. Mainly known as an author of short stories, she published her first novel The Book of Love in 2024. While some of her fiction falls more clearly within genre categories, many of her stories might be described as slipstream or magic realism: a combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and literary fiction. Among other honors, she has won a Hugo Award, three Nebula Awards, and a World Fantasy Award for her fiction, and she was one of the recipients of the 2018 MacArthur "Genius" Grant.
Adam Johnson is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master's Son, and the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection Fortune Smiles. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing.
The Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing is a graduate program in creative writing based at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine, United States. Stonecoast is one of the oldest low-residency creative writing programs in the United States and is notable for being one of only two such programs in the country to offer a degree in popular fiction. The Stonecoast MFA program is a low-residency program. Ten-day residencies for students, faculty, and visiting writers are held each January and June. The rest of a student's academic work during the two-year program is pursued on a one-on-one basis under the leadership of a faculty mentor.
Brenda Shaughnessy is an Asian American poet most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda and So Much Synth. Her book, Our Andromeda, was named a Library Journal "Book of the Year," one of The New York Times's "100 Best Books of 2013." Additionally, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly named So Much Synth as one of the best poetry collections of 2016. Shaughnessy works as an Associate Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing program at Rutgers University–Newark.
Stacie Cassarino is an American poet, educator, editor, and mother. She is the author of two collections of poems, Each Luminous Thing and Zero at the Bone, and a monograph, Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature.
Paul Guest is an American poet and memoirist.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, editor, and teacher. She was born in Cambridge, Ohio and received her BA from Oberlin College and her MFA from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She is author of seven poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press including Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones for which she received a New England Poetry Club's Sheila Motton Book Award, and Silvertone (2013) for which she was named Ohio Poetry Day Association's 2014 Co-Poet of the Year. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted in 2009 as a Carnegie Mellon University Classic Contemporary. Her sixth, Bad Harvest, was published in fall of 2018 and was named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her most recent collection, Those Absences Now Closest, was published in October, 2024.
Theodore "Ted" Deppe is an American poet and professor, author of books of poetry. His most well-known collection is Orpheus on the Red Line, and he has had his poems published in many literary journals and magazines including The Kenyon Review, Harper’s Magazine, Poetry, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Ireland Review. He was the Director of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing’s Stonecoast in Ireland program.
Catherine Chung is an American writer whose first novel, Forgotten Country, received an Honorable Mention for the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award, and was an Indie Next Pick, in addition to being chosen for several best of lists including Booklist's 10 Best Debut Novels of 2012, and the San Francisco Chronicle's and Bookpage's Best Books of 2012. She received a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, and was recognized in 2010 by Granta magazine as one of its "New Voices" of the year. Her second book The Tenth Muse was released to critical acclaim, and was a 2019 Finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. In 2015 Buzzfeed named her one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers.
Jeanette Lynes is a Canadian author, poet and professor born in Hanover, Ontario. She went to high school in Hanover and Flesherton, Ontario. She then earned an Honours B.A. in English from York University, Toronto, and went on to earn an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English from York University. In 2005 she received an M.F.A. in Writing from the University of Southern Maine's low-residency Stonecoast Program. Jeanette has taught university in Canada and the United States since the mid-1980s. She was the Pathy visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Princeton University in 2003. She is a former co-editor of The Antigonish Review. Lynes has been a Writer in Residence at Northern Lights College in B.C., Saskatoon Public Library, Kwantlen Polytechnic University and The Kingston Writers' Festival. She has also been on faculty at The Banff Centre and The Sage Hill Writing Experience (2006-2008) She is now Coordinator of the M.F.A. in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan and a professor in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. Lynes is the author of seven collections of poetry and two novels.
Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author and academic.
Katharine Beutner is an American novelist, essayist, and academic. She is the author of Alcestis, winner of the Edmund White Award for debut fiction from the Publishing Triangle in 2011. From 2013 to 2017 she was an assistant professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. From 2017 to 2019, she was a visiting assistant professor and from 2019 to 2023, she was an assistant professor of English at the College of Wooster. Since 2023, she is an associate professor of English at UW Milwaukee.
Ellen J. Levy is an American writer and academic who was an associate professor of English at Colorado State University before retiring from this role. Her collection of short stories, Love, In Theory, was published in 2012, and her first novel, The Cape Doctor, in 2021 to positive reviews.
Kacen Callender is a Saint Thomian author of children's fiction and fantasy, best known for their Stonewall Book Award and Lambda Literary Award—winning middle grade debut Hurricane Child (2018). Their fantasy novel, Queen of the Conquered, is the 2020 winner of the World Fantasy Award, and King and the Dragonflies won the 2020 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature.
Kristen Arnett is an American fiction author and essayist. Her debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, was a New York Times bestseller.
Bryan Washington is an American writer from Houston. He published his debut short story collection, Lot, in 2019 and a novel, Memorial, in 2020.
Morgan Talty (Penobscot) is a writer and an assistant professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and Contemporary Literature at the University of Maine in Orono.
