The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a celebrated graduate-level creative writing program. At 87 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. It is widely considered the nation's best graduate writing program, with The New Yorker in 2009 calling it "the most renowned creative-writing program in the world". Its acceptance rate is between 2.7% and 3.7%.
The College of the Holy Cross is a private Jesuit liberal arts college in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was founded by educators Benedict Joseph Fenwick and Thomas F. Mulledy in 1843 under the auspices of the Society of Jesus. Holy Cross was the first Catholic college in New England and is among the oldest Catholic institutions of higher education.
Craig Arnold was an American poet and professor. His first book of poems, Shells (1999), was selected by W. S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His many honors include the 2005 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature, The Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, an Alfred Hodder Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a MacDowell Fellowship.
Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was published in August 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).
Bret Lott is the New York Times author and professor of English at the College of Charleston. He is Crazyhorse magazine's nonfiction editor and leads a study abroad program every summer to Spoleto, Italy.
Judith Moffett is an American author and academic. She has published poetry, nonfiction, science fiction, and translations of Swedish literature. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities and presented a paper on the translation of poetry at a 1998 Nobel Symposium.
Caroline Walker Bynum, FBA is a Medieval scholar from the United States. She is a University Professor emerita at Columbia University and Professor emerita of Western Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She was the first woman to be appointed University Professor at Columbia. She is former Dean of Columbia's School of General Studies, served as president of the American Historical Association in 1996, and President of the Medieval Academy of America in 1997–1998.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is an American poet, essayist and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and currently Regents Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Shara McCallum is an American poet. She was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. McCallum is the author of four collections of poems, including Madwoman, which won the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the poetry category. She currently lives in Pennsylvania.
Carmen Giménez is an American poet, writer, and editor.
Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (2010), and the essay collections, Abandon Me (2017) and Girlhood (2021).
Kelly Cherry was a novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.
Brenda Wineapple is an American nonfiction writer, literary critic, and essayist who has written several books on nineteenth-century American writers.
Arnold Krupat is an American author who is Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. His work has been published in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, The Quest, and Sarah Lawrence Journal. He is a recipient of six fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has also held a Fulbright Fellowship, an Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
John D’Agata is an American essayist. He is the author or editor of six books of nonfiction, including The Next American Essay (2003), The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) and The Making of the American Essay—all part of the trilogy of essay anthologies called "A New History of the Essay." He also wrote The Lifespan of a Fact, "Halls of Fame," and "About a Mountain."
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Jasmin Darznik is the New York Times bestselling author of three books, The Bohemians, Song of a Captive Bird, a novel inspired by the life of Forugh Farrokhzad, Iran's notorious woman poet, and The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life, which became a New York Times bestseller. A New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" and a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Song of a Captive Bird was praised by The New York Times as a "complex and beautiful rendering of [a] vanished country and its scattered people; a reminder of the power and purpose of art; and an ode to female creativity under a patriarchy that repeatedly tries to snuff it out." The Bohemians was selected by Oprah Daily as one of the best historical novels of 2021. Darznik's books have been published in seventeen countries.
Shara Lessley is an American poet and essayist.
Susan Laura Mizruchi is professor of English literature and the William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, religion and culture, literary and social theory, literary history, history of the social sciences, and American and Global Film and TV. Since 2016, she has served as the director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities.
Robert Lyons Danly was an award-winning writer, editor and translator of Japanese language and literature. He was also a teacher.
