R. Clifton Spargo (born 1965 in Chicago) is an American novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. He is the author most notably of the novel Beautiful Fools, The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (2013).
Spargo is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Yale Divinity School. Edinburgh University, and the doctoral program in literature at Yale University.
A past winner of Glimmer Train’s Award for New Writers as well as its Fiction Open Contest, he has been a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities, the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, A Jackson Fellow at the Beinecke Library, and an Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
His stories, have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, FICTION, and elsewhere. And his essays and reviews have appeared in venues such as The Yale Review, Raritan, The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, The Oxford Handbook to Elegy, The Wall Street Journal, NewCity, Bookslut, the Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, and The Huffington Post, for which he writes a blog called “The HI/LO” on the interplay between high and low culture, most specifically, about rock ‘n’ roll.
He has taught creative writing, literature, and ethics at Yale University, Marquette University, and the University of Iowa, and he was chosen as the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Fiction at the University of Iowa, 2013-14. He co-created and leads a testimonial writing program for The Voices and Faces Project. He recently served as the inaugural Dixon Professor of Creative Writing at Wittenberg University, 2014–15.
James Alan McPherson was an American essayist and short-story writer. He was the first African-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was included among the first group of artists who received a MacArthur Fellowship. At the time of his death, McPherson was a professor emeritus of fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is a professor in the practice of creative writing at Yale University.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a 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. Its acceptance rate is between 2.7% and 3.7%. On the university's behalf, the workshop administers the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
Jane Smiley is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991).
Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes or with various traditions of poetry and poetics. Due to the looseness of the definition, it is possible for writing such as feature stories to be considered creative writing, even though it falls under journalism, because the content of features is specifically focused on narrative and character development. Both fictional and non-fictional works fall into this category, including such forms as novels, biographies, short stories, and poems. In the academic setting, creative writing is typically separated into fiction and poetry classes, with a focus on writing in an original style, as opposed to imitating pre-existing genres such as crime or horror. Writing for the screen and stage—screenwriting and playwriting—are often taught separately, but fit under the creative writing category as well.
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.
Lan Samantha Chang is an American writer of novels and short stories. She is the author of The Family Chao and Hunger. For her fiction, which explores Chinese American experiences, she is a recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Berlin Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
Josip Novakovich is a Croatian Canadian writer.
Don Lee is an American novelist, fiction writer, literary journal editor, and creative writing professor.
Robert Antoni is a West Indian writer who was awarded the 1999 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by The Paris Review for My Grandmother's Tale of How Crab-o Lost His Head. He is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2010 for his work on the historical novel As Flies to Whatless Boys.
Ian Rosales Casocot is a Filipino journalist and writer of speculative fiction, literary fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction from Dumaguete, Philippines. He is known for his prizewinning short stories "Old Movies," "The Hero of the Snore Tango," "Rosario and the Stories," "A Strange Map of Time," "The Sugilanon of Epefania's Heartbreak," and "Things You Don't Know." He maintained A Critical Survey of Philippine Literature, a website on Filipino writings and literary criticism.
K. L. Cook is an American writer from Texas. He is the author of Last Call (2004), a collection of linked stories spanning thirty-two years in the life of a West Texas family, the novel, The Girl From Charnelle (2006), and the short story collection, Love Songs for the Quarantined (2011). His most recent books are a collection of short stories, Marrying Kind (2019), a collection of poetry, Lost Soliloquies (2019), and The Art of Disobedience: Essays on Form, Fiction, and Influence (2020). He co-directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University and teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University.
Jay Hopler was an American poet.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Hualing Nieh Engle, née Nieh Hua-ling, is a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet. She is a professor emerita at the University of Iowa.
Vu Hoang Tran is a Vietnamese American writer. His debut novel, Dragonfish, was released in 2015.
Justin Torres is an American novelist and an Assistant Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles. He won the First Novelist Award for his semi-autobiographical novel We the Animals which was also a Publishing Triangle Award finalist and a NAACP Image Award nominee. We the Animals has been adapted into a film and awarded the Next Innovator Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
David Borofka is an America novelist and short story writer. He is the author of the short story collection, Hints of His Mortality, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 1996, and the novel, The Island (1997).
Robert McGill is a Canadian writer and literary critic. He was born and raised in Wiarton, Ontario. His parents were physical education teachers. He graduated from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1999. He attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then completed the MA program in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. After graduating with a PhD in English from the University of Toronto, Robert moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and took up a Junior Fellowship with the Harvard University Society of Fellows. He now teaches Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto.
Jamel Brinkley is an American writer. His debut story collection, A Lucky Man (2018), was the winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award, The Story Prize, the John Leonard Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. He currently teaches fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.