Walter Mosley is a fiction, non-fiction, and screenplay writer. He has written more than 50 books, including the bestselling mystery series featuring detective Easy Rawlins. His latest book is called Elements of Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl and The Glass Eye. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, the New York Times Modern Love, NewYorker.com and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and is an assistant professor of English at Towson University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me.  Brodeur founded the fiction magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, where she served as editor in chief from 1996-2002.  In 2005, she became an editor at Harcourt.  She is now the Executive Director of Aspen Words, a literary arts nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer of fiction, non-fiction, television and film whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Zoetrope, among others, and over 40 short movies have been based on his stories, one of which won the American MTV Prize. His feature film Wristcutters also won several international awards.  His short story collection Fly Already won the Sapir Prize for Literature in Israel.  Some of his other titles include The Seven Good Years, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, Four Stories, and A Girl on the Fridge.  Keret's books have been published in 42 languages in 45 countries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Quammen writes fiction and non-fiction with a focus on science and the natural world. He has written more than ten books. His newest book is called The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life.  He is a contributing writer for National Geographic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Deborah Levy was born in South Africa and moved to England at the age of nine, where she studied contemporary arts at Dartington College of Arts. In 1989, she published her first collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, and a second, Black Vodka, in 2013. Two of her novels, Swimming Home and Hot Milk, were shortlisted for the Booker prize; her latest, The Man Who Saw Everything, was long listed for the Booker prize. She is a playwright, fiction writer, and memoirist. Her new memoir is called The Cost of Living. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leslie Jamison writes fiction, non-fiction, and memoir. Her works include The Empathy Exams, The Gin Closet, The Recovering, and Make it Scream, Make it Burn. She teaches at Columbia University's MFA program concentrating on non-fiction.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amitav Ghosh is the author of nine novels, including Gun Island and the Ibis Trilogy, Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. He is also the author of six books of non-fiction. He was born on Calcutta and lives in Brooklyn and Goa, India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Flynn is the author of twelve books including the memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and most recently the poetry collection, I Will Destroy You. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kimi Eisele is the author of the debut novel The Lightest Object in the Universe. She is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tucson, Arizona. She also works for the Southwest Folklife Alliance as a writer and editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexandra Fuller is the author of novels, memoirs, non-fiction, essays, and journalism. Her latest memoir is Travel Light, Move Fast, which focuses on the life and death of her father, an Englishman who settled in Africa. Fuller was born in England, grew up in Zimbabwe, and now lives in Wyoming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Terry Tempest Williams has written and edited over 20 books, including the essay collection Erosion, Refuge, and The Open Space of Democracy. Her work focuses on the natural world and the intersection between the environment and personal and national politics, spirituality, and family. She teaches at the Harvard Divinity School and lives in rural Utah. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Petina Gappah is an award-winning Zimbabwean author. Her novels include Out of Darkness, Shining Light and The Book of Memory.  She has also written two short story collections and also writes journalism. She has a law degree and worked as an international trade lawyer. She lives in Harare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alix Ohlin is the author of the novels Dual Citizens and Inside, which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.  She lives in Vancouver and is the chair of the Creative Writing Program at University of British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nathaniel Popkin is the author of three books of non-fiction and the novels, The Year of the Return, Everything is Borrowed, and Lion and Leopard. He also co-edited the anthology Who Will Speak for America?, which he also spoke about with co-editor Stephanie Feldman on First Draft. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Téa Obreht is the author of the novels Inland and The Tiger’s Wife.  Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic, among many others.  She was born in the former Yugoslavia and now lives and teaches in New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caitlin Horrocks is the author of the novel The Vexations and the short story collection This is Not Your City.  She is on the advisory board of the Kenyon Review and teaches fiction at Grand Valley State University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  Subscribe to First Draft. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Helen Phillips, author of The Need, has written five books, including the short story collections Some Possible Solutions and And Yet They Were Happy and the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Her work has been featured on Selected Shorts, at the Brooklyn Museum, and in the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, and Tin House, among others. She is an associate professor at Brooklyn College.   Subscribe to First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katie Arnold is a contributing editor and former managing editor at Outside Magazine, where she worked on staff for 12 years. She created and launched the popular Raising Rippers column, about bringing up adventurous kids, which appears monthly on Outside Online. Her memoir is called Running Home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin McIlvoy has taught creative writing for over twenty-five years. He was Editor in Chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol at New Mexico State University, and has served on the Board of Directors of two national writing organizations, Council for Literary Magazines & Presses and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. His published works include A Waltz, The Fifth Station, Little Peg, Hyssop, The Complete History of New Mexico, 57 Octaves Below Middle C, and At The Gate of All Wonder.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dinaw Mengestu is the award-winning author All Our Names, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, and How to Read the Air. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s M.F.A. program in fiction and the recipient of a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation and a 20 Under 40 award from The New Yorker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes into the Forest and Show her a Flower, a Bird, A Shadow. Peg lives in Northern California and is the founder and director of WTAW Press and of Why There Are Words, a national literary reading series and program of WTAW Press. She is a member of The Writers Grotto. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Kushner is the author of The Flamethrowers, Telex from Cuba, and The Mars Room. A collection of her early work, The Strange Case of Rachel K, was published by New Directions in 2015. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Paris Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Karen Russell won the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and one of The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2011. Her short story collections include Vampires in the Lemon Grove, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and Orange World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer DuBois is the author of A Partial History of Lost Causes, Cartwheel, and The Spectators. The National Book Foundation named her one of its 5 Under 35 authors. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Lapham’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, Salon, Cosmopolitan, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. A native of western Massachusetts, duBois teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Bernard was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She holds a B. A. and Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Boston Globe Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, Oxtford American, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and theatlantic.com. Her essay collection is called Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Castellani is the son of Italian immigrants and a native of Wilmington, Delaware. He currently lives in Boston, where he is the artistic director of Grub Street, the country’s largest and leading independent creative writing center. He is the author of the novels: A Kiss from Maddalena, The Saint of Lost Things, All This Talk of Love, and Leading Men. He is also the author of The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, a collection of essays on point of view in fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Secret Son, The Moor’s Account, and The Other Americans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

George Hodgman is the author of Bettyville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tina Chang was raised in New York City. She is the first female to be named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn and is the author of the collections of poetry Hybrida, Of Gods & Strangers, and Half-Lit Houses. She is also the co-editor of the W.W. Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Devi Laskar is the author of two poetry collections: Gas & Food, No Lodging and Anastasia Maps and the novel: The Atlas of Reds and Blues.  She lives in Northern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Howard is a writer of fiction, personal essays, memoir, and dance criticism. Her debut novel is called The Risk of Us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Miriam Toews is the author of Women Talking, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, All My Puny Sorrows, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times–bestselling author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking. She is also the author of the young adult novel Belzhar. Wolitzer lives in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joanne Ramos was born in the Philippines and moved to Wisconsin when she was six. She graduated with a BA from Princeton University. After working in investment banking and private-equity investing for several years, she became a staff writer at The Economist.  The Farm is her first novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds, and The Dissident, and the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Molly Dektar is the author of The Ash Family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

CJ Hauser teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University. She is the author of the novel The From-Aways and her fiction has appeared in Tin House, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, Esquire, Third Coast, and The Kenyon Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erika Meitner was born and raised in Queens and Long Island, New York. She is the author of five books of poems: Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, Ideal Cities, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, Copia, and Holy Moly Carry Me. In addition to teaching creative writing at UVA, UW-Madison, and UC-Santa Cruz, she has worked as a dating columnist, an office temp, a Hebrew school instructor, a computer programmer, a systems consultant, a lifeguard, a documentary film production assistant, and a middle school teacher in the New York City public school system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cara Robertson is the author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden.  She is an attorney whose writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, the Raleigh News and Observer, and the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. She was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford Law School. A former Supreme Court law clerk, she served as a legal adviser to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford Law School Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Means is the author of several short story collections including Instructions for a Funeral, The Secret Goldfish, and The Spot and the novel, Hystopia.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Susan Orlean is a staff writer at The New Yorker and her books include Rin Tin Tin, The Orchid Thief, and The Library Book, among others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jessica Soffer's work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, Redbook, Saveur, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.  Her bestselling novel, Tomorrow There Will be Apricots, was published in twelve countries.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of The Water Cure, which is on teh long list for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eva Hagberg Fisher is the author of How to be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pam Houston is the author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Valeria Luiselli is the author of The Lost Children Archive.  She is a fiction writer, journalist, and essayist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Madhuri Vijay is the author of the novel The Far Field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices