Joshua Mohr is the author of the memoir "Sirens", as well as five novels including "Damascus", which The New York Times called "Beat-poet cool." He’s also written "Fight Song" and "Some Things that Meant the World to Me," one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as "Termite Parade," an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times.  His novel "All This Life" won the Northern California Book Award. He is the founder of Decant Editorial.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Orner is the author of Am I Alone Here? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First Draft interview with Gerrard Conley, author of the memoir Boy Erased. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Akhil Sharma is an Indian-American author and professor of creative writing. His first published novel An Obedient Father won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His second, Family Life, won the 2015 Folio Prize and 2016 International Dublin Literary Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin Percy is the author of three novels, the most recent among them The Dead Lands, a post apocalyptic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark saga. He is also the author of  Red Moon and The Wilding, as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk and the craft book Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anuradha Roy's latest book, Sleeping on Jupiter,  won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016 and was nominated for the Man Booker prize 2015. She won the Economist Crossword Prize for her second novel, The Folded Earth. Her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, has been widely translated and was picked as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and the Seattle Times. It has been named by World Literature Today as one of the 60 most essential books on modern India and was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Randa Jarrar’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Five Chapters, and others. Her first novel, A Map of Home was published in half a dozen languages & won a Hopwood Award, an Arab-American Book Award, and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes and Noble Review. Her new book is called Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. She has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Hedgebrook, and others, and in 2010 was named one of the most gifted writers of Arab origin under the age of 40. She runs RAWI (the Radius of Arab-American Writers) and loves coordinating events and strengthening communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Witt is a writer in New York City. She has written for n+1, The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, the London Review of Books, and many other places. She has degrees from Brown, Columbia, and Cambridge, and was a Fulbright scholar in Mozambique. Her first book, Future Sex, was published in 2016 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (Simon & Schuster), and Kapitoil (Harper Perennial). He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A columnist for the New York Times, he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and McSweeney’s and has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Bausch was born in Georgia, at the end of World War II, and was raised in the Washington, D.C., area. He has worked as a salesman--of automobiles, appliances, and hardware--a taxi driver, waiter, production planner, and library assistant. He was educated at George Mason University, earning a BA, an MA and an MFA, and he says he has been a writer all his life. He spent time in the military teaching survival, and worked his way through college.   His eighth and latest novel is called The Legend of Jesse Smoke. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patrick Ryan is the author of the short story collection The Dream Life of Astronauts and the novels Send Me and Saint Augustine among others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jane Smiley is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Thousand Acres.  She has written more than twenty books including Private Life, Moo, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Editors' Choice, which has received a starred Kirkus Review and is deemed one of the best books to read this summer and beyond by New York Times, NPR, BBC, BuzzFeed, Book Riot, Bookish, Miami Herald, Elle, O Magazine, Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, Flavorwire, After Ellen, BookPage, Cosmopolitan, Brooklyn Magazine, among others. Dennis-Benn has also been shortlisted for the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Barry was born in Limerick in 1969 and now lives in Dublin. He writes sketches and columns for the Sunday Herald in Glasgow and the Irish Examiner in Cork. He has written about travel and literature for the Guardian, the Irish Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications. His short fiction has appeared widely on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently in the New Yorker. His recent short story collection is called Dark Lies the Island. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leigh Stein is the author of the novel The Fallback Plan, a collection of poetry called Dispatch from the Future, and a memoir, Land of Enchantment. She is co-founder and Executive Director fo the nonprofit literary organization Out of the Binders, and lives outside New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic.  He is the author of How to Read a Novelist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lev Grossman's first novel, Warp, came out in 1997. His second, Codex, was published in 2004 and became an international bestseller. The Magicians was published in 2009 and was a New York Times bestseller and one of the New Yorker‘s best books of the year. The sequel, The Magician King, came out in 2011 and was a Times bestseller too. The third and (almost certainly) last Magicians book, The Magician’s Land, was published in 2014 and debuted at #1 on the bestseller list. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ramona Ausubel grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of a new novel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty as well as the novel No One is Here Except All of Us (2012), and a collection of short stories A Guide to Being Born (2013).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer duBois is the recipient of a 2013 Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2012 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award. Her debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was the winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction and the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was the winner of the Housatonic Book Award for fiction and was a finalist for a New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer Haigh's new novel is called Heat and Light. She is the author of four previous novels: Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers and Mrs. Kimble, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her short story collection News From Heaven won the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction.  Haigh's short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories and many other places.  She lives in Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Helen Schulman is author of This Beautiful Life, four other novels and one short story collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim Addonizio is the author of six poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry, The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. She has received fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, two Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Award Finalist for her collection Tell Me. Her latest books are Mortal Trash: Poems (W.W. Norton) and a memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress (Penguin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anna Noyes is the author of the debut story collection, Goodnight, Beautiful Women, which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Vice, A Public Space, and Guernica, among others. She has received the Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship, the James Merrill House Fellowship, and the Lighthouse Works Fellowship, and has served as writer-in-residence at the Polli Talu Arts Center in Estonia. Goodnight, Beautiful Women was awarded the 2013 Henfield Prize for Fiction and the 2016 Lotos Foundation Prize, and is a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and an Indie Next Great Reads pick for June. Noyes was raised in Downeast Maine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles Bock is the author of the novels Alice & Oliver and Beautiful Children, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate, as well as in numerous anthologies. He has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Yaddo, UCross, and the Vermont Studio Center.  Charles is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars.  He lives with his wife, Leslie Jamison, and his daughter in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Highly regarded as both a novelist and a short story writer, Ethan Canin has ranged in his career from the "breathtaking" short stories of Emperor of the Air to the "stunning" novellas of The Palace Thief,  from the "wise and beautiful" short novel Carry Me Across the Water to the "epic" America America.  His short stories, which have been the basis for four Hollywood movies, have appeared in a wide range of magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Paris Review, and Granta, and have been selected for many prize anthologies. His latest novel is The Doubter's Almanac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joshua Ferris is the bestselling author of three novels, Then We Came to the End,  The Unnamed and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. He was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40”writers in 2010. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lauren Holmes grew up in upstate New York. She received a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA from Hunter College, where she was a Hertog Fellow and a teaching fellow. Her work has appeared in Granta, where she was a 2014 New Voice, and in Guernica. Holmes lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.  Her short story collection is called Barbara the Slut. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Idra Novey is the author of the debut novel Ways to Disappear, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Born in western Pennsylvania, she has since lived in Chile, Brazil and New York. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian, selected by Patri­cia Smith for the 2011 National Poetry Series, The Next Coun­try, a final­ist for the 2008 Fore­word Book of the Year Award, and Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into eight languages and she’s written for The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Con­sid­ered, Slate, and The Paris Review.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saeed Jones was born in Memphis, TN and raised in Lewisville, Texas. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Rutgers University – Newark. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Western Kentucky University where he won the Jim Wayne Miller Award for Poetry. His collection Prelude to Bruise was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014 and the winner of the 2015 Pen Literary Award for Poetry. Jones is also the literary editor for BuzzFeed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dana Spiotta is the author of four novels: Innocents and Others, published by Scribner in 2016; Stone Arabia (2011), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in fiction; Eat the Document(2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and Lightning Field (2001). Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and won the 2008-9 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She lives in Syracuse with her daughter Agnes and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dominic grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Austin, Texas. He is the author, most recently, of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, a New York Times Bestseller and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice selection. His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Texas Monthly, and the Chicago Tribune. His other novels are: The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, and Bright and Distant Shores.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First Draft interview with Antonya Nelson.  Nelson is the author of seven short story collections and four novels. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program. Her awards include the Rea Award for Short Fiction, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, and an American Artists Award. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Garth Greenwell is an American poet, author, literary critic, and educator. His debut novel is What Belongs to You. In 2013, Greenwell returned to the United States after living in Bulgaria to attend the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop as an Arts Fellow. He has published stories in The Paris Review and A Public Space and writes criticism for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria in 1979. He is the author of Blackass, as well as a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short stories have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Nigeria. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rob Spillman is the author of the memoir All Tomorrow's Parties. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Interview with James Hannah, author of Delicious Foods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Hundred-Year House, winner of the Chicago Writers Association’s Novel of the Year award, and The Borrower, a Booklist Top Ten Debut which has been translated into eight languages. Her short story collection, Music for Wartime, will appear in June of 2015. Her short fiction was chosen for The Best American Short Stories for four consecutive years (2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008), and appears regularly in journals like Harper’s, Tin House, and New England Review. The recipient of a 2014 NEA fellowship, Makkai has taught at Northwestern University and at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York. Her fourth novel, Station Eleven, was a 2014 National Book Award Finalist. All four of her novels—previous books were Last Night in Montreal, The Singer's Gun, and The Lola Quartet—were Indie Next Picks, and The Singer's Gun was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystere de la Critique in France. Her short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013. She is a staff writer for The Millions. She lives in New York City with her husband. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Lisicky is the author of five books: The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, Ecotone, Fence, The Offing, Ploughshares, Tin House, Unstuck, and in many other magazines and anthologies. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Fellow. He has taught in the creative writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Rutgers-Newark, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and elsewhere. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden, the low residency program at Sierra Nevada College, and at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. He is the editor of StoryQuarterly and serves on the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her other books include Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Doria Russell has written several novels including Thread of Grace, The Sparrow and Doc. 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 resides in Boston, where he is the artistic director of Grub Street, one of the country's leading non-profit creative writing centers. He is the author of three critically-acclaimed novels, A Kiss from Maddalena (Algonquin Books, 2003)—winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in 2004— The Saint of Lost Things (Algonquin Books, 2005), a BookSense (IndieBound) Notable Book; and All This Talk of Love (Algonquin, 2013), a New York Times Editors' Choice and finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Literary Award. He is currently working on a new novel. The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story a collection of essays on writing, is now available from Graywolf. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Cantor's stories have appeared in magazines such as the Paris Review, One Story, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Fence, and Volume 1 Brooklyn. They have been anthologized, nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, short-listed by both the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories, and awarded runner-up Bridport and Graywolf/SLS Prizes. She lives in New York, city of her heart, in the writerly borough of Brooklyn, but have at various points made her home in most U.S. states between Virginia and Vermont. Her novels include A Highly Unlikely Scenario and Good on Paper. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Gerard is the author of the novel Binary Star (Two Dollar Radio), the forthcoming essay collection Sunshine State (Harper Perennial), and two chapbooks, most recently BFF (Guillotine). Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine‘s “The Cut”, The Paris Review Daily, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, Joyland, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies for Joyland and The Saturday Evening Post. She writes a monthly column on artists' notebooks for Hazlitt and teaches writing in New York City.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First Draft interview with Edan Lepucki, author of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Johnson was born in South Dakota and raised in Arizona. He earned a BA in Journalism from Arizona State University in 1992; a MFA from the writing program at McNeese State University, and a PhD in English from Florida State University in 2000. Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper's, Tin House, Granta, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories. His works include include Emporium, a short-story collection, Fortune Smiles, which won the National Book Awarad, and the novels Parasites Like Us and The Orphan Master's Son, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First Draft interview with Elizabeth McCracken. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jess Walter is the author of The Beautiful Ruins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices