First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist. She is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Whose Story Is This?, Call Them By Their True Names, Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.  Her new book is Orwell’s Roses.

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Keisha N. Blain is a 2022 New America National Fellow and an award-winning historian. She is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom and Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. Blain has published extensively on race, gender, and politics in both national and global perspectives. She is one of the co-developers of #Charlestonsyllabus, a Twitter movement and crowdsourced list of reading recommendations relating to the history of racial violence in the United States.

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Lauren Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent the novel Matrix. Her work has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, was twice a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

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Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. His most recent is Bewilderment. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His novel, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

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Annie Murphy Paul is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time magazine, and The Best American Science Writing, among many other publications. She is the author of Origins, reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and selected by that publication as a "Notable Book," and The Cult of Personality, hailed by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker as a “fascinating new book.” Her new book is called The Extended Mind.

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Peter Orner's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, Ploughshares and many other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice received a Pushcart Prize. Peter has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. His fiction titles include Maggie Brown and Others, Esther Stores, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, Love and Shame and Love, and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. His non-fiction book is Am I Alone Here? He edited the titles Hope Deferred, Underground America, and Lavil: Life, Love and Death in Port-au-Prince.

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Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He has published two books on writing, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo, and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide. He’s also published a collection of 100-word stories, Fissures, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story. His new collection is called All the Comfort Sin Can Provide. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and he has been anthologized in collections such as Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and Best Small Fictions. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. 

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Kevin McIlvoy has published six novels, A Waltz, The Fifth Station, Little Peg, Hyssop, At the Gate of All Wonder, and One Kind Favor; and a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico and a collection of his prose poems and short-short stories, 57 Octaves Below Middle C. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and other literary magazines. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction. For twenty-seven years he was fiction editor and editor in chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1987 to 2019; he taught as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008.

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Robert Olen Butler has published seventeen novels: Late City, The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River and six volumes of short fiction, Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.

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Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include Her Read, a graphic poem and A Wake with Nine Shades, a finalist for Foreword Reviews Best of the Indie Press Award. A poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist and licensed builder, she has received grants from Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Community of Writers and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Plume, Rhino, and TriQuarterly. She teaches at Northwestern Michigan College and elsewhere.

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