First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Carol Edgarian is an award-winning novelist, essayist, teacher, and editor. Her novels includeVera, the New York Times bestseller Three Stages of Amazement, and the international bestseller Rise the Euphrates. Carol’s articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and W, among many other places, and she coedited The Writer’s life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame from the Diaries of the World’s Great Writers. In 2003 Carol and her husband, Tom Jenks, founded the nonprofit Narrative, a leading digital publisher of fiction, poetry, essays, and art.

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Dantiel Moniz is the author of the short story collection Milk Blood Heat, which was an Indie Next Pick, an Amazon “Best Book of the Month” selection, and a Roxanne Gay Audacious Book Club pick. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, One Story, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares and The Yale Review among others. She lives in Northeast Florida and teaches fiction at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Priyanaka Champaneri is the author of the novel The City of Good Death, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Fiction Writing in 2018. Champaneri received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and has been a fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts several times. 

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Alan Lightman is the author of six novels, including the international best seller Einstein’s Dreams and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award. He has taught at Harvard and at MIT, where he was the first person to receive a dual faculty appointment in science and the humanities. He is currently professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. His new book is called Probable Impossibilities.

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George Saunders is the author of eleven books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner was selected to represent each decade, from the fifty years since the Prize’s inception. His latest book is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

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Natalie West is a Los Angeles based writer and educator. She worked as a professional Dominatrix while obtaining her PhD in Gender Studies. Her personal essays have appeared in Salon, Autostraddle, Kink Academy, Columbia Journal, and them. She moonlights as a sex work, BDSM, and queer community authenticity consultant for film and television.

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Eley Williams is the author of the novel The Liar's Dictionary, the short story collection Attrib. and Other Stories, and the poetry collection Frit. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University of London. Her critical and creative work has appeared in the London Review of Books, the TLS and the Guardian.

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Te-Ping Chen is a fiction writer and journalist whose debut collection of short stories is called Land of Big Numbers. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Granta and Tin House. She is a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Philadelphia who was previously based in Beijing and Hong Kong.

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Ben Okri is a poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer, anthologist, aphorist, and playwright. He has also written film scripts. His works have won numerous national and international prizes, including the Booker Prize for Fiction. His newest book is a short story collection called Prayer for the Living.

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Mateo Askaripour is the author of the novel Black Buck. He aims to empower people of color to seize the opportunities for advancement, not matter the obstacle. He was a 2018 Rhode Island Writers Colony writer in residence and his writing has appeared in Entrepreneur, LitHub, Catapult, The Rumpus, Medium and elsewhere.

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