First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Margot Livesey is a writer and teacher. Her first book, published in 1986, was a collection of stories called Learning By Heart. Since then Margot has published eight novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on For tune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Mercury, and The Boy in the Field. The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays on writing, was published by Tin House Books in 2017.

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R.L. Maizes is the author of the short story collection We Love Anderson Cooper and the novel Other People's Pets. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and have aired on NPR.

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Benjamin Nugent is the author of the short story collection Fraternity. He is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2019 Terry Southern Prize. His stories have been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from the Paris Review.

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Ursula Hegi is the author of The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls, The Worst Thing I've Done, Sacred Time, Hotel of the Saints, The Vision of Emma Blau, Tearing the Silence, Salt Dancers, Stones from the River, Floating in My Mother's Palm, Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories, Intrusions, and Trudi & Pia. She teaches writing at Stonybrook's Southhampton Campus and she is the recipient of more than thirty grants and awards.

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Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of How to Pronounce Knife. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award and appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, NOON, The Believer, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018, and O. Henry Prize Stories 2019. She is the author of four books of poetry, Cluster, Light, Found and Small Arguments.

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Michelle Bowdler is the author of Is Rape a Crime? Michelle is a recipient of a 2017 Barbara Deming Memorial Award for non-fiction and has been a Fellow at Ragdale and MacDowell Colony. She has been published in the New York Times and in the anthologies The Anatomy of Silence and We Rise to Resist: Voices from a New Era in Women’s Political Action.

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Sejal Shah is the author of the debut essay collection, This Is One Way To Dance. Her stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, the Kenyon Review Online, Literary Hub, Longreads, and The Rumpus.

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Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and six novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, The Green Road, and Actress. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature.

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TaraShea Nesbit is a writer and teacher. Her second novel, Beheld, is a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and an Indies Next Pick for April 2020. Her first novel, The Wives of Los Alamos, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and winner of two New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. She is an assistant professor of fiction and nonfiction at Miami University.

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Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born and raised in California to a Japanese mother and American father, and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her books include American Harvest, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, and Picking Bones from Ash.

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