First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Mary South is a graduate of Northwestern University and the MFA program in fiction at Columbia University. For many years, she has worked with Diane Williams as an editor at the literary journal NOON. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Baffler, The Believer, BOMB, The Collagist, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Guernica, LARB Quarterly, The New Yorker, NOON, The Offing, The White Review, and Words Without Borders. We discussed her short story collection You Will Never Be Forgotten.

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Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and author of the New York Times bestseller Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is being adapted as a television series. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes The Atlantic’s weekly “Dear Therapist” advice column and contributes regularly to The New York Times and many other publications. 

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Vanessa Hua is an award-winning, best-selling author and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her novel, A River of Stars, was named to the Washington Post and NPR’s Best Books of 2018 lists. Her short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, received an Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature and was a finalist for a California Book Award, and was reissued by Counterpoint in 2020. We discussed her collection Deceit and Other Possibilities.

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Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Ledger; The Beauty, longlisted for the National Book Award; Come, Thief, a finalist for the PEN USA Poetry Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Hirshfield is also the author of two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, and has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets. In this discussion we talked about Ledger.

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Sue Monk Kidd writes fiction and non-fiction. Her novels include The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair, The Invention of Wings, and The Book of Longings. Some of her non-fiction titles include The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and When the Heart Waits. In this episode we discuss her new novel The Book of Longings

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Emily Nemens is a writer, illustrator, and editor. Her debut novel, The Cactus League, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in February 2020. In 2018, Nemens became the seventh editor of The Paris Review, the nation’s preeminent literary quarterly. In this episode we discuss The Cactus League.

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Ann Napolitano is the author of the novels Dear Edward, A Good Hard Look, and Within Arm’s Reach. She is also the Associate Editor of One Story literary magazine. She received an MFA from New York University; she has taught fiction writing for Brooklyn College’s MFA program, New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and for Gotham Writers’ Workshop. In this episode we discuss Dear Edward.

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Anna Solomon is the author of three novels—The Book of V., Leaving Lucy Pear, and The Little Bride—and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, One Story, The Boston Globe, Tablet, and elsewhere. Anna is a graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches writing at Barnard College, Warren Wilson’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center. In this episode we discuss The Book of V.

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Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan. She studied at Michigan State University and earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University.She is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, Forché's books of poetry include: In the Lateness of the World, The Angel of History, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us, which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes, which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her memoir What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistancewas a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction. In this episode we discuss In the Lateness of the World.

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Ander Monson is the author of eight books, including the non-fiction book I Will Take the Answer and the short story collection, The Gnome Stories. He edits the magazine DIAGRAM among other projects, and he directs the MFA program at the University of Arizona.

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