First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Ben Marcus is the author of five books of fiction: The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet, Leaving the Sea, and Notes from the Fog. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Bomb, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and New American Stories. Since 2000 he has taught on the faculty at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

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Bernice McFadden is the author of nine critically acclaimed novels including Sugar, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, The Warmest December, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), Glorious, and The Book of Harlan (winner of a 2017 American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction). She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of three awards from the BCALA. Praise Song for the Butterflies is her latest novel.

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Amitava Kumar writes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.  His latest novel is called Immigrant, Montana. He was born in Ara, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. Kumar is the author of several books of non-fiction and two novels. He lives in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College.

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Hannah Tinti is the author of the bestselling novel The Good Thief, which won The Center for Fiction’s first novel prize, and the story collection Animal Crackers, a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

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Elissa Schappell is an American novelist, short-story writer, editor and essayist.  Her latest story collection is called Blueprints for Building Better Girls.

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Gary Shteyngart is the author of the memoir Little Failure and the novels Super Sad True Love Story, Absurdistan, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, and Lake Success. His work has been translated into twenty-six languages. Shteyngart lives in New York City and upstate New York.

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Francine Prose is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic.  Her latest book is an essay collection called What to Read and Why.

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Kirstin Valdez Quade is an American writer. Her debut short story collection, Night at the Fiestas, received critical praise and won awards. A review in the New York Times labeled her stories "legitimate masterpieces" and called the book a "haunting and beautiful debut story collection."

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Joe Mungo Reed was born in London and raised in Gloucestershire, England. He has a master’s in philosophy and politics at the University of Edinburgh and an MFA in creative writing at Syracuse University, where he won the Joyce Carol Oates Award in Fiction. He is the author of the novel, We Begin Our Ascent, and his short stories have appeared in VQR and Gigantic and anthologized in Best of Gigantic.

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Stephanie Feldman and Nathaniel Popkin edited Who Will Speak for America?, which includes fiction, essays, photos, cartoons, and poetry from 43 contributing authors. The anthology was compiled just before the 2016 Presidential inaugeration of Donald Trump.

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