First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Alice McDermott is the author of eight novels, including National Book Award winner Charming Billy and The Ninth Hour.

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George Saunders is the author of four short story collections, including Tenth of December and the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize.

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James Han Mattson is the author of The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves.

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Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her newest novel is Manhattan Beach.

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James Longenbach is a poet and critic whose most recent collection of poems, Earthling is a meditation on the ways in which human beings inhabit their knowledge of impending mortality, ranging bemusement to panic.  His most recent critical work, Lyric Knowledge: How Poems Get Made is an account of how English-language poems, ranging from the 8th to the 21st century, are constructed from the most basic elements of their medium (diction, syntax, rhythm, figuration, and so on).  He has also written widely about modern and postmodern poetry, sometimes emphasizing the historicity of poetic language (Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things) but also exploring the ways in which poems resist their historical location (The Resistance to Poetry).

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Matthew Weiner was the writer, creator, executive producer, and director of Mad Men. He also worked as a writer and executive producer on The Sopranos, along with several comedy series, and made his feature film debut in 2014. Weiner's novel is called Heather, The Totality.

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Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize.

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Bruce Machart's works include the novel The Wake of Forgiveness and the short story collection Men in the Making. His novel was named a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection and a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice." Chosen as a Top Ten title for 2010 by Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and The Wall Street Journal, the novel was a finalist for the American Booksellers Association's Indie's Choice award and the PEN/USA Literary Prize. Machart lives in Hamilton, Massachusetts.

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David Litt is an American political speechwriter and author of the memoir Thanks, Obama: My Hopey Changey White House Years. He is currently the head writer/producer for Funny or Die’s office in Washington, D.C.

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Lu Spinney was born in Cape Town and spent her childhood on a farm in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal, later moving with her family to the Indian Ocean coast north of Durban. After university, she left South Africa to live in Nice and Paris, before settling in London.  Beyond the High Blue Air is her first book.

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