First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Chavisa Woods is the author of Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country and Other Stories.

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Jesse Goolsby is the author of the novel I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them, winner of the Florida Book Award for Fiction and long-listed for the Flaherty-Duncan First Novel Prize. His fiction and essays have appeared widely, including The Literary Review, EPOCH, The Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Salon, and Pleiades.

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Max Winter is a graduate of UC Irvine’s MFA program, and a recipient of two Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Fiction. He has been published in Day One and Diner Journal. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife and son.

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Peter Heller is the author of the novels The Dog Stars, The Painter, and Celine.  He is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. 

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Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His current book is the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. 

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Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, the novel Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize, and two chapbooks, most recently BFF. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies. She’s been supported by fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Tin House, PlatteForum, and Ucross. She writes a monthly column for Hazlitt and teaches writing in New York City.

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Shulem Deen is the author of the  award-winning memoir All Who Go Do Not Return, an account of growing up in and then leaving the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the U.S. He is a regular contributor to Forward, and in 2015 was listed in the Forward 50, an annual list of American Jews with outsized roles on political and social issues.

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Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three short story collections. The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book.  Her latest novel is called We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

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Jim Shepard is an American novelist and short story writer, who teaches creative writing and film at Williams College.  His latest novel is The Book of Aron.

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Douglas Preston is a novelist, journalist, and essayist.  Preston's most recent nonfiction book, The Lost City of the Monkey God, published in January 2017, tells the true story of the discovery of an ancient, Pre-Columbian city in an unexplored valley deep in the Mosquitia Mountains of Honduras.

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