Explore every episode of the podcast First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Moshe Sakal was born in Tel Aviv into a Jewish-Arab family with roots in Damascus and Cairo. He is the author of six Hebrew novels, including The Diamond Setter and Yolanda. A revised edition of The Diamond Setter was published by Other Press in September 2026. His fiction explores exile, diaspora, queer identity, and the shared Arab-Jewish world before and after 1948. He is a two-time Sapir Prize nominee, Eshkol Prize winner, Fulbright Scholar, and Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa. Support this podcast at ⁠Patreon⁠. Listeners like you keep the podcast going. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Wednesday’s Child; The Book of Goose; Must I Go; Where Reasons End; Kinder Than Solitude; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; The Vagrants; and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers—and the memoirs Things in Nature Merely Grow and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham–Campbell Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.  Her new novel is Music Against the Night Support this podcast at Patreon. Listeners like you keep the podcast going. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

T. Geronimo Johnson is the bestselling author of Welcome to Braggsville, longlisted for the National Book Award and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence; and Hold It ’Til It Hurts, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He won the inaugural Joyce Carol Oates Award, the Rome Prize, Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and the William Saroyan International Prize, received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he later taught writing, and has held Stegner and Iowa Arts fellowships. His new novel is The Occidental Book of the Dead. You can support First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing on Patreon. Your support contributes to the existence of this podcast and offers you ad-free, pitch-free episodes plus extras each month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Kolker is the author of Hidden Valley Road, an instant #1 New York Times best-seller and selection of Oprah's Book Club that was named a Top Ten Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Slate; one of the year’s best by NPR, the Boston Globe, the New York Post, and Amazon. His previous work includes Lost Girls, also a New York Times best-seller and New York Times Notable Book, and one of Slate’s best nonfiction books of the quarter century. He is a National Magazine Award finalist whose journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine. His new book is called The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia. Support First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing on Patreon. No ads, plus extras like cuts from the interviews not in this episode, writing tips from guests and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Margrét Ann Thors is a writer based in Reykjavík, Iceland. Originally from Fairfield County, Connecticut, she holds a BA, MA, and MFA from Columbia University and teaches at the University of Iceland. In 2025, she earned her PhD with an emphasis on literature after 9/11. Her creative writing has been published in Glamour, Creative Nonfiction, Ós Pressan, Storychord, and other outlets. Her debut novel is FREYJA. Support First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing on Patreon. No ads, plus extras like cuts from the interviews not in this episode, writing tips from guests and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The 2018–21 Laureate for Irish Fiction, he is the author of nine novels, five of which have been long- or shortlisted for the Booker Prize, most recently Old God’s Time. His work has won numerous awards in Ireland, the UK, and France, including the Costa Book of the Year Award, the Walter Scott Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In the US, his novels have been recognized by the ALA Carnegie Medal (longlist), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (shortlist), and the High Plains Book Award (winner). He lives in County Wicklow, Ireland.  His new novel is The Newer World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Alexander is a prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author, renowned poet, educator, scholar, and cultural advocate. Her memoir, The Light of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. She composed and recited "Praise Song for the Day" for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration and is currently president of the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of the arts, culture, and humanities. Her new work is called Signals Across Vast Distances: Essays and Tales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roberta Rossella Recchia was born in Rome and  lived for a time in Lille, France, where she earned a master’s degree in international relations and cultures. She worked for ten years for a big company and then quit office work to devote herself to teaching. She currently teaches English in a high school in Rome. She is passionate about film and literature, especially Russian and French. She lives with her chihuahua, Claudio, in a small town on the coast of Lazio, Italy. Her new novel is All That Is Left of Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Salter grew up in New York City and was a career officer and Air Force pilot until his mid-thirties, when the success of his first novel, The Hunters(1957), led to a fulltime writing career. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose has earned him acclaim from critics, readers, and fellow novelists. His novel, A Sport and a Pastime (1967), was hailed by the New York Times as “nearly perfect as any American fiction.” His latest book, All That Is, was published to critical acclaim in 2013. He died in 2015.  This interview was recorded in November 2014. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jess Row is the author of the novels The New Earth and Your Face in Mine as well as a collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination.  His short story collections include The Train to Lo Wu, Nobody Ever Gets Lost and the newly published Storyknife. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction among other honors. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program in the Department of English at NYU and is an ordained senior dharma teacher in the Kwam Um School of Zen.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Russo is the author of 11 novels, including most recently, Under the Falls, Somebody’s Fool, Chances Are . . . , Everybody’s Fool, and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, won multiple awards for its screen adaptation, and in 2023 his novel Straight Man was adapted into the television series Lucky Hank. In 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Port­land, Maine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University. His new book is Unsayable: A Life in Writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, multimedia artist, memoirist and novelist. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poets and Writers, and Best American Poetry, among others. Some of her poetry collections include Miracle Arrhythmia, Mule and Pear, Seeing the Body, and Lighting the Shadow. Griffiths’ hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body was selected as the winner of the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Poetry, the winner of the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize, and a finalist the 2020 NAACP Image award. Her debut novel, Promise was a Kirkus Reviews and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year. Her memoir is called The Flower Bearers.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Powers’ books, including The Yellow Birds, A Line in the Sand, A Shout in the Ruins and poetry collection Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Prix littéraire du Monde prix étranger, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, among other recognitions. He was a James A. Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin from 2009-2012 and later held a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. Powers is a U.S. Army veteran of the war in Iraq. His new novel is Children of the Wild. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laura Dave is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me, Eight Hundred Grapes and six other novels. Her books have been published in thirty-nine languages and have been chosen by Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club, Indie Next, Book of the Month Club, The Richard and Judy Book Club, Best of Amazon, and Best of Apple Books. The Last Thing He Told Me was chosen as the Goodreads Mystery & Thriller of the Year for 2021. Her new novel, The First Time I Saw Him is a sequel to The Last Thing He Told Me, both of which are series on Apple TV. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emeline Atwood graduated from the Michener Center for Writers in 2023. She writes fiction and poetry and is a recipient of the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, the Louis Begley Prize, the Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, and the Le Baron Russell Briggs Fiction Prize. She lives in Austin, Texas. Her novel is A Real Animal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir; The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller, Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN-USA Award; Sanctuary, a New York Times Editor’s Pick; and Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg. Emily Rapp Black has received awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation; the Jentel Arts Foundation; the Corporation of Yaddo; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was a winter writing fellow among other awards. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside, where she also teaches in the School of Medicine. Her new nonfiction book is called I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truthtelling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ben Fountain’s work has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the PEN-Cerulli Award for Excellence in Sports Writing, and a Whiting Writers Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His works include Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, Beautiful Country Burn Again, Devil Makes Three, and Rasputin Swims the Potomac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zinzi Clemmons was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. Her debut novel, What We Lose was named “Debut Novel of the Year” by Vogue, and received praise from the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and others. What We Lose was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize. She is a 2017 National Book Award 5 Under 35 Honoree. She wrote the foreword to a new edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane, published by Penguin Classics in 2019. Her new collection of essays is called Freedom. Listen to First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing ad-free, pitch-free and with monthly extras by becoming a patron at https://www.patreon.com/firstdraftwriters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. Her new short story collection is called The Typing Lady and Other Fictions. Her novels — My Year of Meats , All Over Creation, A Tale for the Time Being, and The Book of Form and Emptiness — have been translated and published in over thirty countries. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, won the LA Times Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Book of Form and Emptiness was the winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction as well as the 22nd Annual Massachusetts Book Award, the BC Yukon Book Prize, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize for Fiction. She is Professor Emerita of English Language & Literature at Smith College, where she was the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities. Support First Draft and listen ad-free and pitch-free with monthly extras at www.patreon.com/firstdraftwriters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emma Straub is the New York Times-bestselling author of seven books for adults: the novels American Fantasy, This Time Tomorrow, All Adults Here, The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. She is also the author of three picture books: Gaga Mistake Day, which she co-wrote with her mother, Mama Hug, and Very Good Hats. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and her work has been published in more than 20 languages. Emma and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York. Listen ad-free, pitch-free with thank you gifts each month by becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/firstdraftwriters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lily King is the award-winning author of six novels. Her most recent novel is Heart the Lover. She has also published a collection of short stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her 2020 novel, Writers & Lovers, won the New England Society Book Awards and was a New York Times Notable Book and chosen as a top-ten best book of 2020 by The Washington Post, NPR, People Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times. Her 2014 novel Euphoria won the Kirkus Award, the New England Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. This episode was recorded live at Aspen Words Winter Words program in 2026. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays is called Inciting Joy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ramona Ausubel is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of the novel No One Is Here Except All of Us and the short story collection A Guide to Being Born. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily, Best American Fantasy, and elsewhere, and has received special mentions in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award and the Pushcart Prize. Her new book is Unstuck: A Writer's Guide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hafeez Lakhani was born in Hyderabad, India and raised in suburban South Florida. His novel is called Abundance. His fiction and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, Exposition Review, Salt Hill, Tikkun, The Cortland Review, and The Southern Review, among other places, and have garnered fellowships from PEN America and The Center for Fiction. He was twice recognized with a Notable Essay in Best American Essays and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. After publishing his essay, If We Show That We Like They Make More Mainga, he was profiled by the Huffington Post as one of “Eight Fantastic New Writers To Look Out For”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tom Perrotta is the bestselling author of eleven works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into Oscar-nominated films, and The Leftovers, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed, Peabody Award-winning HBO series. His other books include Bad Haircut, The Wishbones, Joe College, The Abstinence Teacher, Nine Inches, Mrs. Fletcher, and Tracy Flick Can’t Win. His new novel is Ghost Town. His work has been translated into a multitude of languages. Perrotta grew up in New Jersey and lives outside of Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jim Newton is a journalist, teacher, and author of Justice for All, Eisenhower, Worthy Fights, and Man of Tomorrow. He was at the Los Angeles Times for twenty-five years as a reporter, bureau chief, editorial page editor, columnist, and editor at large. He lives in Pasadena, California, and teaches at UCLA, where he founded and edits the award-winning public affairs magazine Blueprint. His new book is Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead and an American Awakening. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University. This is about his novel The Snow Queen recorded in 2014. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Allegra Goodman is the author of Isola, Sam, Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Commentary, and Ploughshares and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories.  Her new novel is This is Not About Us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Khong’s first novel Goodbye, Vitamin, won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction. Her second novel, Real Americans, was a New York Times bestseller.  She was the managing and executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine and edited a cookbook called All About Eggs. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission district.  Her new short story collection is called My Dear You. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate Schatz is a feminist author, educator, and public speaker. She's the New York Times-bestselling author of the "Rad Women" book series; the novel Where the Girls Were; the 33 ⅓ book Rid of Me: A Story; and Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book, co-written with W. Kamau Bell. She lives in the Bay Area with her wife, three children, and pets. In all she does, Kate is committed to sharing radical histories that shine light on the marginalized people who've truly made America (and the world) great: the people of color, the immigrants, the queers, the punks, the weirdos, the artists, the workers, and the women.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Camille T. Dungy is the author of America, A Love Story. She has also written the memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, and four other collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry; 100 Best African American Poems; Best American Essays; The 1619 Project; All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis; and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Naeem Murr, a dual US and UK citizen, is the author of four novels: The Boy, a New York Times Notable Book; The Genius of the Sea; and The Perfect Man, which was awarded The Commonwealth WritersʼPrize for the Best Book of Europe and South Asia, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.  His new novel is Every Exit Brings You Home. He is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Among his awards are a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ada Limón is the author of seven books of poetry, including Startlement: New & Selected Poems; The Hurting Kind, which was a finalist for the Griffin Prize; The Carrying, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. She is the author of two picture books and was the editor of the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World. She served as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrea Mara is a number one international bestselling Irish author. Several of her books have been shortlisted for Irish Crime Novel of the Year awards.  Someone in the Attic was her U.S. debut and her novel All Her Fault was adapted into a television series on Peacock.  Her new novel It Should Have Been You is her newest novel.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Schultz is the author of nine poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Failure. Some of his other works include Like Wings, winner of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature; Deep within the Ravine awarded the Academy of American Poets Lamont prize; The Holy Worm of Praise Living in the Past and The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems. He is the founder and director of The Writers Studio and has been teaching creative writing since 1971. His new collection is Enormous Morning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tayari Jones is the author of four novels including An American Marriage, which was an Oprah’s Book Club Selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list as well as his year-end roundup. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction Aspen Words Literary Prize and an NAACP Image Award. It has been published in two dozen countries.  Her other works include Leaving Atlanta, Silver Sparrow, and The Untelling. Her new novel is Kin. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the award-winning short story collection Corpus Christi, the novels We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His short stories have been published in anthologized in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best; The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. His work has been widely translated and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review. He is the Director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. His new short story collection is Encounters with Unexpected Animals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His plays include of Boss Grady’s Boys, The Steward of Christendom, Our Lady of Sligo, The Pride Parnell Street, and Dallas Sweetman. His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, Annie Dunne, A Long Long Way, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Secret Scripture, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, On Canaan’s Side, The Temporary Gentleman, Days Without End, A Thousand Moons, and Old God’s Time. He has also published three collections of poetry. He is the recipient of the Irish-America Fund Literary Award, The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize, the London Critics Circle Award, The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, and Costa Awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year. He lives in Wicklow with his family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

R.L. Maizes is the author of A Complete Fiction. Her debut novel, Other People’s Pets, won the 2021 Colorado Book Award in Fiction and was a Library Journal Best Debut of Summer/Fall 2020. She also is the author of the short story collection, We Love Anderson Cooper. Her short stories have aired on National Public Radio and can be found in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and in The Best Small Fictions 2020. Maizes’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, O Magazine, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and have aired on NPR. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Guterson is the author of thirteen books, including the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Snow Falling on Cedars, which was made into a major motion picture, translated into twenty–five languages, and has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. He lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington. His new novel is Evelyn in Transit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ann Packer is the author of four best-selling novels including Some Bright Nowhere, The Children’s Crusade, Songs Without Words, and The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, which received the Kate Chopin Literary Award among many other prizes and honors. Her short fiction has been published in two collections — Mendocino and Other Stories and Swim Back to Me — and includes stories that appeared in The New Yorker and in the O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. Ann’s work has been translated into over a dozen languages and published around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

George Saunders is the author of twelve books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner was selected to represent each decade, from the fifty years since the Prize’s inception. His stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 1992. The short story collection Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2013 (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Torrey Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction and was named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. Her second book of short stories is called Stag Dance. Torrey is an amateur sauna builder, rides a pink motorcycle, and splits her time between Brooklyn and Santa Marta, Colombia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniyal Mueenuddin was brought up in Lahore, Pakistan, and Elroy, Wisconsin. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories 2008, selected by Salman Rushdie. His collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For a number of years he practiced law in New York. He now divides his time between Oslo, Norway, and his farm in Pakistan’s South Punjab. His new novel is called This is Where the Serpent Lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ashley Shelby’s debut novel, South Pole Station, received praise from The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio and others.  It was also named a New York Times Editor's Pick and an Indie Next Pick, as well as a Best Book of 2017 by Shelf Awareness, and was awarded the 2017 Lascaux Prize in Fiction. Her 2024 story collection, Honeymoons in Temporary Locations is currently shortlisted for the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in Slate, The New York Times Book Review, LitHub, Salon, Audubon, and other outlets. She is also the author of Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin Wood was born in 1981 and grew up in Merseyside. Seascraper is his fifth novel. His previous works have been shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Book Prize, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the RSL Encore Award, the CWA Gold Dagger Award and the European Union Prize for Literature. In 2014, he won France’s Prix du Roman Fnac. He is a senior lecturer in creative writing at King’s College, London, and lives in Surrey with his wife and sons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marisa Silver⁠ is the author of the novels At Last, The Mysteries; Little Nothing, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice; Mary Coin, which was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller's Award; The God of War, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and No Direction Home. Her story collections include Alone With You and Babe in Paradise, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Devon O’Neil is a freelance journalist based in Breckenridge, Colorado, and the author of The Way Out: A true story of survival in the Heart of the Rockies, published in November 2025 by HarperOne. In the past he has worked as a daily newspaperman, a staff writer for ESPN.com, and a correspondent for Outside magazine. O’Neil’s stories have been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing and noted in The Best American Sports Writing, and twice have been finalists for national awards in civic journalism.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. He was born and raised in Kansas and now makes his home in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry prize and will be published by Milkweed Editions in June, 2021. Michael teaches creative writing through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and at colleges and high schools in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices