Presenters
Our 2025 presenters and panelists.
Soniah Shah
Soniah Shah (keynote) is a home-grown journalist, a 2024 Guggenheim fellow, and author of The Next Great Migration: the beauty and terror of life on the move (2020); Pandemic: tracking contagions from cholera to Ebola and beyond (2017), and The Fever: How malaria has ruled humankind for 500,000 years (2010) among others.
Her bylines appear in the New York Times magazine, the New Yorker, the Nation and elsewhere. Her new book, Special: the Rise and Fall of a Beastly Idea, winner of a 2023 Whiting Grant for Creative Nonfiction, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
Athena Dixon
Athena Dixon is an essayist and editor originally from Northeast Ohio. She is the author of the books The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files. She serves as the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press and as a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre Magazine.
Her work also appears in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books) and Getting to the Truth: The Practice and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (Hippocampus Books 2021). She was the Founder of Linden Avenue Literary Journal, which published from 2012-2021. Athena is a former co-host of the New Books in Poetry Podcast via the New Books Network.
Lindsay Bernal
Lindsay Bernal is the author of What It Doesn't Have to Do With (University of Georgia Press, 2018), winner of the National Poetry Series. Poems from her second manuscript appear or are forthcoming in Chicago Review, the Georgia Review, the Hopkins Review, New England Review, Oversound and other journals.
She coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, where she also co-directs the Writers Here and Now reading series and teaches undergraduate poetry workshops and courses on poetics.
Elizabeth DeMeo
Elizabeth DeMeo is a former editor at Tin House, where she acquired fiction and literary nonfiction. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas, where she was managing editor of the Arkansas International literary magazine and director of the Arkansas Writers in the Schools program.
Books she's edited at Tin House have been named best books of the year by the New Yorker and NPR; reviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, among others; and short- or long-listed for numerous awards including the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, Aspen Words Literary Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and New American Voices Award. Originally from New Hampshire, she currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Eman Quotah
Eman Quotah is the author of the novels The Night Is Not for You and Bride of the Sea, which won the Arab American Book Award for Fiction. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, Literary Hub, and other publications.
When she’s not writing fiction or essays, Eman is a communications consultant and ghost writer for nonprofit and business leaders. She’s also a board member of RAWI, which represents writers of Southwest Asian and North African heritage. She lives with her family in Rockville, MD.
Barbara Jones
Barbara Jones worked as an editor for more than thirty years, first in magazines (Harper’s Magazine, Vogue, More) then in books (as editorial director at Hyperion Books and executive editor at Henry Holt). As a magazine editor, she worked with such writers as Jennifer Egan, Elizabeth Gilbert, Christopher Hitchens, Ann Hood, Jean Korelitz, Lorrie Moore, Ann Patchett and many others. As a book editor, she edited and published bestselling as well as prizewinning titles by authors such as Paul Auster, Dan Chaon, Susan Choi, Kelly Corrigan, Lauren Groff, Janice Hadlow, Lillian Li, Julie Lythcott-Haims, Adelle Waldman and many others.
Barbara is now a literary agent at the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, representing writers of literary and upmarket commercial fiction as well as an idiosyncratic list of nonfiction authors.
Jung Yun
Jung Yun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. She studied
at Vassar College, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst, where she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing.
Her work has appeared in Tin House, the Massachusetts Review, the Indiana Review, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.
She is the recipient of individual artist’s grants in fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, and the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. She has also received residential fellowships from MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Art Omi and the National Humanities Center.
Currently, Jung lives in Baltimore with her husband and is an associate professor of English at the George Washington University. She serves on the board of directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and is a fiction juror for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Pronunciation notes: “Jung” sounds exactly like the first syllable of “jungle” and “Yun” rhymes with “tune.”
Wallace West
Wallace West is an award-winning children's book author / illustrator and a world explorer. His first picture book, Mighty Red Riding Hood won a Lambda Literary Award. He also illustrated the NY Times Bestselling middle-grade Dogtown series by legendary authors Katherine Applegate and Gennifer Choldenko. By day he writes and scribbles, by night he dreams of adopting a pet snake.
Hyeseung Song
Hyeseung Song is a first-generation Korean American painter and the author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl. Docile has been called a "savagely beautiful memoir" by David Henry Hwang, a "revelation" by Chloé Cooper Jones and was named a "Best Book" by Apple and “Most Anticipated” by Electric Literature, BookRiot and more.
Raised in Texas, Song studied philosophy at Princeton and Harvard Universities, law at Harvard, and painting at the Grand Central Atelier in New York City. A two-time Greenshields award winner, TedX speaker, and resident artist of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the Vermont Studio Center and the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program, Song has also taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is at work on her first novel. Song lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York.
Grady Chambers
Grady Chambers is the author of the novel Great Disasters (Tin House Books, 2025), and the poetry collection North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions, 2018), winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Grady was born and raised on the north side of Chicago, and lives in Philadelphia.
His writing can be found in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Sun and many other publications. Grady is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, and received his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University.
Michelle Orange
Michelle Orange is the author of This Is Running for Your Life: Essays, a New Yorker best book of the year, and Pure Flame, a New York Times Editors' Choice pick. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the Oxford American, Bookforum, the New York Times and many other publications.
She is a contributing editor at the Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded her their Staige D. Blackford Prize for nonfiction in 2019. She teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and Goucher College. Her third book, Dog People, is forthcoming from Astra House.
Kate Reed Petty
Kate Reed Petty's debut novel, True Story, was a New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice” and was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award and a Shirley Jackson Award. Kate’s fiction and essays have been published by ZZYZZYVA, Electric Literature, American Short Fiction, Blackbird, Nat. Brut, the Los Angeles Review of Books blog and Ambit. Her work has been supported by a Rubys Grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and creative residencies at Bloedel Reserve and The Mount.
In addition to fiction, Kate’s short films have appeared on Narrative magazine and at the 2019 Maryland Film Festival. And her middle-grade graphic novel,
The Leak, illustrated by Andrea Bell, was published by First Second Books in March 2021.
Kate lives in Baltimore.
Jeannie Vanasco
Jeannie Vanasco is the author most recently of A Silent Treatment, which Booklist in its starred review described as "a beautiful gift to all who have struggled to care for a loved one in the way they needed." Her other memoirs include Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl—a New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye, which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017.
Her essays have appeared in The Believer, The New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.
Geoff Becker
Geoff Becker is the author of the novels Hot Springs and Bluestown, and the story collections, Dangerous Men and Black Elvis. He's a past winner of both the Flannery O'Connor Award and the Drue Heinz Prizes, and his stories have appeared in many literary magazines as well as the Best American Short Stories anthology. He is a professor of English at Towson University.
Sarah Perry
Sarah Perry (she/they) is a memoirist and essayist who writes about love, food culture, body image, trauma, gender-based violence, queerness and the power dynamics that influence those concerns. They teach workshops, craft seminars and literature courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs, with subspecialties including the researched memoir, flash essay, writing sexuality and true crime.
Perry is the author of Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover (Mariner/HarperCollins, February 2025), and After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, September 2017), which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Recent short work includes a Huffington Post Personals essay that reached 1M+ readers and an essay for Cake Zine that was a nominee for the James Beard Foundation’s 2024 M. F. K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. Other essays have appeared in The Guardian, Elle magazine and Off Assignment.
Perry holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Columbia University, has taught in the graduate programs at Columbia and the University of North Texas and was the 2019 McGee Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Davidson College. They are at work on two book manuscripts: a sequel memoir exploring the complicated relationship between trauma and romantic love, titled The Book of Regrets; and a work of personal true crime criticism which tangles with Truman Capote’s legacy, called Two Daughters Were Away.
Barbara Westwood Diehl
Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her poems and stories have been published or are forthcoming in a variety of journals including Atticus Review, Five South, Free State Review, Gargoyle, The Inflectionist Review, Raleigh Review, Ponder, Allium, Potomac Review (Best of the 50), The Shore, Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Split Rock Review, Bacopa Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poetry South, Midway, New World Writing Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Sky Island Journal and Cleaver. (Quick Critiques faculty, poetry.)
Kathryn Rhett
Kathryn Rhett is the author most recently of a poetry collection, Immortal Village, and an essay collection, Souvenir, both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. She has also published a memoir, Near Breathing (Duquesne University Press, selected by Lee Gutkind for the Emerging Writers of Creative Nonfiction series) and edited the anthology Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis (Doubleday/Anchor).
A 2007 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellow in Nonfiction, she has published essays in Creative Nonfiction, Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and elsewhere. She writes screenplays with her sister, film editor and writer Cecily Rhett, and their TV movie, "Crossword Mysteries: Abracadaver," premiered on the Hallmark channel in January 2020. She lives in Harrisburg and is a professor at Gettysburg College. (Quick critiques faculty, poetry/non-fiction.)
Dora Malech
Dora Malech's fifth book of poetry is Trying × Trying, out now from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. With Laura T. Smith, she edited The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, published by the University of Iowa Press in 2023.
With Gabriella Fee, she translated Italian poet Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto’s debut collection, Dolore Minimo, which won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize and was published by Saturnalia Books in 2022. Malech has been the recipient of an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among other honors. She is a professor in and chair of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she is also the editor in chief of The Hopkins Review.
Lauren Reding
Lauren Reding grew up in rural Virginia. She earned a BA in English from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and holds an MFA in fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Lauren enjoys planting native perennials, playing video games, going for walks, and shooting the breeze. Her novel The Killer in the House debuts in March 2026.
Annie Marhefka
Annie Marhefka is a writer in Baltimore, Maryland whose work has been featured on The Slowdown Show, nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and was awarded the 2024 Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize. Annie is the Executive Director at Yellow Arrow Publishing, a Baltimore-based nonprofit empowering women-identifying writers. Annie has a BA in creative writing from Washington College and an MBA, and is an MFA candidate at the University of Baltimore. Her collection, Strangers We Know By Heart, was a winner of the 2025 Garden Party Collective chapbook contest and published in 2025. When Annie is not writing, she is usually trying to find her way back to the water.
Benjamin Warner
Benjamin Warner is a Teaching Professor in the English Department at Towson University, where he teaches first year writing, fiction writing, and creative nonfiction that focuses on the environment. He is the author of the novels Thirst (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Fearless (Malarkey Books, 2023) and the forthcoming textbook Speculative Fiction: A User’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2025).