Presenters
Our 2026 presenters and panelists. Additional presenters will be announced.
Ed Park
Ed Park (keynote) is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize); the story collection An Oral History of Atlantis; and the memoir Three Tenses: A Transmission From the Nineties. He is a founding editor of the National Magazine Award–winning The Believer, a former newspaper and book editor, and a frequent contributor to many periodicals, including The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. His latest book is The Repairer of Reputations, a work of weird horror. He is the recipient of the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Deborah Pease Prize from A Public Space. A native of Buffalo, he lives in Manhattan and teaches creative writing at Princeton University.
'Pemi Aguda
'Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She is the author of One Leg on Earth and Ghostroots, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Awards in Fiction, the LA Times First Fiction Prize, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Elissa Bassist
Elissa Bassist is the author of the memoir Hysterical, a semi-finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor, and the creator of the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus. As a founding contributor to The Rumpus, Elissa has written cultural and personal criticism since the website launched in 2009. She’s worked in media and publishing since 2007, as an editor, a managing editor, a TV and film writer’s assistant, a producer, performer, speaker, and barista. Her writing has appeared in over 30 publications and anthologies, and she’s taught for over 20 writing programs. Her next book is Inside Jokes: A Comedy and Creativity Guide for All Writers. Elissa lives in Brooklyn and is probably her therapist’s favorite.
Erica Dawson
Erica Dawson is the author of three books of poetry: When Rap Spoke Straight to God (Tin House, 2018), winner of the 2018 Florida Book Awards Gold Medal for Poetry; The Small Blades Hurt (Measure Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Poets’ Prize; and, Big-Eyed Afraid (Waywiser Press, 2007), winner of the 2006 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Orion, Revel, The Believer, The Common, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. A two-time Pushcart Prize winner, her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry (2008, 2012, and 2015), Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poets Now, and American Society: What Poets See. Her essays and criticism have been published by The Paris Review’s “The Daily,” The Rumpus, Ecotone, and other venues. She has been featured on PBS Newshour and in The New York Times Magazine. She lives in the Baltimore-DC area.
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson is the author of the critically acclaimed biography Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free, which was named one of The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2025 and hailed as a best book of the year by NPR, Time, Kirkus, The Washington Post, Library Journal, and The New York Post, among many others. Claire McCardell was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, selected
as an Amazon Editor’s pick for Best History, and chosen by the Maryland Center for
the Book, in partnership with the Library of Congress, as its “Great Reads” selection
for the 2026 National Book Festival. The New York Times called Claire McCardell an essential read, writing that “in the hands of Dickinson, this is more than just
the biography of a fashion revolutionary: It is a story of the fight for women’s identity
and, incidentally, the birth of an American industry.”
Elizabeth is working on her second book, a true crime object biography about the famous
Ruby Slippers from the movie “The Wizard of Oz.” In 2019, her Washington Post Magazine cover story broke news about an infamous ruby slippers heist, and the book is forthcoming
from Dutton in 2027.
Athena Dixon
Athena Dixon is the author of the essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files. Her work also appears in the anthologies The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic and Getting to the Truth: The Craft and Practice of Creative Nonfiction as well as in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is the Nonfiction Editor for Split/Lip Press and a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre.
Asa Drake
Asa Drake is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. She is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press, 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Kenyon Review Residential Writers Workshop, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems are published or forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist.
Melissa Faliveno
Melissa Faliveno is the author of the novel Hemlock (Little, Brown, 2026) and the essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, and Debutiful, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her work, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received notable selection in Best American Essays, has appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Prairie Schooner, Brevity, and Brooklyn Rail, among others, and in the anthologies Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic (Harper Perennial, 2022) and Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music (Split/Lip, 2026). The former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, Melissa is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina and lives in the woods outside Chapel Hill. You can find more of her writing at www.melissafaliveno.com
Cara Hoffman
Cara Hoffman is the author of Running, a New York Times Editor's Choice, an Esquire Magazine Best Book of the Year, and an Autostraddle Best Queer and Feminist Book of the Year. She first received national attention in 2011 with the publication of the feminist classic So Much Pretty which sparked a national dialogue on violence and retribution and was named a Best Novel of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. Her second novel, Be Safe I Love You, was nominated for a Folio Prize, and named one of the Five Best Modern War Novels by the Telegraph UK. A MacDowell Fellow and an Edward Albee Fellow, she has written for the New York Times, The Paris Review, Bookforum, Bennington Review, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, Elle, Brooklyn Rail, Fifth Estate and NPR. She has been a visiting lecturer at University of Oxford, teaches Experimental and Transgressive Literature in The Kreiger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and is a senior visiting associate scholar at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens Greece.
Karen Houppert
Karen Houppert is the director of the MA in Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of three nonfiction books, Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice, which investigates the country’s broken public defender system, Home Fires Burning, which examines military family policy through a feminist lens, and The Curse, which explores the culture of concealment surrounding menstruation. She was a contributing writer for The Washington Post magazine, a staff writer for the Village Voice, and a freelancer whose work has appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, Mother Jones, Glamour, Ms., Salon, Newsday, etc. She has won numerous awards for her reporting on social and political issues as well as for her editing, celebrating 18 Maryland/DC/Delaware Press Association awards for her staff in 2016 while editor-in-chief of Baltimore City Paper.
Elise Levine
Elise Levine’s story collection Big of You was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2025 and a 2025 CBC Fall Book selection. She is also the author of a collection of two novellas, two novels, and two other story collections. Her work has also appeared in publications including Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, and five times in Best Canadian Stories. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Art Council, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her personal papers are held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. She lives in Baltimore and is faculty in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.
Michael Loughran
Michael Loughran was born in New Hope, Pennsylvania and attended Ithaca College and the University of Florida. His work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, The Awl, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Subtropics, Tin House, West Branch Wired, and elsewhere. Windower, a memoir, is his first book. He teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia and lives in Mount Airy, Philadelphia, with his wife and their son.
Alice Martin
Alice Martin is the author of the novel Westward Women (St. Martin's Press, 2026), acclaimed by Joyce Carol Oates as “an audacious first novel to set beside Margaret Atwood.” An assistant professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, she received her PhD in American Literature from Rutgers University. Before returning to academia, she worked in commercial book publishing at Algonquin Books, Writers House, and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Appalachian Heritage, and LitHub, amongst others. She is also a Fiction Editor at Loblolly Press in Asheville. She lives in Waynesville, NC with her husband and son.
Uche Okonkwo
Uche Okonkwo is the author of A Kind of Madness: Stories, the Winner of the 2025 High Plains First Book Award, and a Finalist for the 2025 NAACP Image Awards, and the Reading the West Awards. Her stories have been published in A Public Space, One Story, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Zyzzyva, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, and Lagos Noir, among others. A former Bernard O’Keefe Scholar at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and resident at Art Omi, she is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy, a Steinbeck Fellowship, and an Elizabeth George Foundation grant. Okonkwo grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College.
Sarah Perry
Sarah Perry (she/they) is the author of the memoir After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search, which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice. Her second book, Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover, is a collection of 100 flash essays that explores joy, resilience, and memory. Perry’s work has been supported by a 2020-2022 Tulsa Artist Fellowship, the 2018 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, and fellowships from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, VCCA, Playa, La Porte Peinte, and The Studios of Key West. Their essays appear in The Guardian, Elle, Huffington Post, Off Assignment, and elsewhere, and she was a 2024 nominee for the James Beard Foundation’s M. F. K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. 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 is the first person to serve two terms (’19 and ’26) as the McGee distinguished professor of Creative Writing at Davidson College. Originally from Maine, they teach in the graduate program at Colorado State University and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
Jianan Qian
Jianan Qian is a bilingual writer and translator. In her native Chinese, she is the author of the story collection People Grow Old, Never Die, the novel No Eggs for Him, the lecture collection How to Read Literary Classics, and the essay collection A Future That Concerns Me. Her work has received literary awards from Mainland China, Taiwan and Malaysia. She has translated several canonical authors into Chinese, including Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson. In English, her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, Guernica, The Millions, The Common, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. She was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 2021. She is the co-translator of Masters of Sleep and Other Stories. Born and raised in Shanghai, China, she currently lives in Towson.
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 debut thriller novel is The Killer in the House.
Marin Sardy
Marin Sardy is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Edge of Every Day (2019) and co-creator of the Substack Psychic Telephone (2024–2026). Sardy’s essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, The Missouri Review, and many other journals, as well as in two award-winning photography books. She is the winner of the 2025 Mathiasen Prose Award and has had work nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, as well as twice listed as Notable in the Best American Essays. She teaches writing for Authors Publish.
Chet'la Sebree
An essayist and poet from the Mid-Atlantic, Chet'la Sebree is the author of the debut essay collection TURN (W)HERE: A Geography of Home as well the poetry collections Blue Opening, longlisted for PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry; Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Mistress, nominated for an NAACP Image Award. She’s an associate professor at George Washington University.
Hyeseung Song
Hyeseung Song, 송혜승 (she/her), is a first-generation Korean American painter, writer and teacher. She is the author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl, about an Asian American woman’s struggle with self-worth and mental illness. Docile was called “a savagely beautiful memoir” by David Henry Hwang and a “revelation” by Chloé Cooper Jones. The audiobook was a “Best” at Apple, and a Korean language edition released in 2025.
Raised in Texas, Song studied philosophy at Princeton University. She pursued dual post-graduate degrees at Harvard, in law and philosophy, before dropping out to study painting in New York. A two-time Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant winner, TedX speaker and resident artist of The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, Vermont Studio Center and the Klots International Program for Artists, Song has taught at the SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology, the Queens Council on the Arts and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her paintings have been the subject of solo and group shows, and her work is held in private collections internationally.
She is currently at work on a meta-memoir on the eternal question plaguing memoirists: that of the ethics of writing about those we love. At the center of her exploration is a failure of translation—linguistic, psychological and literary—which she awoke to when her father unexpectedly died after the publication of her debut memoir.
A 2026 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction Literature and a recipient of the Mae Fellowship which supported women and nonbinary writers, Song will be at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference this summer as a Nonfiction Fellow. She splits her time between New York City and the western Catskills.
Benjamin Warner
Benjamin Warner is the author of two novels: Thirst (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Fearless (Malarkey Books, 2023). He is the co-author of Speculative Fiction: A User’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026). You can find some of his writing at www.benjaminwarner.net
Cutter Wood
Cutter Wood’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper’s, Discover, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review Daily and other publications. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and he was the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence at George Washington University. He lives in Baltimore with his partner and family.
Jung Yun
Jung Yun is the author of All the World Can Hold, O Beautiful, and Shelter. Her novels have been long listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, selected as a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and recognized as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her short fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Tin House, The Massachusetts Review, The Indiana Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. Currently, she is an associate professor of English at George Washington University and serves on the board of directors at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.