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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.