First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

EJ Levy’s work has been featured in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation and The Paris Review, and has received a Pushcart Prize. Her story collection, Love, In Theory, won the Flannery O’Connor Award and Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. Her anthology, Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers, won the Lambda Literary Award. She holds a degree in History from Yale and an MFA from Ohio State University, and currently teaches in the MFA Program at Colorado State University. The Cape Doctor is her first novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nawaaz Ahmed is a transplant from Tamil Nadu, India. Before turning to writing, he was a computer scientist, researching search algorithms for Yahoo. He holds an MFA from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is the winner of several Hopwood awards. He is the recipient of residencies from Macdowell, VCCA, Yaddo, and Djerassi. He is a former Kundiman and Lambda Literary Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn. Radiant Fugitives is his first novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kalani Pickhart is the recipient of research fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center and the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Intelligence for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.  I Will Die in A Foreign Land is her first novel. Kalani currently lives and writes in Phoenix, Arizona.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist. She is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Whose Story Is This?, Call Them By Their True Names, Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.  Her new book is Orwell’s Roses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Keisha N. Blain is a 2022 New America National Fellow and an award-winning historian. She is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom and Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. Blain has published extensively on race, gender, and politics in both national and global perspectives. She is one of the co-developers of #Charlestonsyllabus, a Twitter movement and crowdsourced list of reading recommendations relating to the history of racial violence in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lauren Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent the novel Matrix. Her work has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, was twice a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. His most recent is Bewilderment. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His novel, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Annie Murphy Paul is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time magazine, and The Best American Science Writing, among many other publications. She is the author of Origins, reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and selected by that publication as a "Notable Book," and The Cult of Personality, hailed by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker as a “fascinating new book.” Her new book is called The Extended Mind. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Orner's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, Ploughshares and many other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice received a Pushcart Prize. Peter has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. His fiction titles include Maggie Brown and Others, Esther Stores, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, Love and Shame and Love, and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. His non-fiction book is Am I Alone Here? He edited the titles Hope Deferred, Underground America, and Lavil: Life, Love and Death in Port-au-Prince. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He has published two books on writing, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo, and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide. He’s also published a collection of 100-word stories, Fissures, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story. His new collection is called All the Comfort Sin Can Provide. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and he has been anthologized in collections such as Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and Best Small Fictions. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices