First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The sequel to this novel is The Committed and his short story collection is called The Refugees. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nalini Singh is the author of more than 60 novels and novellas. She has five different series of books, primarily in the Paranormal Romance Genre. Her latest novel is a thrilled called Quiet in Her Bones. Nalini Singh was born in Fiji and moved to New Zealand as a child where she still lives and writes.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chang-rae Lee is the author of My Year Abroad, Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as On Such a Full Sea, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories of Violence. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. The Misfit's Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books. Her new collection of short stories is called Verge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carol Edgarian is an award-winning novelist, essayist, teacher, and editor. Her novels includeVera, the New York Times bestseller Three Stages of Amazement, and the international bestseller Rise the Euphrates. Carol’s articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and W, among many other places, and she coedited The Writer’s life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame from the Diaries of the World’s Great Writers. In 2003 Carol and her husband, Tom Jenks, founded the nonprofit Narrative, a leading digital publisher of fiction, poetry, essays, and art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dantiel Moniz is the author of the short story collection Milk Blood Heat, which was an Indie Next Pick, an Amazon “Best Book of the Month” selection, and a Roxanne Gay Audacious Book Club pick. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, One Story, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares and The Yale Review among others. She lives in Northeast Florida and teaches fiction at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Priyanaka Champaneri is the author of the novel The City of Good Death, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Fiction Writing in 2018. Champaneri received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and has been a fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts several times.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alan Lightman is the author of six novels, including the international best seller Einstein’s Dreams and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award. He has taught at Harvard and at MIT, where he was the first person to receive a dual faculty appointment in science and the humanities. He is currently professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. His new book is called Probable Impossibilities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

George Saunders is the author of eleven 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 latest book is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Natalie West is a Los Angeles based writer and educator. She worked as a professional Dominatrix while obtaining her PhD in Gender Studies. Her personal essays have appeared in Salon, Autostraddle, Kink Academy, Columbia Journal, and them. She moonlights as a sex work, BDSM, and queer community authenticity consultant for film and television. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices