Rebecca F. Kuang is the award-winning, #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, Yellowface, and Katabasis (forthcoming). She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.
https://www.ethanrutherford.com/
Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, One Story, and The Best American Short Stories. His first book, The Peripatetic Coffin, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. His second collection was Farthest South. His novel North Sun, will be out in 2025. He teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College and lives in Connecticut with his family.
LaTanya McQueen is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for feminist fiction, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is the author of the essay collection And It Begins Like This and the novel When the Reckoning Comes, a Bram Stoker Award finalist. She was the 2017-2018 Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow at Cornell College. She is an Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina State University.
https://www.amyshearnwrites.com/
Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of five novels including Animal Instinct (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025). Her nonfiction book Mom Blogs comes out from Instar Press in 2025, for their Remember the Internet series. Amy has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, and Conde Nast, and has published work in the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, and elsewhere. She teaches writing in Brooklyn, where she lives with her two children.
Louis Bayard is the author of 11 novels, including The Wildes, ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top novels of 2024; The Pale Blue Eye, adapted into the global #1 Netflix release starring Christian Bale; Jackie & Me, the national bestseller Courting Mr. Lincoln, The Black Tower, and Mr. Timothy, as well as the young-adult novel, Lucky Strikes. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Christina Chiu is the Grand Prize Winner of the James Alan McPherson Award and the Kirkus Best Book Award for her novel Beauty. Her first book, Troublemaker and Other Saints, won the Asian American Writers’ Award. Chiu’s writing has appeared Tin House, Electric Literature, Washington Square, and elsewhere. She has won literary prizes for her stories from Playboy, New Stone Circle, El Dorado Writer’s Guild. Her story “Waves” was nominated for the Pushcart.
https://www.meganstielstra.com/
Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: Everyone Remain Calm, Once I Was Cool, and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life. Her work appears in the Best American Essays, New York Times, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Tin House, and on National Public Radio. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and is an acquisitions editor with Northwestern University Press.
Emily Barton is the author of the novels The Book of Esther, Brookland, and The Testament of Yves Gundron; she also writes stories, essays, and book reviews for publications such as the New York Times Book Review and the UK’s Times Literary Supplement. She has earned fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She is an associate professor and chair of the Creative Writing department at Oberlin College.
https://kristinamariedarling.com
Lecture Date: Saturday, June 14, 2025 @ 2:00 pm
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over thirty books. An expert consultant with the United States Fulbright Commission and a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Darling’s work has also been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, a 2024 Villa Lena Foundation Fellowship, a 2024 Civita Institute Fellowship, and eleven juried residencies at the American Academy in Rome. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she now divides her time between Greece, Spain, and the Amalfi Coast.
Lecture Date: Saturday, June 14, 2025 @ 2:00 pm
Greg Harris has taught writing at Harvard University for over 20 years, and founded and co-directed Harvard’s literary festival, LITfest. He is an affiliate of the Shorenstein Center on the Media, Politics, and Policy, and was a 2023 Arctic Fulbright Scholar in Iceland. He is the founding editor of Pangyrus Literary Journal. His essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Review, Jewish Fiction, Earth Island Journal, and elsewhere.
Lecture Date: Friday, June 13, 2025 @ 7:30 pm
Lisa Ko is the author of the new novel Memory Piece and the nationally bestselling novel The Leavers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ko’s writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, and The Believer.
Lecture Date: Saturday, June 14, 2025 @ 2:00 pm
Jenny Molberg’s third poetry collection, The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. An NEA fellow, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She is Associate Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context.
Lecture Date: Friday, June 13, 2025 @ 7:30 pm
Meghan O'Rourke is the author of five books, including, most recently, the New York Times Bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. The recipient of a Guggenheim Award, a Radfliffe Award, and a Front Page Award for Criticism, she is a professor in the practice of Creative Writing at Yale University. She also serves as the editor of The Yale Review.