Winter Online Adult Writers Workshops

Lars Horn’s first book, Voice of the Fish, won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was named an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award as well as an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection. The recipient of the Tin House Without Borders Residency and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Horn’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. He lives in New York and teaches at Wesleyan University.

Grace Talusan is the author of The Body Papers, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction. She is an Assistant Teaching Professor of English in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University and serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Her writing has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright, US Artists, the Brother Thomas Fund, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council with residencies at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, and Hedgebrook. Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian editor and writer of essays, fiction, and criticism living in Orlando. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle, where she has written for over a decade and where she also helps oversee the newly launched Autostraddle print magazine. She is also an assistant fiction editor at Foglifter, and her short stories appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and others as well as in the anthology Be Gay, Do Crime. Some of her culture writing can be found in The Cut, The A.V. Club, Vulture, Refinery29, and Vice. She has held fellowships with the McCormack Writing Center and Lambda Literary, and her first book, the queer horror novelette Helen House, was named one of the Best LGBTQ Books of 2022 by NBC News.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Wildness Before Something Sublime (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, as well as four chapbooks. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, POETRY, and elsewhere. She teaches in Pacific University’s low-residency M.F.A. program and lives in Cincinnati.

Anthony Cody is the author of The Rendering (Omnidawn, 2023) and Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020), winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize. His debut has been recognized as a winner of a 2022 Whiting Award, a 2021 American Book Award, a 2020 Southwest Book Award, and a Poets & Writers 2020 Debut Poet. Anthony was a finalist for the National Book Award, L.A. Times Book Award, among others. He is from Fresno, CA with lineage in the Bracero Program and Dust Bowl. He is co-publisher of Noemi Press. Anthony teaches at Randolph College’s Low Residency MFA Program.

Benjamin Garcia is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in poetry. His first collection, Thrown in the Throat, was selected for the National Poetry Series, the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, and as a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He worked for ten years as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where he received the Jill Gonzalez Health Educator Award recognizing contributions to HIV treatment and prevention. A CantoMundo and Lambda Literary fellow, he serves as core faculty at Alma College’s low-residency MFA program. His poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in: Copper Nickel, Seneca Review, The Believer, Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and New England Review. His video poem “Ode to the Peacock” is available for viewing at the Broad Museum’s website as part of El Poder de la Poesia: Latinx Voices in Response to HIV/ AIDS.

Joy Priest is the author of The Black Outside (Duke UP, 2027) and Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). She is a recipient of a National Endowments for the Arts fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and her poems and scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Sewanee Review, The New Republic, and Poetry, among others. Priest is on the faculty of both the Randolph College and University of Pittsburgh MFA programs in Creative Writing.

Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, and Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Horses, which was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and named one of Literary Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026. His honors include a Whiting Award, Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and he was the 2023-2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He is currently serving as the third Navajo Nation Poet Laureate and teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

​Jenny Xie was born in Anhui province, China. She is the author of Eye Level, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Larry Levis Prize, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize. Her second collection, The Rupture Tense, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award, and a recipient of the Josephine Miles Award. Her chapbook, Nowhere To Arrive, received the Drinking Gourd Prize.

She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Kundiman, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vilcek Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Howard Foundation.

She has taught at Princeton and NYU, and is assistant professor of Written Arts at Bard College. She lives in New York City.

Farah Ali is the writer of the novels Telegraphy and The River, The Town, and the short-story collection People Want to Live. Her work has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions, and has appeared in AGNI, The Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She is the cofounder of Lakeer.

Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Emory, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, Headlands, Loghaven, Lighthouse Works, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and graphic fiction for The Believer, Lenny Letter, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. They’ve served as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and are now an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.  

Alice Sola Kim’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed Magazine, New York Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and other publications. She is a 2016 Whiting Award winner and has received funding and support from the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the MacDowell Foundation, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. Currently, she teaches speculative fiction in the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and the MA Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.

Hanna Pylväinen is the author of the novels We Sinners, which received the Whiting Award and the Balcones Fiction Prize, and The End of Drum-Time, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal; she has received residencies from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Lásságámmi Foundation, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a Princeton Arts Fellowship from Princeton University, and a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, among others. Currently, she is the Zell Visiting Professor of Prose at the University of Michigan; she also teaches at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Her third novel, Death Party, is forthcoming from Viking in 2027.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the author of National Bestseller, The American Daughters, published by One World Random House. He is the recipient of the 2024 South Arts State Fellowship, the 2023 Louisiana Writer Award, the 2022 Louisiana Board of Regents ATLAS grant, and a Black Rock Senegal Residency. He wrote The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, which was published by One World Random House in August 2021. It is the 2023 One Book One New Orleans selection. The book was a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and longlisted for the Story Prize. The book was also selected to represent Louisiana at the 2023 National Book Festival. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. It was longlisted for the 2021 DUBLIN Literary Award, Center for Fiction Prize, and Aspen Words Literary Prize. All three books were New York Times Editor’s Choice picks. His work appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Kenyon Review, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Ruffin was the 2022 Grand Marshal of the Mardi Gras Krewe of House Floats. 

Jiaming Tang is the author of Cinema Love, a Dakota Johnson x Teatime Book Club Pick. He holds an MFA from the University of Alabama, and his writing has appeared in AGNI, Lit Hub, Joyland Magazine, and elsewhere. He was a 2022-23 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow and lives in Brooklyn, New York.