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Faculty

Peter Balakian, reader, poetry

Peter Balakian is the author of eight poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ozone Journal (2016). Other works are No Sign (2022), Ziggurat (2010), and June-tree (2001). His prose includes Vise and Shadow (2015) and The Burning Tigris (2004), a New York Times Notable Book and national bestseller that won the Raphael Lemkin Prize. His memoir, Black Dog of Fate, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize and was a best book of the year for the New York Times and Publisher’s Weekly. He co-translated Armenian Golgotha (2009), a Washington Post book of the year. Balakian authored a book on Theodore Roethke and co-translated Siamanto’s works. He co-edited Graham House Review (1976-1996) and has received numerous awards, including a Presidential Medal from Armenia and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into many languages. Balakian has been a founding faculty member and advisor for the ����ͷ�� Writers Conference since 1996, leading workshops, readings, and talks.

Greg Bottoms, Workshop Instructor, creative nonfiction

Greg Bottoms is the author of several books, including the memoirs Angelhead and Lowest White Boy and two works of literary journalism about American outsider artists, The Colorful Apocalypse and Spiritual American Trash. His collection of essays, Ghosts of My Old Dominion, will be published in early 2026. His writing has appeared in The Believer, Bookforum, Esquire, Harper’s, The Oxford American, and in numerous literary journals and anthologies. He teaches literary nonfiction writing at the University of Vermont, where he is a Professor of English.

Jennifer Brice, advisory committee chair, jumpstarter workshop instructor

Jennifer Brice is the author of three books, The Last Settlers, Unlearning to Fly, and Another North. Her essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Cimarron Review, The Gettysburg Review, River Teeth, American Nature Writing, and The Dolphin Reader, among others. Born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, she now lives in upstate New York, where she is a professor in the English and Creative Writing department at ����ͷ��.

Maisy Card, workshop instructor, fiction

Maisy Card is the author of the novel These Ghosts Are Family, which won an American Book Award, the 2021 Bocas Prize in Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, AGNI, The New York Times, Guernica, and other publications.

Brock Clark, workshop Instructor, fiction

Brock Clarke is the author of nine books, most recently the novel Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? and the essay collection I, Grape; or The Case for Fiction. His books have been reprinted in a dozen international editions, and have been awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship, and an Ohio Council for the Arts Fellowship, among others. Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sewanee Review, One Story, The Believer, Georgia Review, New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Southern Review and have appeared in the annual Best American Essays, Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. His tenth book—the short story collection, Special Election—will be published in September 2025. He lives in Portland, Maine, and is the A. LeRoy Greason Professor of English and Creative Writing at Bowdoin College.

Jonathon Dee, workshop instructor, fiction

Jonathan Dee is the author of eight novels, including Sugar Street and The Privileges, which won the St. Francis College Literary Prize and the Prix Fitzgerald and was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. A National Magazine Award-nominated critic for Harper's and The New Yorker, a former Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine, and a former Senior Editor of The Paris Review, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Xiaolu Guo, workshop instructor, fiction

Xiaolu Guo is a memoirist, novelist and filmmaker. Her novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and I Am China. Her memoir Nine Continents won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. A Lover’s Discourse was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020 and longlisted for the Orwell Prize. Radical was published by Vintage in 2023. Named as a Granta Best of Young British Novelist, she directed a dozen films, including How Is Your Fish Today (Sundance Official Selection 2007) and UFO In Her Eyes. Her feature She, A Chinese received the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Festival 2009. She had film retrospectives at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Cinématheque Switzerland, and the Greek Film Archive. She has been a visiting professor at Columbia University and Baruch College in New York, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her 2024 autobiographical reflection My Battle of Hastings completes her ‘transparent self’ trilogy.  Her new novel Call Me Ishmaelle, a retelling of Melville’s Moby Dick, is published by Grove, October 2025.

Eleanor Henderson, workshop instructor, memoir

Eleanor Henderson's most recent book is the memoir Everything I Have Is Yours: A Marriage (Flatiron, 2021), which was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of 2021 by Vogue. She is also the author of two novels, The Twelve-Mile Straight (Ecco, 2017) and Ten Thousand Saints (Ecco, 2011), and co-editor of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers (FSG, 2014). Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including Salon, LitHub, Poets & Writers, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The New York Times Book Review. A Professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College and a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Fiction, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and two sons.

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, workshop instructor, fiction 

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is the author of My Monticello, a fiction debut that was called "a masterly feat" by the New York Times, and recommended as #3 on Time Magazine's best fiction of the year. Her work won the Library of Virginia Fiction Award, the Weatherford Award, the Balcones Fiction Prize and was finalist for several national awards including a National Book Critics Circle Award and an LA Times Prize. Her short story “Control Negro” was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, guest edited by Roxane Gay, and read live by LeVar Burton. Johnson has been a fellow at TinHouse, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her writing appears in Guernica, The Guardian, Kweli Journal, and elsewhere. A veteran public school art teacher for 20 years, Johnson now lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Maggie Millner, workshop instructor, poetry

Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets, a New York Times Editors' Choice, one of The Atlantic's ten best books of 2023, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. Couplets has been (or will be) translated into six languages and published in seven countries. Maggie's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. She works as a Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review.

Ernesto Quiñonez, workshop instructor, fiction

Ernesto Quiñonez was born in Ecuador, but arrived to New York City he was eighteen months old and was raised in El Barrio, East Harlem. Quiñonez is also the author of Bodega Dreams and Chango’s Fire. Quiñonez is an Associate Professor at Cornell University, where he teaches Creative Writing, Latino Fiction and Magical Realism, among others.

Bruce Smith, workshop instructor, poetry

Bruce Smith is the author of six books of poems, The Common Wages, Silver and Information (National Poetry Series, selected by Hayden Carruth), Mercy Seat, The Other Lover (University of Chicago), which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Songs for Two Voices, and most recently, Devotions (Chicago, 2011), a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award, and the winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize. He lives in Syracuse, NY.

Samrat Upadhyay, workshop instructor, fiction

Samrat Upadhyay is the author of six books of fiction, including Arresting God in Kathmandu and Buddha’s Orphans. His award-winning books, which have been translated internationally, have received praise from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. His new novel, Darkmotherland, is an epic tale of love and betrayal and political violence set in an earthquake-ravaged country; Kirkus Reviews calls it “dizzyingly complex and dazzlingly written” and has given a starred review. Upadhyay is a Distinguished Professor of English and Martha C. Kraft Professor of Humanities at Indiana University, where he teaches creative writing.

Simon Wu, workshop instructor, creative nonfiction

Simon Wu is a writer and artist. His writing has been published in The Drift, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. His first book is Dancing On My Own. He has two brothers, Nick and Duke, and loves the ocean. 

Conference Staff

Kanitha Heng Snow ‘09, conference director

Kanitha Heng Snow has spent the last fifteen years building community partnerships, programs, and strategic communications, with a key focus on under-invested in communities. Her social impact experience includes her work at Energize Colorado, Colorado Universities Innovation Council (CUIC), and Project X-ITE at the University of Denver. She also runs a marketing and communications consultancy focused on supporting BIPOC and women-owned businesses. Kanitha serves as Board Chair at The Village Institute and board director at Colorado Asian Culture and Education Network (CACEN). She received her BA in English Literature and Sociology/Anthropology from ����ͷ�� and her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University. She is currently working on her memoir, I Am My Mother’s Mother: A Story Of Birth, Death, and Reincarnation. Kanitha’s debut documentary, Kamnop, is slated for production in October 2025.

Samantha Kost ‘25, intern

Samanta Kost is a senior at ����ͷ�� majoring in English with a minor in Writing and Rhetoric. Samanta previously interned with the 2024 ����ͷ�� Living Writers program. She discovered her passion for nonfiction writing after taking a course at ����ͷ��, motivating her to spread the word about the conference and support its mission of growing a brilliant writing community. She lives outside Chicago and is the Midwest’s number-one fan.