The Writing Seminars

Rebecca Makkai is the author of the novels I Have Some Questions for You, The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, and the story collection Music for Wartime. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Great Believers received an American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in […]

Afaa Michael Weaver is a poet, playwright, and translator. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, most recently A Fire in the Hills (Red Hen Press, 2023). Other recent books include Spirit Boxing (Pitt Poetry Series, 2017); City of Eternal Spring (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), winner of the Phillis Wheatley Book Award; The Government of Nature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), winner […]

MONICA YOUN is the author of From From (Graywolf Press 2023), Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010), and Barter (Graywolf Press 2003). She has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, a Witter Bytter Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship among […]

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems(2023), The Absurd Man(2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the […]

Hernan Diaz is the author of In the Distance, a gorgeously written page-turning epic tale that upends and reinvents the old-school western genre. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award, this extraordinary novel offers a probing examination of the stereotypes that populate America’s past, following a young Swedish immigrant as he travels through the American frontier […]

David Yezzi’s latest books are Late Romance: Anthony Hecht—A Poet’s Life and More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems. As an actor, he recently performed the roles of King Lear (Baltimore Shakespeare Factory) and Hamlet’s Ghost (Chesapeake Shakespeare). A 2022 short-term visiting fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, he teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins.  

Ange Mlinko is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Venice, and a forthcoming book of lyric criticism, Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets. She has won the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism, the Frederick Bock Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review […]

Callie Siskel is the author of Two Minds (W. W. Norton) and Arctic Revival, winner of the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems appear in the Atlantic,Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and Paris Review. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she lives in Los Angeles, where she is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Taylor […]

Andrew Motion was UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009, and is co-founder of The Poetry Archive and Poetry by Heart. His most recent publications are New and Selected Poems 1977-2022, The Penguin Book of Elegy (co-edited with Stephen Regan) and Waders. He is Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins, and lives in Baltimore. Declan Ryan is a […]

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the critically acclaimed debut story collection If I Survive You (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a finalist for the 2023 Booker Prize. His next book is the forthcoming novel Play Stone Kill Bird. Escoffery is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and is the recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for […]