Eric Puchner is the author of the new novel Dream State. His other books include the novel Model Home, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and two collections of short stories, Last Day on Earth and Music Through the Floor, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award.  His stories and personal essays […]

Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. Nunez is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National […]

Gilman Hall 50 Writing Seminars Presents: Armen Davoudian and Jenny Xie Armen Davoudian Davoudian is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Forty Pillars and the translator, from Persian, of Hopscotch by Fatemeh Shams. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.  Photo credit: Matthew Lansburgh Jenny […]

Vauhini Vara is the author of This is Salvaged, which was longlisted for the Story Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and The Immortal King Rao, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was […]

Shannon Robinson’s debut short story collection, The Ill-Fitting Skin, is winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Joyland, Nimrod, failbetter, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2011 she was […]

Lauren Russell is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance (Milkweed Editions, 2024); Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award for “venturesome, interdisciplinary work”; and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). Russell has received fellowships from 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]