Alexander Weinstein

Director / Fiction (Week One & Two)

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Alexander Weinstein is the founder and Director of the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the author of the short story collections Children of the New World, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a best book of the year by NPR and Electric Literature, and Universal Love. His fiction has appeared in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and Best American Experimental Writing. His short story, "Saying Goodbye to Yang," was adapted as the film After Yang by A24 Films, and was the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance, the Boston Society of Film Critics Award, and Barack Obama's Best Films of 2022.

Vogue M. Robinson

Poetry (Week One)

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Vogue M. Robinson – author, poet, educator, & creativity enabler – appreciates human beings who put truth and heart into words. She served as Clark County, Nevada's Poet Laureate (2017-2019) and is the first Black woman to receive the Silver Pen award from the Nevada Writers' Hall of Fame. Robinson is the author of Vogue 3:16, Selected Poems Vol. 1. Her work has been anthologized in The Beautiful,  Legs of Tumbleweeds, Wings of Lace, Sandstone and Silver, and A Change is Gonna Come. Vogue’s writing and performances are humorous, vulnerable, and empowering. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family or experimenting with fluid art techniques at home in Las Vegas.

Donald Quist

Fiction (Week One)

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Donald Quist is author of two essay collections, Harbors, a Foreword INDIES Bronze winner and International Book Awards finalist, and To Those Bounded. He has a linked story collection, For Other Ghosts. His writing has appeared in AGNI, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and was Notable in Best American Essays. He is the creator of the online nonfiction series PAST TEN. Donald has received fellowships from Sundress Academy for the Arts and Kimbilio for Black Fiction. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University of Missouri. Find him on instagram: @donaldewquist.

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Hannah Bae

Creative Nonfiction (Week One)

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Hannah Bae is a Korean American freelance journalist, nonfiction writer and illustrator who is at work on a memoir. She is a 2024 grantee in literature for the New York State Council on the Arts, a 2024 juror in nonfiction for The Kirkus Prize, and a 2021 and 2022 Peter Taylor Fellow for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops.

 

Christopher Citro

Poetry, Creative Nonfiction & Publishing (Week One)

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Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (elixir press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His honors include a 2018 Pushcart Prize for poetry, a fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation, and writing awards from Columbia Journal (poetry) and The Florida Review (creative nonfiction). 

 

Christopher's writing appears in anthologies such as the Best New Poets, New Poetry from the Midwest, and Best Microfictions 2020. His poetry appears in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. 

 

Christopher has taught at the University of Kansas, Indiana University, SUNY Oswego, and the Downtown Writers Center. He is an Editorial Assistant for the Seneca Review and lives and teaches in sunny Syracuse, New York.

 

Sequoia Nagamatsu

Fiction (Week Two)

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Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the novel, How High We Go in the Dark, a national bestseller and New York Times Editors’ Choice, as well as the story collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone. His work has been a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and the Locus Award for first novel, shortlisted for The Barnes and Noble Discover Prize and The Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short fiction has appeared widely in journals such as the Iowa Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, Conjunctions, Lightspeed Magazine, and Zyzzyva. He is an associate professor at St. Olaf College in Minnesota and is a faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program.

 

Mary Austin Speaker

Poetry, Creative Nonfiction & Publishing (Week Two)

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Mary Austin Speaker is the author of Ceremony (Slope Editions); The Bridge (Shearsman); 20 Love Poems for 10 Months (UDP); Necropastorals (Wooden Leg Press), and a play, I Am You This Morning You Are Me Tonight, written with her husband, poet Chris Martin, with whom she lives in El Cerrito, California with their two sons. She is currently the Creative Director of Milkweed Editions, and has designed and/or edited for HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, Indiana Review, Bloomsbury, WW Norton, The Song Cave, Graywolf and Coffee House Press.

 

Chris Martin

Poetry (Week Two)

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Chris Martin is a tilted thinking animal who sways, lights, listens, and arrives. His days quake with the work of nonspeaking autistic writers through Unrestricted Interest and he is also the curator of Multiverse, a series of neurodivergent writing from Milkweed Editions. After publishing four collections of poetry, including Things to Do in Hell (Coffee House Press, 2020), he released his first book of nonfiction May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future (HarperOne, 2022). He lives El Cerrito, among the scrub jays and coast live oaks, with Mary Austin Speaker and their two bewildering creatures.

 

Kristina Marie Darling

Poetry, Prose & Publishing (Week Two)

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Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over thirty volumes of poetry, essays, and fiction. An expert consultant with the United States Fulbright Commission, a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar, and a member of the peer review panel for Fulbright grants, Dr. Darling’s work has also been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry, a 2024 Villa Lena Foundation Fellowship, a 2024 Civita Institute Fellowship, and eleven juried residencies at the American Academy in Rome. A faculty member at The Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, Dr. Darling has taught at Yale University, the American University in Rome, Stanford University, where she leads a workshop in professional empowerment through their Continuing Studies Division, the New School, the University of Cyprus, and in Cedar Crest College’s Pan-European M.F.A. Program. Dr. Darling currently teaches as Visiting Faculty in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She will serve as Visiting Researcher at Universidade do Porto in Spring 2025, and Visiting Faculty at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid for the 2025-2026 academic year. Dr. Darling is Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she now divides her time between Greece, Rome, and the Amalfi Coast.