LONGLEAF WRITERS CONFERENCE

Beth Nguyen is the author of four books, most recently the memoir Owner of a Lonely Heart, published by Scribner in 2023. Owner of a Lonely Heart was a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick and was named a best book of 2023 by NPR, Time, Oprah Daily, and BookPage. Nguyen’s three previous books, the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and the novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl, were published by Viking Penguin. Her awards and honors include an American Book Award, a PEN/Jerard Award from the PEN American Center, a Bread Loaf fellowship, and best book of the year honors from the Chicago Tribune and Library Journal. Her books have been included in community and university read programs around the country. Nguyen’s work has also appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Literary Hub, Time Magazine, and The Best American Essays. Nguyen was born in Saigon.

Dean Bakopoulos is the author of the novels Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), My American Unhappiness (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Summerlong (Ecco/HarperCollins). The winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a NEA fellowships in both fiction and creative nonfiction, Bakopoulos is now an associate professor of screenwriting arts at the University of Iowa. A WGA screenwriter, he co-wrote the film adaptation of his first novel and is co-creator and executive producer of the HBO MAX series Made for Love. Bakopoulos is currently developing several original projects for television, including Goodwinter, which he co-created with bestselling author Michael Perry and Grammy-winning musician Justin Vernon, and The Off Weeks, a domestic noir directed by Michael Showalter. 

Born in New Delhi, India, Vandana Khanna is a writer, educator, and editor. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Train to Agra, Afternoon Masala, and Burning Like Her Own Planet, as well as the chapbook, The Goddess Monologues.

Her work has won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, The Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, and the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. She has been published widely in journals and anthologies such as The New Republic, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Guernica, and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.

Matt Bondurant’s most recent book, Oleander City tells the true story of the tragic deaths of all ninety-three children from the Sisters of the Incarnate Word orphanage – except for one little girl who miraculously survived – and how a storied boxing match between two of America’s most legendary boxers changed the fortunes of the city and exposed an insidious secret society determined to return Galveston to its former glory at all costs. His novel, The Night Swimmer, was featured in the New York Times Book Review, Outside Magazine, and The Daily Beast, among others.  His second novel The Wettest County in the World is an international bestseller, a New York Times Editor’s Pick, a San Francisco Chronicle Best 50 Books of the Year, and was made into a feature film (Lawless) by Director John Hillcoat, starring Shia Labeouf, Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Gary Oldman, and Guy Pearce.  His first novel The Third Translation is an international bestseller, translated into 14 languages worldwide.  He has sold three original screenplays including a development deal with HBO/Cinemax to write and executive produce an original one-hour dramatic series, as well as a dramatic series for Warner Brothers Television. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi where he serves as the Director of the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi.  

Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the poetry collections Doll Apollo and Dear Weather Ghost, the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City, and three poetry chapbooks, Arbor, Double Blind, and Apollo. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Image, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Fence, Southwest Review, and other magazines. Originally from Houston, Texas, Melissa studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Mississippi, and serves as Associate Editor of Tupelo Quarterly. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Mark Winegardner is the FSU Burroway Professor of English, and is the winner of a University Teaching Award and is the department’s only two-time winner of the University Mentoring Award. He has also won grants, fellowships and residencies from the Ohio Arts Council, the Lilly Endowment, the Ragdale Foundation, the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Corporation of Yaddo. Winegardner’s books have been translated into more than twenty languages and sold almost two million copies worldwide. They have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List and in best-of-the-year lists by The New York Times Book Review, the New York Public Library, The American Library Association, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Sun-Times. In 2004, Cleveland Magazine named Crooked River Burning the best book ever written about Cleveland. A contributing writer to ESPN the Magazine and The Oxford American, Winegardner’s work has also appeared in such magazines as GQ, Men’s Journal, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Ploughshares, Five Points, Doubletake, Story Quarterly, and TriQuarterly. He also helped write the script for The Godfather video game (all platforms), creating original dialogue performed by such actors as James Caan, Robert Duvall, and (in his final professional gig) Marlon Brando.

Seth Brady Tucker’s third book, The Cruelty Virtues will be published by 3:a Taos Press late this year. His second collection, We Deserve the Gods We Ask For won the Gival Press Poetry Award and went on to win the Eric Hoffer award, and his first book won the Elixir Press Editor’s Choice Award. He has won a number of individual writing awards including the Shenandoah Bevel Summers Fiction Prize and the Literal Latte Short Fiction Award. among others. His recent work appears in such magazines and journals as Copper Nickel, Los Angeles Review, Driftwood, Iowa Review, December, Pleiades, Shenandoah, PoetryNorthwest, Chattahoochee Review, and many others.  For over a decade, Seth has been the executive director of for Longleaf. Seth has degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, Northern Arizona University, and top-ranked Florida State University (PhD, 2012). Currently, Seth’s novel and first short fiction collection (recently a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award) are represented by Glass Literary Management, New York. Seth teaches poetry and fiction workshops at the Light House Writer’s Workshop in Denver as well as the Colorado School of Mines in Denver where he is a full teaching professor. He is originally from Wyoming, and once served as an Army 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper in Iraq.

Martha Wydysh is a literary agent with Trident Media Group focusing primarily on literary and upmarket fiction. She is drawn to novels that are contemporary, emotionally and psychologically acute, and not necessarily plot-centric. She has a soft spot for slightly speculative and satirical works that question the status quo here in the U.S. and abroad, and gravitates toward anything that verges on the absurd, obsessive, or humorous. She has a particular love of short fiction, especially linked collections or novels-in-stories that transport and immerse readers in an unfamiliar place. Additionally, Martha is looking dark and propulsive psychological and social thrillers. In non-fiction she is interested in representing very select projects in the areas of narrative non-fiction, cultural criticism, and literary memoir. In addition to working closely with her clients on their book projects, Martha views their careers holistically and loves helping them place short stories and essays. She is proud to have placed their work with such publications as The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, and Guernica.   

Anjali Singh has been an agent at Ayesha Pande Literary since 2015; she was previously a literary scout, an editor at Vintage Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Simon & Schuster, as well as Editorial Director at Other Press. She represents Bridgett Davis, The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers; Susan Abulhawa, bestselling author of Mornings in Jenin and whose recent novel Against the Loveless World won the 2021 Palestine Book Award, the Arab Book Award and was an Aspen Words Prize finalist; Nawaaz Ahmed, author of Radiant Fugitives, a 2021 PEN/Faulkner finalist. This year she is very excited about Tessa Hulls’ Feeding Ghosts, a graphic memoir about inherited trauma, mental illness and three generations of women in a Chinese-American family and Zara Chowdharys’ memoir The Lucky Ones. She is on the lookout for character-driven fiction or non-fiction works that reflect an engagement with the world around us and graphic novels for all ages.

Duvall Osteen represents a diverse list of debut, award-winning, bestselling, and notable authors. Before joining UTA, she spent 11 years as an agent at Aragi Inc., focusing on literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, and graphic novels. Her literary interests include writing rooted in place, especially the global South, multigenerational storytelling, crime, and literary suspense. In both fiction and non-fiction, she gravitates towards books across genres with big, original, astute, immersive voices. She is a passionate advocate for her authors, and tailors her approach to representation based on their needs. Above all, she prioritizes close editorial relationships. Duvall was raised in the South, and is based in Manhattan, where she lives with her family. She holds a Master of Arts in Southern Cultural Studies from the University of Mississippi

Courtney Sender’s essays have appeared in The New York Times‘ Modern Love, The Atlantic, and Slate, and her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and many others. Her debut book, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me (WVU Press 2023), was called “a stunner from the very first page” by Deesha Philyaw, “miraculous” by Ann Patchett, and “literary rock ‘n’ roll” by Aimee Bender. A Yaddo and MacDowell fellow, Courtney holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School. She is currently at work on a debut novel. www.courtneysender.com

Parul Kapur was born in Assam, India and grew up in Connecticut. Her debut novel,                 Inside the Mirror, about twin sister artists in 1950s India, won the AWP Prize for the Novel and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press on March 1. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Prime Number, Midway Journal and elsewhere. She has contributed articles and reviews to The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Art in America, ARTnews, Guernica, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review. Parul holds an MFA from Columbia University and has received writing fellowships from the Hambidge Center and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She founded the Books page at ArtsATL, Atlanta’s leading online arts review, and lives in Atlanta.

Juan J. Morales is the son of an Ecuadorian mother and Puerto Rican father. He is the author of three poetry collections, including The Handyman’s Guide to End Times, and his fourth collection is forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press in 2025. Recent poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Laurel Review, Breakbeats Vol. 4 LatiNEXT, Acentos Review, terrain.org, South Dakota Review, Sugar House Review, and Poetry. Morales is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Macondo Fellow, the editor/publisher of Pilgrimage Press, a Professor of English, and the Associate Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences at Colorado State University Pueblo.

Elizabeth Sylvia is a poet and teacher from Massachusetts whose first book, None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women (2022), won the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. She has been a semi- or finalist in competitions sponsored by the Burnside Review, C&R Press, DIAGRAM, Thirty West, Rare Swan and Wolfson Press, and is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. Sylvia has been a presenter for the Mass Poetry Festival and received a Shirley Lim fellowship from the West Chester University Poetry Center. She is the winner of the 2023 riverSedge Poetry Prize. elizabethsylviapoet.net

Jonathan Fink is Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing at University of West Florida.  He has published two books of poetry: The Crossing (Dzanc, 2015) and Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad (Dzanc, 2016).  His third book, a hybrid poetry/nonfiction collection, is forthcoming from Dzanc. He has also received the Editors’ Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review, the McGinnis-Ritchie Prize for Nonfiction/Essay from Southwest Review, the Porter Fleming Award in Poetry, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Joshua Tree National Park, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and Emory University, among other institutions. His poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, Narrative, New England Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, and Witness, among other journals. 

Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter (Sundress 2022) and the chapbook Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak. She co-edited the anthology Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest, her work has appeared in The Ecopoetry Anthology II, Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Pleiades, & several other anthologies & journals. Winner of a 2021 PEN America grant, Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State & teaches poetry at The Poetry Barn, The Loft, and UNO. 

Graham Barnhart is a poet, military veteran, and author of The War Makes Everyone Lonely. His work has been recognized with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, The Blackwell Prize, and The Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans from The Iowa Review. He has received support from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Community of Writers. Graham currently lives in Oakland, CA, and is completing work on a Ph.D. dissertation in Creative Writing.

Bronson Lemer is the author of the memoir The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq. His work has appeared in Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, The Southeast Review, Permafrost, Hobart, & Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers. He is a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow and lives in St. Paul.

Ari L Mokdad is a Detroit-born poet, choreographer, dancer, and educator. She received three Bachelor of Arts from Grand Valley State University in Dance, Writing, and English. She completed her MA in English and doctoral studies at Wayne State University. In 2023, Ari received an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  She lives with her partner in Northern Michigan on the ancestral and unceded land of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Pottawatomie people, The People of the Three Fires.

Javier Sandoval grew up in the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico and studied under Forrest Gander and John Wideman at Brown University. He now teaches at the University of Alabama where he also serves as Poetry Editor of Black Warrior Review. His own cross-genre work has appeared or is forthcoming in swamp pink, Gulf Coast, Salamander, Narrative, and Indiana Review, and his first poetry chapbook, Blue Moon Looming, will soon be published by CutBank. But mostly, he loves to smoke on the stoop with his lady. You can follow him on IG for updates and jokes @JavierWantsCandy.

Adam Straus is a Marine veteran. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Hopkins Review, The Los Angeles Review, JMWW, South Dakota Review, Pithead Chapel, trampset, and elsewhere. In 2022, Adam was named a runner-up for The Iowa Review’s Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award. He’s also been longlisted for LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction and nominated for the Best Small Fictions Anthology, the Best of the Net Anthology, and the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. Adam holds an MFA from Rutgers-Camden. He lives in New York City with his girlfriend and teaches English at Montclair Kimberley Academy.

Alyssa Freeman-Moser is an MFA in fiction candidate at Florida State University. She holds an MA in English from Kansas State University and an MA in Political Communication from The Johns Hopkins University. Find her story “The Bugman” in Dartmouth’s Meetinghouse.

Vince is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow in the department of English (Creative Writing) at Florida State University. His area of concentration is African-American Literary and Cultural Studies, with a focus on adapting fiction written by writers of the African diaspora for film and television. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kansas and a BA in English from Saint Olaf College (Northfield, MN). He is a 2019 winner of the Margaret Walker Memorial Prize in Fiction, 2022 Hurston/Wright Fellow, and 2023 Kimbilio Fellow. He is also co-founder of SoulClap: A Black Joy Journal, a digital publication made possible by a grant from the Florida Open Access Fund. His short story “Mine Own” will be published in Virgin Islands Noir (Akashic, 2025).

Oliver Nash is a writer of the weird currently living in Alabama where they are working on a Southern Gothic novel and spending a lot of time with their cat. They are a Truman Capote Literary Fellow at the University of Alabama’s MFA. They were a 2024 Pushcart Prize Nominee, Judge’s Choice for Queer Sci-Fi’s 2023 Flash Fiction Contest, and placed as a Finalist or Semi-Finalist in several 2022 chapbook contests. Their work appears in Susurrus, Words&Sports, Queer Sci-Fi, Unspeakable Horror 3, The Offing, Spectrum Literary Journal, and The Santa Ana River Review, among others. They can be found online on Instagram @olivernashwrites, and at olivernashwrites.com

Kaitlin Harris is a fiction writer based in Birmingham, Alabama. As a current junior within the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Harris is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences degree in English with a concentration in creative writing. She strives to hone her craft at the graduate level while establishing a career as a content editor and published author.

Alyson (“Al”) Favilla is a second-year MFA student and a Grisham Fellow in poetry at the University of Mississippi. Their work appears, or is forthcoming, in the Poetry Ireland Review, Diode, Electric Literature, and About Place.

Homa Mojtabai is a writer mostly from Massachusetts and California. Her writing has appeared in publications including The Los Angeles Times, Paper Darts, and JMWW. In 2015, her piece “Reasons You Were Not Promoted That Are Totally Unrelated to Gender” was the most read article on the McSweeney’s Internet Tendency website. She earned an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Spanish from Bowdoin College. Homa is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi. You can read more of her work at www.homagod.com.

Anna Vogt (she/her) is currently a student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where
she studies English with a concentration in creative writing. When she isn’t writing poetry or
unsettling short stories, you can find her cooking dinner in her small kitchen with her friends,
hiking, camping, doing acro, having opinions about films, or traveling with a very large
backpack. Reach her on instagram @itsannavogt.

Dori Lumpkin is a queer writer and graduate student at the University of South Alabama. Their work has appeared in The Deeps, Crow & Cross Keys, and Demons & Death Drops, (amongst other places). They love all things speculative and weird, and strive to make fiction writing a more inclusive community. You can find them @whimsyqueen on most social media websites, or check out their website: https://dorilumpkin.carrd.co/