The 2023 Napa Valley Writers’ Conference faculty members in fiction, poetry, and translation are listed below.

You may also peruse the full list of visiting faculty and speakers from 1981 to the present.

Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang’s next book of poems, With My Back to the World, is forthcoming in 2024 with Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her other six collections include The Trees Witness Everything, chosen as one of the Best Books of 2022 by The New Yorker and The Guardian; OBIT, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award; Barbie Chang; and The Boss, winner of a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory, was published in 2021 and was named a favorite nonfiction book of 2021 by Electric Literature and Kirkus. She also edited the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (2004). She is the author of a children’s book, Is Mommy?, illustrated by Marla Frazee, and a middle grade verse novel, Love, Love. A past Guggenheim Fellow and 2022 New York Times poetry editor, she lives in Los Angeles and is Acting Program Chair and Distinguished Faculty at Antioch’s low-residency MFA Program.

Brenda Hillman

Brenda Hillman is the author of 11 collections of poetry from Wesleyan University Press, most recently In a Few Minutes Before Later. Previous titles include Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, winner of the Northern California Book Award; Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2014; and Practical Water, which received the Los Angeles Times Prize for Poetry. Her prose book Three Talks is forthcoming in spring 2023. She has also co-translated At Your Feet by Ana Cristina Cesar. With Patricia Dienstfrey, she co-edited the collection The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood. A longtime faculty member of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, she is Professor Emerita at St. Mary’s College of California and lives in the Bay Area.

Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of the widely acclaimed Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019), a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry; Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004); and Musica Humana (Chapiteau Press, 2002). Kaminsky has won the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and the Foreword Magazine’s Best Poetry Book of the Year award. Recently, he was on the shortlist for the Neustadt International Literature Prize. He is the editor of several anthologies, among them The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Ecco, 2010), co-edited with Susan Harris; A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith (Tupelo Press, 2012), co-edited with Katherine Towler; Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poets and Prose (Tupelo Press, 2014), co-edited with Katie Farris and Valzhyna Mort; and In the Shape of the Human Body I am Visiting the Earth: Poems from Far and Wide (McSweeney’s, 2017) with Dominic Luxford and Jesse Nathan. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022). His honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022); and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (Oxford University Press, 2004). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Lan Samantha Chang

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of the novel The Family Chao. Her other books include the novels Inheritance and All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost and a collection of short fiction, Hunger. A recipient of the Berlin Prize, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Iowa City, where she directs the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Katie Crouch

Katie Crouch is the New York Times bestselling author of Girls in Trucks, Men and Dogs, and Abroad. Her latest novel, Embassy Wife, was longlisted for the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize and is currently in development with 20^th Century Television. Entertainment Weekly called Embassy Wife “a devilishly au courant satire that skewers white privilege and colonialism.” Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Zyzzyva, The London Guardian, and Tin House. She lives in Vermont with her family and teaches creative writing at Dartmouth College.

Peter Orner

Peter Orner is the author most recently of the memoir/ essay collection Still No Word from You, as well as two novels (The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love), and three story collections (Esther Stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others). His previous collection of essays, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. A three-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Peter’s work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, A Public Space, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, and has been translated into eight ­languages. He has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, as well as a Fulbright to Namibia. For Voice Witness, he has edited three volumes of oral history. Currently, Peter is chair of the English and Creative Writing department at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont.

Crystal Wilkinson

Crystal Wilkinson, a recent fellowship recipient of the Academy of American Poets, is Kentucky’s Poet Laureate. She is the award-winning author of Perfect Black, a collection of poems, and three works of fiction—The Birds of Opulence, Water Street, and Blackberries, Blackberries. She is the recipient of a 2022 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, a 2021 O. Henry Prize, a 2020 USA Artists Fellowship, and a 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. She has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Hermitage Foundation and others. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, is forthcoming from Clarkson Potter/Penguin Random House. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Robert Hass

Robert Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He has published many books of poetry including Field Guide, Praise, and his latest Summer Snow: New Poems. His collection of poems entitled Time and Materials won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His book of essays, What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, is the recipient of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Hass translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and he has edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Tomas Transtromer; The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa; Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life; the 2001 edition of Best American Poetry; and Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology (with Paul Ebenkamp).

Katie Farris: Generative Community Workshop

Katie Farris is a poet, writer of hybrid forms, and translator. She is the author of Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books, April 2023). Farris is also the author of the chapbook, A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal, and of boysgirls (Tupelo Press). She also is the award-winning translator of several books of poetry from the French, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Russian, including Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose. Her awards include The Pushcart Prize, Orison Prize, and Anne Halley Prize from Massachusetts Review. In addition to her poetry and translations, Farris also writes prose about cancer, the body, and its relationship to writing, such as in her recent, widely circulated essay in Oprah Daily.

Caroline Goodwin: Faculty Reading Series Community Class

Caroline Goodwin moved from Sitka, Alaska to the San Francisco Area to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry in 1999. Her most recent collections are Old Snow, White Sun (JackLeg Press, 2021), Madrigals (Big Yes Press, 2021), and Matanuska (Aquifer Press, Wales, UK, 2022). She lives on the San Mateo coast and teaches at the California College of the Arts, Stanford Continuing Studies, and UC Berkeley Extension. From 2014-2016, she served as the first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, CA.