The 2024 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.

Jan Beatty

Jan Beatty’s eighth book, Dragstripping, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press, fall, 2024. Her memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award (2021). Recent books include The Body Wars(University of Pittsburgh), the chapbook, Skydog (Lefty Blondie Press, 2022), and Jackknife: New and Selected Poems(University of Pittsburgh, 2018 Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019. Awards include the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, Discovery/The Nation Prize finalist, Pablo Neruda Prize, an Artist Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation, and a Creative Achievement Award, Heinz Foundation. Publications include The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, POETRY, Best American Poetry, and many other journals. Beatty worked as a waitress, an abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. She is Professor Emerita at Carlow University.

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently The Asking: New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023), Ledger (Knopf, 2020) and The Beauty ( Knopf, 2015), a San Francisco Chronicle best book of the year and long listed for the National Book Award. Her second collection of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015), received the Northern California Book Award. Other poetry collections include Come, Thief (2011); After (2006), named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times; and Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Northern California Book Award. In addition to a previous book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, Hirshfield has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets from the past. Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; and (twice) the California Book Award. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. In 2012, she received the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2019 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Bruce Snider

Bruce Snider is the author of three poetry collections, Fruit (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020); Paradise, Indiana (Pleiades Press, 2013); and The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). He is co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018). His poems and essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, and Threepenny Review, among others. His awards include a 2023 NEA fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship, and the Jenny McKean Writer-in-Washington award as well residencies from Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Amy Clampitt House, the James Merrill House, VCCA, and the Bogliasco Foundation. He lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

C. Dale Young

C. Dale Young is the author of a novel, The Affliction (2018), and five collections of poetry, the most recent being Prometeo (2021). A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, he practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. His Building the Perfect Animal: New & Selected Poems will be published by Four Way Books in 2025.

Lan Samantha Chang

Lan Samantha Chang’s novel The Family Chao was chosen for Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List and won an Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction. A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of her first collection, Hunger: A Novella and Stories was recently published by W.W. Norton & Company. She is also the author of All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritance, which won the PEN Open Book Award. Her short stories have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Best American Short Stories. Since 2006, she has directed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with her husband and daughter.

Peter Ho Davies

Peter Ho Davies’ most recent books are the novel A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, a New York Times Notable Book, and The Art of Revision: The Last Word. Other works include the novels The Fortunes, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award; the The Welsh Girl, long-listed for the Booker Prize, and a London Times bestseller; as well as two critically acclaimed collections of short stories. A recipient of the PEN/Malamud and PEN/Macmillan awards, his fiction has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Granta and been anthologized in O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, he now teaches in the Helen Zell MFA Program at the University of Michigan.

Jamil Jan Kochai

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize. His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New Yorker, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Sacramento.

Lysley Tenorio

Lysley Tenorio is the author of the story collection Monstress, named a book of the year by The San Francisco Chronicle, and the novel The Son of Good Fortune, winner of the New American Voices Award. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Manoa, and Zoetrope: All-Story, and have been adapted the for the stage in San Francisco and New York City. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in the Philippines and raised in California, he is an Associate Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Emily Wilson

Emily Wilson is a Professor in the Department of Classical Studies and holds the College for Women Class of 1963 Chair in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include The Death of Socrates: Hero, villain, chatterbox, saint (2007) and The Greatest Empire: A life of Seneca (2014). Her verse translations include Six Tragedies of Seneca, four translations of plays by Euripides in the Modern Library, The Greek Plays, and Oedipus Tyrannos. She is the Classics editor of the revised Norton Anthology of World Literature. Her 2017 translation of the Odyssey, in iambic pentameter, met with wide acclaim, as did her new translation of the Iliad, published in fall 2023.  She is now working on translations of select dialogues of Plato, and a fictionalized retelling of the ancient myths associated with the Trojan War. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2019, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.

Maw Shein Win: Generative Community Workshop

Caroline Goodwin: Faculty Reading Series Community Class