Meet the 2021 Faculty!
The 40th conference will be held August 1 - August 6, 2021. The faculty: Poetry: Victoria Chang, Brenda Hillman, Brian Teare, Matthew Zapruder Fiction: Charles Baxter, Lan Samantha Chang, ZZ Packer, Joan Silber Translation: Robert Hass Applications will open [...]
Virtual Day 5 with Brian Teare, Lan Samantha Chang, & Robert Hass
Although we can't gather in person this week, we are offering an assortment of prompts and curated online content to nurture your writing and reading. These materials are available for you to view on your own schedule for free; no [...]
Virtual Day 4 with Victoria Chang & ZZ Packer
Although we can't gather in person this week, we are offering an assortment of prompts and curated online content to nurture your writing and reading. These materials are available for you to view on your own schedule for free; no [...]
Virtual Day 3 with Brenda Hillman & Peter Ho Davies
Although we can't gather in person this week, we are offering an assortment of prompts and curated online content to nurture your writing and reading. These materials are available for you to view on your own schedule for free; no [...]
Virtual Day 2 with Jane Hirshfield & Yiyun Li
Although we can't gather in person this week, we are offering daily online programming to nurture your writing and reading. Book titles link to Readers' Books, our long-time conference bookseller. Your purchase supports this beloved community resource. Titles from this [...]
Virtual Day 1 with Camille T. Dungy & Daniel Orozco
Although we can't gather in person this week, we are offering daily online programming to nurture your writing and reading. Book titles link to Readers' Books, our long-time conference bookseller. Your purchase supports this beloved community resource. Titles from this series [...]
Welcome to the Online Program
Greetings from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference! We’d hoped to gather in person this year at our home in Saint Helena, California, to celebrate our 40th anniversary. Obviously circumstances intervened, and our team hopes for the good health of everyone [...]
Join Us for a Week of Reflection & Inspiration
Although we can't gather in person during the final week of July, the writers' conference will offer daily online programming from Sunday, July 26, to Friday, July 31, to nurture your writing and reading. If you're not already on our [...]
Update: May 1, 2020
Due to the circumstances surrounding COVID-19, the Napa Valley Writers' Conference has made the difficult decision to cancel the 2020 conference, originally slated for the last week of July. This was to be the conference's 40th anniversary, and we will [...]
Remembering Edwina Leggett
She never came to the microphone and she wasn’t an author, but Edwina Leggett, whose passing we heard of earlier this month, made an important contribution to the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Married to Jack Leggett, one of our founding [...]
A Remembrance: Jane Mead (1958 – 2019)
We were saddened to learn that 2018 faculty member Jane Mead died Sunday, September 8, 2019. Our poetry director, Iris Dunkle, Jane's long-time friend and colleague, offers this remembrance. Up on the ridge at Jane Mead's family vineyard above Napa [...]
Participant Spotlight: Jill Koenigsdorf
As we head into our 40th conference year, we're proud of the literary community our conference has fostered over the years. That fellowship is what poet, essayist, and novelist Jill Koenigsdorf especially appreciates about her three conference experiences. She recalls [...]
2019 faculty in the news
Members of the 2019 faculty have been earning wide acclaim for their latest work. Faculty poet Forrest Gander won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for his latest collection, Be With, "a collection of elegies that grapple with sudden loss, and the [...]
Free class returns to St. Helena library July 29-31
We're delighted to partner with the St. Helena Public Library for a third year to present a free class spotlighting the conference's fiction and poetry faculty. Bay Area poet and teacher Caroline Goodwin will lead the classes, which will be [...]
New for 2019: Translation Workshop
Join us in an exploration of the challenges and insights of translating poetry or prose—either your own work or that of an author you admire—from another language into English. The workshop is open to literary translators or those interested in [...]
Meet the 2019 faculty!
The 39th conference will be held July 28 - August 2, 2019. The faculty:Poetry: Eavan Boland, Forrest Gander, Jane Hirshfield, Major JacksonFiction: Lan Samantha Chang, Ryan Harty, Mitchell S. Jackson, Julie OrringerNEW! Translation: Howard Norman Applications open in January. Meantime, [...]
Howard Norman
Howard Norman received the Harold Morton Landon Prize in translation from the Academy of American Poets, a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Merrill Foundation Fellowship, [...]
Julie Orringer
Julie Orringer is the author of two award-winning books: The Invisible Bridge, a novel, and the short-story collection How to Breathe Underwater, both New York Times Notable Books; her new novel, The Flight Portfolio, will be published this May. Her [...]
Mitchell S. Jackson
Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years (2013) received The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright [...]
Ryan Harty
Ryan Harty’s story collection Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona (2003) received the John Simmons Award for Short Fiction, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Book of 2003, and Book of the Year from the Arizona Library Association. He is the recipient [...]
Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang is the author of All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (2010), Inheritance (2004), and Hunger (1998). Her works have also appeared in Ploughshares, The Atlantic, and Best American Short Stories. Chang’s work was nominated for the PEN [...]
Major Jackson
Major Jackson is the author of four books of poetry, including 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. He is the editor [...]
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Beauty, a San Francisco Chronicle best book of the year and long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award. Her second collection of essays, Ten Windows: How Great [...]
Forrest Gander
Forrest Gander is a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature. He was born in the Mojave Desert, grew up in Virginia, and taught for many years at Brown University with his wife, the poet CD Wright. Among [...]
Eavan Boland
Eavan Boland is the author of, most recently, A Woman Without a Country and New Collected Poems. Her other books of poetry include Domestic Violence, Against Love Poetry, The Lost Land, and In a Time of Violence. Boland is also [...]
Meet the 2018 faculty: Howard Norman
Howard Norman is an award-winning author and educator whose books have been translated into 12 languages. He has written seven novels: My Darling Detective (2017), Next Life Might be Kinder (2014), What is Left the Daughter (2010), Devotion (2007), The [...]
Meet the 2018 faculty: Mat Johnson
Mat Johnson has authored the novels Loving Day (2015), Pym (2011), Hunting in Harlem (2003), Drop (2000), the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot (2007), and comic books Incognegro (2008) and Dark Rain (2010). The long list of awards and [...]
Meet the 2018 faculty: Lauren Groff
Acclaimed author Lauren Groff has three novels to her name: Fates and Furies (2015), Arcadia (2012), and The Monsters of Templeton (2008), and has been featured in publications such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic, American Short Fiction, Harper’s Tin [...]
Meet the 2018 faculty: Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang is the author of All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (2010), Inheritance (2004), and Hunger (1998). In addition to being translated into nine languages, her works have also appeared in Ploughshares, The Atlantic, and twice chosen for [...]
Meet the 2018 faculty: Jane Mead
Jane Mead is an award-winning poet, whose writing has appeared in multiple anthologies and magazines. She has published five collections of poetry: World of Made and Unmade (2016), Money Money Money Water Water Water (2014), The Usable Field (2008), The [...]
Meet the 2018 faculty: Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips, referred to as “one of America’s most original, influential, and productive of lyric poets,” has authored 14 books of poetry and several works of criticism and translation. His recent poetry collections include: Wild is the Wind (2018), Reconnaissance [...]
Meet the 2018 faculty: Camille T. Dungy
Camille Dungy has authored four collections of poetry: Trophic Cascade (2017), Smith Blue (2011), Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (2006). Her most recent work is a collection of essays [...]
Meet the 2018 faculty: Brenda Hillman
A prolific and celebrated poet, Brenda Hillman is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), Practical Water (2011), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), [...]
2018 Public Literary Events
Napa Valley Writers’ Conference – 2018 Public Lectures and Readings Evening Readings Admission to evening readings was $20 and included a wine reception prior to the presentation. Students with ID were admitted for free, as were community housing hosts and [...]
Past Literary Events
Archive: Literary Events Past Readings, Lectures, and Speakers 2018 Camille Dungy, Brenda Hillman, Jane Mead, Carl Phillips, Lan Samantha Chang, Lauren Groff, Mat Johnson, Howard Norman 2017 Eavan Boland, Jane Hirshfield, Ada Limón, Matthew Zapruder, Lan Samantha Chang, Peter Ho [...]
The 38th conference is a wrap!
Thanks to our faculty, participants, and community supporters for a wonderful 38th conference! Check out our Facebook page for a gallery of conference photos ... we wish you a fruitful new year of writing!
Participant Spotlight: Javier Zamora
Javier Zamora's first full-length collection, Unaccompanied, debuted in September of 2017 with the kind of fanfare most poets only dream of. But he remembers when, just seven years earlier, he attended the Napa Valley Writers' Conference as a novice. [...]
Participant Spotlight: Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua's debut collection of short stories, Deceit and Other Possibilities, was published late last month -- just over a decade after Hua workshopped one of the volume's stories at the conference. Deceit and Other Possibilities won the Grand Prize [...]
Participant Spotlight: Catherine Abbey Hodges
We were delighted to learn Catherine Abbey Hodges accorded us the honor of an acknowledgement in her collection, Instead of Sadness, which was published last year by Gunpowder Press as the inaugural winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Why [...]
Participant spotlight: Daphne Larkin
If you've attended the conference any time in the last decade, Daphne Larkin's face is likely familiar to you. Not only has she been a fiction participant several times, but she's a supporter, community housing host, and frequent attendee of [...]
John Leggett / November 11, 1917 – January 25, 2015
Program Director Anne Evans authored this tribute. Jack Leggett at the 2014 conference. (Photo by Mary Shea) John Leggett, or Jack as we all knew him, was co-founder and Program Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference from 1987 until [...]
Meet the 2014 Faculty: Justin Torres
This profile was penned by Angela Pneuman, who will introduce Justin at the conference's opening reading July 27, and who will appear on our "First Books" panel for conference participants. Her first novel, Lay It on My Heart, was released [...]
Meet the 2014 Faculty: Brian Teare
A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts and the American Antiquarian Society. He’s the author [...]
Meet the 2014 Faculty: Welcome Back, Ayana Mathis
Assistant Fiction Director Patrick Vogelpohl penned this profile of Ayana Mathis. Before Ayana Mathis earned praise for her debut novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, she was a standout student at the 2011 Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. “She was clearly [...]
Meet the 2014 Faculty: Kazim Ali
Assistant Poetry Director Iris Dunkle interviewed poet Kazim Ali for the journal Chautauqua in 2012. In the excerpt below, they discuss history, place and their intersection. You may read the full interview in PDF format or visit the journal Web [...]
Meet the 2014 faculty: Brenda Hillman
Poetry Assistant Iris Dunkle penned this profile. Returning to our faculty this year is the highly esteemed poet, Brenda Hillman. Hillman has been on the faculty at Napa Valley Writers’ Conference for over two decades and anyone who has had [...]
Meet the 2014 faculty: Michael Byers
By fiction director Lakin Khan At our conference in 2010, Michael Byers had the honor of reading the first night, a plein-air reading in the cool of approaching nightfall, sunset plying along the mountain behind him, full moon nosing its [...]
Meet the 2014 Faculty: Camille Dungy
This profile is based on an introduction written by conference assistant Kathleen Winter for the 2013 conference. Camille Dungy holds degrees from Stanford and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She was born in Denver. Camille is author of three [...]
Meet the 2014 faculty: Lan Samantha Chang
This profile is based on an introduction written by conference director Andrea Bewick for the 2013 conference. It's our great pleasure to welcome Lan Samantha Chang back to Napa and the writers’ conference. Sam has been teaching at the conference [...]
Fall 2013 alumni update: renown from near and far
Conference alumni have been as busy as ever since our last alumni update in January -- earning plaudits and publication around the world. Beverly Bie Brahic (2009, 2010, 2011) wrote to let us know her second collection, White Sheets, was [...]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Camille Dungy
Camille T. Dungy is the author of Smith Blue, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. She is the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, co-editor of [...]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Yiyun Li
This faculty profile comes to us courtesy of past participant Angela Watrous, who conducted an interview with Li for the Fiction Writers Review. What follows below is an excerpt; read the entire interview on the FWR site. "Yiyun Li grew [...]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Jane Hirshfield
Thanks to poetry assistant Iris Dunkle for updating this profile. Poet, essayist, teacher, translator: Jane Hirshfield’s writing persona is multi-faceted, her body of work diverse. But if there is a unifying element in her pursuits, it lies in her formative [...]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Peter Ho Davies
Peter Ho Davies was born to Welsh and Chinese parents and raised in Britain and the U.S., so it's no surprise that his work concerns itself with the concept of identity. But his works are hardly circumscribed by the labels [...]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Linda Gregerson
Thanks to poetry assistant Iris Dunkle for writing this profile. The poet and scholar Linda Gregerson begins her spectacular poem, “Bicameral,” with the line: Choose any angle you like, she said, the world is split in two. On one side, [...]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Lan Samantha Chang
This is a re-post of conference media manager Catherine Thorpe's 2011 profile. Lan Samantha Chang was born and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin, to Chinese immigrant parents. Growing up, she experienced both the Chinese cultural traditions her family upheld and Midwestern [...]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Major Jackson
Thanks to conference assistant Kathleen Winter for providing this updated profile. Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (Norton, 2010) and Hoops (Norton, 2006), both finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and [...]
Meet the 2013 faculty: Christopher Tilghman
Thanks to fiction assistant Patrick Vogelpohl for penning this profile. Countless writers find inspiration in their family histories. However, no one draws from their lineage quite like Christopher Tilghman, a long-time conference faculty favorite who returns this summer after an [...]
Winter 2012-2013 alumni update: an Oprah pick, a Pushcart nomination & more
Oprah announces conference alumna Ayana Mathis' debut as the second pick for Oprah's Book Club 2.0 Our alumni have hardly been hibernating during the autumn and winter months. Since our last update we've received word of publications and accolades galore [...]
September alumni news: publication success & a new local workshop
We continue to hear good publishing news from alumni -- including the latest crop of participants from 2012. Fiction writer Kirstin Chen, who was in Lan Samantha Chang's workshop this year, learned while at the conference that her debut novel [...]
Faculty Profile: Brenda Hillman
~ by Aaron DiFranco Few writers match the tenacity, courage and range of Brenda Hillman in seeking out a congruence between one’s non-verbal experience of the world and how language reflects it. Her poems command not only a fiercely demanding [...]
Faculty Profile: Tayari Jones
“Born, bred and buttered” in Atlanta, Georgia (as she once described herself), Tayari Jones has placed all three of her novels in that city, creating a trilogy, as The Village Voice noted, “defining middle-class black Atlanta the way Cheever did [...]
We’re hearing good news from alumni !
Big Muddy Fall 2011 Unbeknownst to each other, Kathleen Rowell (2010) and Thomas Linville (2010, 2011) both entered the Mighty River Short Story Contest in 2010 ~ and won prizes. Peterson received First Prize for her story "Resolution," [...]
Faculty profile: Lan Samantha Chang
For last year's conference, fiction and poetry assistant Jeannie Kim-McPherson penned this introduction to Lan Samantha Chang's work. Lan Samantha Chang's stories have appeared in The Atlantic and twice in The Best American Short Stories, and her books have won [...]
Allardice Publication News
Participant Jim Allardice sent the following message: Hello everyone, Just a quick note to let you know that the story I workshopped in Samantha Chang's workshop last summer has been accepted in Folio. The story I workshopped with Robert Boswell [...]
Faculty Profile: Crossing Borders with Forrest Gander
Born in California's Mojave desert with roots in the South, schooled in Virginia and California, now living in Rhode Island, but frequently traveling abroad: Forrest Gander's itinerant physical existence is mirrored in his writing, which travels widely. Gander has authored [...]
A Bit More About Arthur Sze
When Arthur Sze was named a Chancellor of the Academy of AmericanPoets last month, Academy Chancellor Naomi Shihab Nye called his poetry “a nourishing tonic for the mind.” The word tonic, with its connotations of both [...]
Tayari Jones on NPR
Tayari Jones was heard on NPR today with this essay about the death of Trayvon Martin in Florida. She writes and speaks with the elegance and heart-breaking honesty so present in all her work.
Ron Carlson, Man of Many Genres
This year, we welcome the return of Ron Carlson, whose renown as a master of the short story is matched only by his excellence and generosity as a teacher—as those in his workshop are bound to discover. And [...]
The Application Gates Are Open
Along with the plum blossoms, the first flurries of applications are arriving! There's nothing quite like the smell of fresh applications in the morning, still warm from the friction of electron-transmission. Though, to be sure, [...]
Applications will open in only ten days!
We've cleared our desks from last year's mess - we're ready and eager to review your submissions! Meanwhile, skip over to Alumni & Faculty News to read about Valerie Fioravanti, an alum from 2009, her thriving writing center in Sacramento [...]
Publication and Prize for Valerie Fioravanti (2009)
We recently heard from Valerie Fioravanti, (participant in 2009), that her first book,Garbage Night at the Opera, won the 2011 Chandra Prize and is forthcoming from BkMk Press. Congratulations are in high order! Valerie seems to be the [...]
Introducing Kevin Brockmeier
In an interview last year with Granta magazine, Kevin Brockmeier was asked about the premise of his highly acclaimed novel, The Illumination (2011), in which human suffering and pain become visible. Brockmeier cites G.K. Chesterton’s The [...]
Scholarship opportunity
Click over to our blog post to find out more about a scholarship offered through AWP to attend a writing conference, including ours...
Scholarship Opportunity!
Eager to attend the conference but could use some financial support to pull it off? Here's a scholarship opportunity offered throughthe Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). The $500 award, offered to a poet and a fiction writer each, can be applied to [...]