The 2022 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.

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield, writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today,” according to Naomi Shihab Nye’s description in The New York Times, is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. She explores shared fate and interiority with equal allegiance. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the founder of Poets for Science, Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including most recently Ledger (Knopf, 2020). Her books have received the Poetry Center Book Award and the California Book Award; The Beauty (2015), was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s the author as well of two now-classic collections of essays on poetry’s infrastructure and craft, Nine Gates and Ten Windows, and is the editor and co-translator of four books presenting the work of world poets from the deep past. Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The TLS, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. Her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. In 2019, Hirshfield was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man, Roll Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He is the author of the essay collection A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and Zyzzva. Major lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

Dana Levin

Dana Levin is the author of five books of poetry: In the Surgical Theatre, chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; Wedding Day; Sky Burial, noted for 2011 year-end honors by The New Yorker and the San Francisco Chronicle, Coldfront, and Library Journal; Banana Palace, and Now Do You Know Where You Are, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in April 2022. Her poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including Best American Poetry 2015, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and The Paris Review. Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. She currently serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.

Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith is the award-winning author of eight critically-acclaimed books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (Triquarterly Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow (CityFiles Press, 2015), a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. She has authored and edited poetry, fiction, children’s books, and nonfiction, including the history Africans in America (Mariner, 1999), a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. A Guggenheim fellow, NEA Literature Fellow, and four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, Patricia is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.

Kevin Brockmeier

In addition to his latest book, The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories, Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and a memoir of his seventh-grade year called A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He has published his stories in such venues as The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, Tin House, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and New Stories from the South. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. In 2007, he was named one of Granta‘s Best Young American Novelists. He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.

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 Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Iowa City, where she directs the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Michelle Huneven

Michelle Huneven was born and raised in Altadena, California. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, spent many years as a restaurant critic, then published five novels Round Rock (Knopf 1997), Jamesland (Knopf 2003), Blame, (Sarah Crichton Books, FSG, 2009), Off Course, (Sarah Crichton Books, FSG, 2014), and Search, (Penguin Press, 2022).

She has received a Whiting Award, an O Henry Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a James Beard Award. She teaches literature and creative writing at UCLA and lives in Altadena, California, with her husband, Jim Potter, a rescue dog, a talkative African Gray parrot, and nine chickens.

ZZ Packer

ZZ Packer currently teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College. Her collection of short stories, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, was a New York Times Notable Book, winner of a Commonwealth Club Fiction Award, and an Alex Award and PEN/Faulkner Award finalist.

ZZ is at work on a novel which chronicles America’s violent history following the Civil War through the eyes of the Buffalo Soldiers—African American infantry and cavalry units who fought during the “Indian campaigns.” Raised in Louisville, Kentucky, ZZ is also at work on a forthcoming nonfiction book about Breonna Taylor.

ZZ is the recipient of a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Whiting Writers Award. She has published fiction in The Best American Short Stories, Harper’s, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, and the New Yorker, which included her in its 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. Her nonfiction has appeared in the American Prospect, the Guardian, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, and the Washington Post Magazine. 

ZZ has taught writing at many institutions including Harvard; Princeton; MIT; the Michener Center at the University of Texas; Vassar College; and Stanford. She received her education at Yale (BA), Johns Hopkins (MA), the University of Iowa (MFA), and Stanford as a Stegner Fellow.

Forrest Gander

Born in the Mojave Desert in Barstow, California, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia and spent significant years with the poet CD Wright, in San Francisco; Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico; Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and Providence, Rhode Island. With CD Wright, he has a son, the artist Brecht Wright Gander. Forrest holds degrees in both geology and English literature. He lives now in northern California with the artist Ashwini Bhat.

Gander’s book Be With was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Concerned with the way we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign, his book Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gander has collaborated frequently with other artists including photographers Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, Raymond Meeks, and Lucas Foglia, glass artist Michael Rogers, ceramic artists Rick Hirsch and Ashwini Bhat, artists Ann Hamilton, Tjibbe Hooghiemstra, dancers Eiko & Koma, and musicians Vic Chesnutt and Brady Earnhart, among others.

The author of numerous other books of poetry, including Redstart: An Ecological Poetics and Science & Steepleflower, Gander also writes novels: As a Friend; The Trace; essays: A Faithful Existence, and translates. His most recent translations are Alice Iris Red Horse: Poems of Gozo Yoshimasu, Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems and Fungus Skull Eye Wing: Selected Poems of Alfonso D’Aquino. His most recent anthologies are Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin American (selected by Raúl Zurita) and Panic Cure: Poems from Spain for the 21st Century.