2018 Faculty | Napa Valley Writer's Conference

2018 Facultynvwcadmin2019-12-31T18:47:44-08:00

Faculty for the 38th conference, July 29 – August 3, 2018:

Poetry


	Camille Dungy is the author the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History and four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology, and served as assistant editor on Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Her honors include an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, two NAACP Image Award Nominations, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both prose and poetry. She has held posts at the college and university level since 1998 and is currently a Full Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.

	Brenda Hillman is the author of 10 collections of poetry, including Extra Hidden Life, among the Days. Previous titles include 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. She has also co-translated At Your Feet by Ana Cristina Cesar, forthcoming in 2018. 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 the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at St. Mary’s College.

	Jane Mead is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently World of Made and Unmade, which was nominated for a National Book Award and a finalist for the Griffin Prize for excellence in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her poems appear regularly in journals and anthologies, and she’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. For many years Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she manages her family’s ranch in northern California. She has taught as a visiting writer at Washington University, Colby College and most recently, The University of Iowa.

	Carl Phillips is the author of 14 books of poetry, most recently Wild Is the Wind and Reconnaissance, winner of the PEN USA Award and the Lambda Literary Award. He is also the author of two books of prose: The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry. His honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Fiction

	Lan Samantha Chang is the author of three books: the critically acclaimed novella All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, the novel Inheritance, and Hunger: A Novella and Stories. Chang has been honored as the California Book Award Silver Medalist, as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and with a Bay Area Book Award and literary awards from the Greensboro Review and the Transatlantic Review. Her work has also been nominated for the PEN Center USA West Award and the PEN/Hemingway Literature Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Chang directs the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

	Lauren Groff is the author of three novels, including Fates and Furies, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Her short fiction has been published in journals including the New Yorker, Atlantic, and American Short Fiction, and in two collections of short stories, the latest of which, Florida, was published by Riverhead in June of 2018. She was named one of Granta‘s Best of Young American Novelists in 2017. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

	Mat Johnson is the author of the novels Loving Day, Pym, Drop, and Hunting in Harlem, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the comic books Incognegro and Dark Rain. He is a recipient of the United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. He is a professor at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program..

	Howard Norman‘s new novel, In The Hours Still Left to Us, will be published early in 2019, followed by a memoir, Forms of Prayer in Vermont. He has received the Lannan Award in Literature, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Whiting Writers Award, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New England Book Award, and the Harold Morton Landon Prize in Translation from the Academy of American Poets. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland, and at the New York State Writers Institute. His novels include The Bird Artist, What Is Left the Daughter, Next Life Might Be Kinder, and My Darling Detective. His most recent memoir is I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place. He divides his time between Washington D.C. and Vermont.