Napa Valley Writers’ Conference 2026 Faculty
Jane Hirshfield, among American poetry’s foremost spokespersons for the biosphere, is the author of ten much-honored books of poetry, most recently The Asking: New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023); two now-classic essay collections; and four books collecting world poets from the deep past. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Best American Poems anthology, and elsewhere. In 2017, she founded the interactive and travelling installation, Poets for Science. Among recent honors are the 2024 Zhongkun International Poet Award, China’s foremost independently-given honor for a world poet; Hirshfield was the first English-language poet and the first woman to receive it. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and spring 2026 Visiting Fellow of the Harvard Divinity School, she was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Danusha Laméris is a poet and essayist, raised in Northern California. Her first book, The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. She’s also the author of Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), winner of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, and Blade by Blade (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She teaches through Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA Program and leads the Litfield Writing Community online.
Dana Levin is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Now Do You Know Where You Are (2022), a New York Times Notable Book and NPR “Book We Love.” Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Her other books are Wedding Day, Sky Burial, and Banana Palace, a finalist for the Rilke Prize. Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as the Lannan, Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. With Adele Elise Williams, she co-edited Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master(2023) for the Unsung Masters Series. She currently serves as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction, and seven books of poetry, most recently West: A Translation, which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Utah Book Award in Poetry, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Reading the West Poetry Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the UNT Rilke Award, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she directs the American West Center.
Mira Rosenthal is an American poet and translator of Polish-language writers such as Tomasz Różycki, Małgorzata Lebda, and Krystyna Dąbrowska. Her translation of Różycki’s To the Letter (Archipelago Books) won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Polish Book Institute’s Found in Translation Award for the best translation of 2024, and the AATSEEL Award for Best Literary Translation into English. She is the author of Territorial (Pitt Poetry Series), a finalist for the INDIES Book of the Year award, and The Local World (Kent State), winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Northern California Book Award. She was a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College and a Fulbright Scholar at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Cal Poly.
Jamel Brinkley is the author of the short story collections A Lucky Man and Witness. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Story Prize, and has won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Maya Angelou Book Award. He has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize. Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, New York, he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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 25th anniversary edition of her first collection, Hunger: A Novella and Stories, was recently published by W.W. Norton & Company. Sam also is the author of All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, as well as 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.
Paul Harding is the author of three novels, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers, Enon, and This Other Eden, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and PEN America. He is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College.
Michelle Huneven is the author of six novels: Round Rock, Jamesland, Blame, Off Course, Search, and Bug Hollow. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books and finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a James Beard Award, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received her master’s in fine arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since her home was lost in the Altadena fires, she has been living in Echo Park.
Caroline Goodwin: Faculty Reading Series Community Seminar
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; Madrigals, and Matanuska. 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, California.
Judy Halebsky: Community Poetry Workshop
Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections, including Sky=Empty which won the New Issues Prize. With Ayako Takahashi, she translated Since Fukushima by Wago Ryoichi. Her honors include fellowships from MacDowell, Millay Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center as well as a Graves Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities. She is a contributing editor to the bilingual poetry journal Crossing Lines and often serves as a reviewer for the Creative Youth Awards. On fellowships from the Japanese Ministry of Culture (MEXT) she trained in Japanese literature at Hosei University and fine arts at the Kanazawa College of Art. At Dominican University of California, she directs the MFA in Creative Writing program and teaches courses in Japanese literature, poetry, and live storytelling.
