First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Jim Newton is a journalist, teacher, and author of Justice for All, Eisenhower, Worthy Fights, and Man of Tomorrow. He was at the Los Angeles Times for twenty-five years as a repor...

Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Colum...

Allegra Goodman is the author of Isola, Sam, Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist). Her fiction has appeared in T...

Rachel Khong’s first novel Goodbye, Vitamin, won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction. Her second nov...

Kate Schatz is a feminist author, educator, and public speaker. She's the New York Times-bestselling author of the "Rad Women" book series; the novel Where the Girls Were; the 33 ⅓...

Camille T. Dungy is the author of America, A Love Story. She has also written the memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Stra...

Naeem Murr, a dual US and UK citizen, is the author of four novels: The Boy, a New York Times Notable Book; The Genius of the Sea; and The Perfect Man, which was awarded The Common...

Ada Limón is the author of seven books of poetry, including Startlement: New & Selected Poems; The Hurting Kind, which was a finalist for the Griffin Prize; The Carrying, which won...

Andrea Mara is a number one international bestselling Irish author. Several of her books have been shortlisted for Irish Crime Novel of the Year awards.  Someone in the Attic was h...

Philip Schultz is the author of nine poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Failure. Some of his other works include Like Wings, winner of the American Academy an...

Tayari Jones is the author of four novels including An American Marriage, which was an Oprah’s Book Club Selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list as well a...

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the award-winning short story collection Corpus Christi, the novels We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This and the editor of Naming the W...