Bonnie Jo Campbell

Lori Erickson

From a childhood on an Iowa farm, Lori Erickson (lorierickson.net) grew up to become one of America’s leading travel writers specializing in spiritual journeys. She is the author of Every Step Is Home, The Soul of the Family Tree, Near the Exit, and Holy Rover, books that explore the intersection of travel and spirituality. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic Traveler, Travel + Leisure, and Better Homes & Gardens, among other publications. Lori lives in Iowa City with her husband, Bob Sessions, her longtime traveling companion and photographer.

Melissa Febos

Melissa Febos is the author of five books, including the national bestselling essay collection Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and the bestselling craft book Body Work. Her newest memoir, The Dry Season, was published in 2025.

A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, and other organizations, Febos’s essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Vogue, and numerous other publications.

Febos is the Roy J. Carver Professor in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, where she teaches creative nonfiction. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, poet Donika Kelly.

Patricia Foster

Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls, Just Beneath My Skin, Girl from Soldier Creek, and Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter. She has edited four anthologies and received a PEN Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Hall-Waters Award for Distinguished Southern Writing, a Clarence Cason Award, and an Alabama Truman Capote Prize for fiction and nonfiction. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she was a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for more than twenty-five years and has taught in France, Australia, Italy, and Spain. She currently lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

James Geary

James Geary is author of the New York Times bestseller The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, the second edition of which is published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also the author of Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World, Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, and The Body Electric: An Anatomy of The New Bionic Senses. He is an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has taught at the VII Foundation, Bennington College, Boston University, Brandeis University, the Faber Academy, Tufts University and the Harvard Extension School. He is a 2027 Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar at Ashoka University in India and a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He is the former deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, where he edited Nieman Reports, and the former editor of the European edition of Time magazine.

Megan Greenwell

Megan Greenwell is a narrative journalist who writes features and books about how systems affect people. She is a contributing writer at Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of the bestselling book Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. Megan has written or edited for publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, Deadspin, and WIRED. She is also the deputy director of the Princeton Summer Journalism Program, a residential workshop and college-access initiative for high school journalists from low-income backgrounds.

Tiffany Hanssen

Tiffany Hanssen is an on-air host at public radio station WNYC in New York City. During her decades-long career in broadcasting, she has produced award-winning national programs and worked at stations from Las Vegas to Washington D.C. She is also a screenwriter and mom to two boys. And although she was born in Iowa and spent many years in Minnesota, she currently lives in Manhattan.

Darby Harn

Darby Harn is the author of character-driven sci-fi and fantasy, including Dead Malls, Stargun Messenger, and Ever The Hero, which Publisher’s Weekly called an “entertaining debut that uses superpowers as a metaphor to delve into class politics in an alternate America.” His short fiction appears in Strange Horizons, Interzone, and other venues. A graduate of the University of Iowa, he is the host of the One Hour Short Story Workshop, which he’s conducted at several major conventions, including Galaxy Con, Twin Cities Con, and more.

Scott Heim

Mark Leidner

Mark Leidner’s previous poetry collections are Returning the Sword to the Stone (Fonograf Editions, 2021), Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me (Factory Hollow Press, 2011), and The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover (Sator/Two Dollar Radio, 2011). He also wrote the story collection Under the Sea (Tyrant Books, 2018), called “virtuosic” by the New York Times. One of the stories from that collection, “21 Extremely Bad Breakups,” won the 2015 Newfound Prose Prize and in 2018 was adapted for the stage by Amy Rummenie of the Walking Shadow Theatre Company in Minneapolis. Mark also wrote and produced the 2019 feature-length sci-fi thriller Empathy, Inc., which earned rave reviews in Variety, The AV Club, and The Verge and is available on streaming platforms. Mark is a graduate of the University of Georgia, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He grew up in Tifton, GA and now lives in northern California. His website is markleidner.com.

Lyz Lenz

Lyz is a New York Times bestselling author, whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, and others. Her book God Land was published in 2019, through Indiana University Press. Her second book Belabored, was published in 2020 by Bold Type Books. Lyz’s essay “All the Angry Women” was also included in the anthology Not that Bad edited by Roxane Gay. Her third book, This American Ex-Wife, published in 2024, was an instant New York Times best seller. She is also the host of the This American Ex-Wife podcast.

Lyz received her MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She lives in Iowa with her two kids and two dogs. She writes a regular newsletter, Men Yell At Me, where she explores the intersection of politics and our bodies in red-state America.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is the award-winning author of five novels, two short story collections, two books of nonfiction, and one memoir. Her latest memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Her acclaimed novel The Book of Goose received the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Born in China, Li came to the University of Iowa to study immunology before discovering her passion for writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Whiting Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. Li is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program. Her next novel, Music Against the Night, will be published in October 2026.

Michael McCarty

Michael McCarty has been a professional writer since 1983 and is the author of more than 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, as well as hundreds of articles, short stories and poems. A five-time Bram Stoker Award finalist, he is also the recipient of the David R. Collins Literary Achievement Award from the Midwest Writing Center.

McCarty has written extensively in horror, science fiction and the supernatural, with books including Dark Cities: Dark Tales, A Little Help from My Fiends, I Kissed a Ghoul, Liquid Diet and the Bloodless trilogy, co-written with Jody LaGreca. His nonfiction includes Modern Mythmakers, a collection of interviews with writers and filmmakers including Ray Bradbury, Dean Koontz, John Saul, Elvira and members of the Night of the Living Dead cast and crew. His writing and interviews have appeared in Fangoria, Cemetery Dance, Starlog and Filmfax, and he was a staff writer for Science Fiction Weekly, the official website of the Sci-Fi Channel.

Pilar Quintana

Pilar Quintana is the author of five novels and a book of short stories. La perra (The Bitch, New York, World Editions, 2020), which has been translated into more than twenty languages, was on the long list for the Dublin Literary Award, was a finalist for the Premio Nacional de Novela and the National Book Award, and won the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana, an English PEN Translates Award, and the LiBeraturpreis. With her book Los abismos (Abyss, New York, World Editions, 2023), translated into multiple languages, she won the Alfaguara Novel Prize in 2021 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is the editor of the Biblioteca de Escritoras Colombianas (The Library of Colombian Female Writers), a publishing project of the Ministry of Culture to rescue and promote women’s literature.

Ron Rindo

Ron Rindo is the author of three collections of short stories and a novel, and his fiction and essays have appeared in a wide variety of journals and magazines. His new novel, Life, and Death, and Giants, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2025. Following three years teaching at Birmingham-Southern College, Rindo returned to Wisconsin as a professor of American Literature, Nature Writing, and Fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh.

Matt Singer

Matt Singer is the editor and film critic of ScreenCrush.com and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. He is also the author of Marvel’s Spider-Man: From Amazing to Spectacular and Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

Melissa Tedone

Melissa Tedone is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Conservation at the University of Delaware and Associate Director of the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. A specialist in the conservation of library and archival materials, she previously served as Library & Archives Conservator at Iowa State University.

Tedone is the lead conservator of the Poison Book Project, an international research initiative investigating the use of toxic pigments in nineteenth-century bookbindings. Her work explores the history of books, bookmaking, and preservation, with a focus on making library collections safer and more accessible.

She holds a PhD in Slavic literary history from Yale University and a master’s degree in library and archives conservation from the University of Texas at Austin.

Daniel Umemezie

Daniel Umemezie is a Nigerian-American poet whose work explores cultural inheritance and displacement, using bodily transformation as both metaphor and form. His poetry develops a realm between interior experience and external reality. His work has appeared in the North American Review, Scholastic, Magpie Journal and many more. He is forthcoming in Polyphony Lit, and has been recognized as the Iowa Student Poetry Ambassador, the Kenyon Young Writers Program, the Iowa Poetry Association, Humanities Iowa, and others. As the 10th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, Daniel positions cultural specificity as formal resistance, creating what he describes as “architecture of consciousness.”

Ben Wolf

Award-winning author Ben Wolf has made a career of writing action-packed LitRPG, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy novels, including his exciting Tech Ghost trilogy, his acclaimed Blood Mercenaries series of sword & sorcery books, his hilarious Santa Saves Christmas series, and his legendary LitRPG saga, Rickshaw Riot, co-written with Luke Messa.

He is also the Lead Writer for the Dungeon Crawler Carl Roleplaying Game and has written for the Dungeon Crawler Carl Audio Immersion Tunnel, published by Soundbooth Theater.

When not writing, he plays video games and chokes his friends in Brazilian jiu jitsu. You can follow him on Facebook in the The Ben Wolfpack, on TikTok at @1benwolf, or check out his books at www.benwolf.com.