Writing Desire

Steve Almond is the author of 12 books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His recent books include the novel All the Secrets of the World, which has been optioned for television by 20th Century Fox, and William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life. For four years, Steve hosted the New York Times “Dear Sugars” podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed. He is the recipient of a 2022 NEA grant in fiction, and his short stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series.

Camille Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden; Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award; and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. Her work has appeared in over 40 anthologies plus dozens of print and online venues, and she has received an American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and hosts Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise.

Megha Majumdar is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was named one of the best books of the year by media including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME. A 2022 Whiting Award winner, she holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins and she is the former editor-in-chief of Catapult Books.

Sarah Manguso is the author of 10 books, most recently the novel Liars. Her novel Very Cold People was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Wingate Literary Prize, & the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her nonfiction books include 300 Arguments; Ongoingness; The Guardians; & The Two Kinds of Decay. She has also written a story collection, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, and poetry collections Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise, poems from which have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of Best American Poetry. Her essays have appeared in Frieze, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, New York Review of Books, & New York Times Magazine.

Anthony Doerr is the author of The Shell Collector, Memory Wall, Four Seasons in Rome, and novels About Grace; All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; and Cloud Cuckoo Land, finalist for the National Book Award and Novel of the Year in the British Book Awards. His work has been translated into over 40 languages, and won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the NYPL’s Young Lions Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, an Alex Award from the ALA, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, 5 O. Henry Prizes, 4 Pushcart Prizes, 5 Ohioana Book Awards, 3 Pacific Northwest Book Awards, the 2010 Story Prize, & the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award.