First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

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 as his year-end roundup. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction Aspen Words Literary Prize and an NAACP Image Award. It has been published in two dozen countries.  Her other works include Leaving Atlanta, Silver Sparrow, and The Untelling. Her new novel is Kin. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His short stories have been published in anthologized in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best; The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. His work has been widely translated and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review. He is the Director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. His new short story collection is Encounters with Unexpected Animals.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His plays include of Boss Grady’s Boys, The Steward of Christendom, Our Lady of Sligo, The Pride Parnell Street, and Dallas Sweetman. His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, Annie Dunne, A Long Long Way, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Secret Scripture, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, On Canaan’s Side, The Temporary Gentleman, Days Without End, A Thousand Moons, and Old God’s Time. He has also published three collections of poetry. He is the recipient of the Irish-America Fund Literary Award, The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize, the London Critics Circle Award, The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, and Costa Awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year. He lives in Wicklow with his family.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

R.L. Maizes is the author of A Complete Fiction. Her debut novel, Other People’s Pets, won the 2021 Colorado Book Award in Fiction and was a Library Journal Best Debut of Summer/Fall 2020. She also is the author of the short story collection, We Love Anderson Cooper. Her short stories have aired on National Public Radio and can be found in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and in The Best Small Fictions 2020. Maizes’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, O Magazine, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and have aired on NPR.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Guterson is the author of thirteen books, including the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Snow Falling on Cedars, which was made into a major motion picture, translated into twenty–five languages, and has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. He lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington. His new novel is Evelyn in Transit.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices