Rowland Writers Retreat

CONNIE BIEWALD is the author of Truth Like Oil and three other loosely connected novels: Roses Take Practice, Bread and Salt, and Digging to Indochina. She teaches in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Lagonav, Haiti, sharing her love of reading and writing with homeschoolers and hundreds of students and teachers in public and private schools. She is the grateful recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council artist grant, a PEN New England Discovery Award and numerous residencies and fellowships.

SAMANTHA SCHOECH is a staff writer at NYT Wirecutter. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in The Sun, Seventeen, The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, Travel & Leisure, the New York Times, and many other publications. Her collection of stories, My Mother’s Boyfriends, which Vendela Vida called “witty and utterly enchanting,” came out in January 2025. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing from UC Davis and she’s been awarded numerous residencies, a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, and the Erma Bombeck & Anna Lefler Humorist-in-Residence Award. She’s also a member of SF The Writers Grotto. She’s the founding director of Independent Bookstore Day. She lives with her bookseller husband and their twins in San Francisco. 

QUAN BARRY, born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s northshore, is the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Barry is the author of seven books of fiction and poetry, including the recent novel When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East, which follows a group of Buddhist monks as they search for a reincarnation in the vast Mongolian landscape. O: Oprah Magazine described her novel We Ride Upon Sticks as, “Spellbinding, wickedly fun,” while the New York Times called her previous work, She Weeps Each Time You’re Born, “deeply affecting.” In the 2021-2022 season, Barry served as Forward Theater’s first ever Writer-in-Residence. The world premiere of her play, The Mytilenean Debate, was staged in spring 2022.

BRANDY COLBERT is the award-winning author of several books for children and teens, including Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which was the winner of the 2022 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Nonfiction and a finalist for the American Library Association’s Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award; Stonewall Book Award winner Little & Lion; and The Only Black Girls in Town. Her books have been chosen as Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selections, and have been named to many best of lists, including the ALA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults and Notable Children’s Books. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, and her short stories and essays have appeared in several critically acclaimed anthologies for young people. She is on faculty at Hamline University’s MFA program in writing for children, and lives in Los Angeles.

SULEIKA JAOUAD is the author of the instant New York Times bestselling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms. She wrote the Emmy Award-winning New York Times column “Life, Interrupted,” and her reporting and essays have been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Vogue, and NPR, among others. A highly sought-after speaker, her mainstage TED Talk was one of the ten most popular of 2019 and has nearly five million views. She is also the creator of The Isolation Journals, a community creativity project founded during the Covid-19 pandemic to help others convert isolation into artistic solitude; over 100,000 people from around the world have joined.

COLLEEN MCKEEGAN is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Cut, Elle, Bustle, Fortune, and Marie Claire, where it was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Colleen’s debut novel The Wild One, which author Megan Abbott called “a riveting tale of secrets, shame and a harrowing reckoning,” was featured in People, Oprah Daily, Glamour, and The Skimm, among others. Her second novel, Rip Tide, will be published by Harper in 2024. A native of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of Georgetown University, Colleen now lives with her family in New York.

CLEYVIS NATERA was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New York City. Her debut novel, Neruda on the Park, was a May 2022 New York Times Editor’s Choice. Natera earned an undergraduate degree from Skidmore College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from New York University. She lives with her husband and two young children in Montclair, NJ.

LINDA SUE PARK is the author of many books for young readers, including the 2002 Newbery Medal winner A Single Shard and the New York Times bestseller A Long Walk To Water. Her most recent title is The One Thing You’d Save, a collection of linked poems. The daughter of Korean immigrants, Linda Sue is the founder and curator of the Allida Books imprint for HarperCollins, dedicated to works by marginalized creators that defy expectations. She serves on the advisory boards of We Need Diverse Books and the Rabbit hOle children’s literature museum project, and also created the website kiBooka.com, a listing of kids’ books by Korean Americans & Korean diaspora creators. Linda Sue knows very well that she will never be able to read every great book ever written, but she keeps trying anyway.

JOANNE RAMOS was born in the Philippines and moved to Wisconsin when she was six. She graduated with a B.A. from Princeton University. After working in investment banking and private-equity investing, she became a staff writer at The Economist. She currently serves on the board of The Moth and lives in New York City with her family. The Farm, her debut novel, was a national bestseller, a New York Times editor’s pick and was chosen by over 50 media outlets in America and abroad as a “must read” in 2019. The Farm was longlisted for the Center of Fiction’s 2019 First Novel Prize, nominated for a NAACP Image Award, and is currently being adapted for television.

NAFISSA THOMPSON SPIRES wrote Heads of the Colored People, which won the PEN Open Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Award, and the LA Times Art Siedenbaum Award for First Fiction. Heads was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Award, and other prizes. She won a 2019 Whiting Award. She earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt and an MFA from University of Illinois. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Ploughshares, 400 Souls, The 1619 Project, and elsewhere. She’s currently Richards Family Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Cornell University.

LINDY WEST is an opinion writer for the New York Times and the author of Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema, as well as the memoir Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman and the essay collection The Witches Are Coming. Her work has also appeared in This American Life, The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Vulture, Jezebel, and others. She is the co-founder of the reproductive rights destigmatization campaign #ShoutYourAbortion. Lindy was a writer and executive producer on Shrill, the Hulu comedy adapted from her memoir. She co-wrote the independent feature film Thin Skin. She lives in Seattle.

ROBIN FARMER, a freelance writer, is the author of the debut YA novel Angel Dressed in Black, which SparkPress will publish in June 2021. Her fiction projects, which include poetry and screenplays, focus on girls discovering their voices to advocate for social justice. She is a recipient of residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. A national award-winning journalist, her investigative projects for the Richmond Times-Dispatch led to a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan and a first-place award from the Education Writers Association.

JULIA GLASS is the author of the novels A House Among the Trees, And the Dark Sacred Night, The Widower’s Tale, The Whole World Over, and the National Book Award–winning Three Junes, as well as the Kindle Single Chairs in the Rafters. Her third book, I See You Everywhere, a collection of linked stories, won the 2009 SUNY John Gardner Fiction Award. She has also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a cofounder of Twenty Summers, a nonprofit arts-and-culture festival in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and a Senior Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College.

REYNA GRANDE is the author of the bestselling memoir, The Distance Between Us (2012), and the much-anticipated sequel, A Dream Called Home (2018). Her other works include the novels Across a Hundred Mountains (2006) and Dancing with Butterflies (2009). Her books have been adopted as the common read selection by schools, colleges and cities across the country. Reyna has received an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the International Latino Book Award. In 2012, she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, and in 2015 she was honored with a Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. Originally from Mexico, Reyna entered the U.S. as an undocumented child immigrant and came of age in California. She has written about immigration, family separation, language trauma, and the American Dream for publications such as The New York Times, CNN, The Dallas Morning News, Buzzfeed, among others. Visit her at reynagrande.com.

SHARON HARRIGAN is the author of the memoir Playing with Dynamite (Truman State University Press, 2017) and the novel Half (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). Her poetry collection, Body of Light, is forthcoming from Tender Buttons Press. She has published more than fifty stories, essays, and reviews in the New York Times (Modern Love), Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include: finalist, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for the Novel; International Book Award, first place in memoir, second place in new nonfiction; May Sarton Book Award finalist; Kinder award for best short story from Pleiades; Cecilia Joyce Johnson Award from Key West Literary Seminar; Sarah Pennypacker Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and Ted Berrigan Award from Naropa University. She teaches writing at WriterHouse, a literary center in Charlottesville, Virginia.

MEG MEDINA is a New York Times bestselling author and winner of the 2019 John D. Newbery Medal in Children’s Literature. She writes picture books, middle grade novels, and teen fiction. Her work features strong Latino characters, and it examines the places where culture, family and growing up intersect. Her titles include: Merci Suárez Changes Gears (Candlewick 2018), Burn Baby Burn (Candlewick Press,2016) Mango, Abuela and Me (Candlewick Press, 2015); Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass (Candlewick Press, 2013; and Tia Isa Wants a Car (Candlewick Press 2011.)

CYNTHIA SALAYSAY is a writer and registered nurse from Oakland, California. Her forthcoming YA novel, Private Lessons, is an Indies Introduce Pick about a teenage girl who falls in love with her piano teacher. It is set to be released by Candlewick Press in May 2020. Her favorite procrastination activity is gardening.

MARTHA SOUTHGATE is the author of four novels: The Taste of Salt, Third Girl From The Left, The Fall of Rome and Another Way to Dance. Her work has won numerous accolades and she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in many venues, among them The New York Times Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. Among her more recent work is ”Rise Up,” an essay in The American Scholar about the transformative effect of Hamilton: An American Musical, and reviews of both Ann Beattie and Ann Patchett’s latest novels for The New York Times Book Review. She is a second-year student in the MFA in Playwriting program at Brooklyn College.

TERESE SVOBODA has published 18 books of fiction, poetry, memoir, biography, and a book of translation from the Nuer. Winner of a Guggenheim, a Bobst Prize in fiction, an Iowa Prize for poetry, a NEH grant for translation, an O. Henry Award for the short story, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, 3 NYFA fellowships, a Pushcart Prize for the essay, a Bellagio residency for a libretto, and the Jerome Foundation Award in video, she also wrote the libretto for the opera WET that premiered at L.A.’s RedCat Theater. Great American Desert, a book of stories, appeared in March. Theatrix: Play Poems is forthcoming from Anhinga in 2021.

CHERYL LU-LIEN TAN is a New York-based journalist and author of the international bestsellers Sarong Party Girls and A Tiger In The Kitchen: A Memoir of Food & Family. New York Magazine named “Tiger” one of the “Top 25 Must-Read Food Memoirs of All Time.” She is also the editor of the fiction anthology Singapore Noir. A native of Singapore, she was a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, In Style magazine and the Baltimore Sun. Her stories have also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review and TLS among other places.

HELEN BENEDICT, a professor at Columbia University, is the author of seven novels, including Wolf Season (2017), which Elissa Schappell wrote should be “required reading” and received a starred review in the Library Journal; and Sand Queen (2011), named a “Best Contemporary War Novel” by Publishers Weekly and reviewed by The Boston Globe as “The Things They Carried for women.’” Her nonfiction book, The Lonely Soldier (2009) inspired a class action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of those sexually assaulted in the military, and the 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary, The Invisible War. She is a widely published essayist and reporter

GEORGIA CLARK is an author, performer and screenwriter. She wrote the critically acclaimed novels The Regulars, and The Bucket List, (Simon & Schuster), as well as two young adult novels and a forthcoming picture book series. Georgia is the host/founder of the storytelling night, Generation Women, which invites six generations of women to tell a story on a theme. She is currently developing The Regulars as a TV show for E!. A native Australian, she lives in Brooklyn with her fiancée and a fridge full of cheese.

HILLARY JORDAN is the author of the novels Mudbound and When She Woke, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. The two novels have been translated into fifteen languages. Mudbound won multiple awards, including the Bellwether Prize for socially conscious fiction. It was adapted into an acclaimed Netflix film that premiered at Sundance in January 2017 and earned four Academy Award Nominations. Hillary has a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, along with half the writers in America.

MARIE MYUNG-OK LEE’S novel, The Evening Hero, is forthcoming with Simon & Schuster. Her work has appeared in or  is forthcoming in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine and the New York Times Book Review. She was a Fulbright Fellow, has been a judge for the National Book Awards, and is a current New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in fiction. Lee is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and teaches fiction at Columbia, where she is  Writer in Residence at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity (CSER).

BETH LISICK is the author of five books, including the New York Times bestseller Everybody Into the Pool and Yokohama Threeway and Other Small Shames (City Lights). Her work has been published in various anthologies, including Best American Poetry and Santa Cruz Noir. She co-founded Porchlight, San Francisco’s longest-running storytelling series, traveled the country with the Sister Spit performance tours, and received a grant from the Creative Work Fund for a chapbook series with Creativity Explored, a studio for artists with developmental disabilities. Beth has appeared in films screened at Cannes, Sundance, and the San Francisco International Film Festival. Her first novel, Edie On The Green Screen, will be out on 7.13 Books in 2020.

ANTONYA NELSON is the author of nine books of fiction, including Nothing Right and the novels Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell. Nelson’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Grant, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and, recently, the United States Artists Simon Fellowship. She is married to the writer Robert Boswell and lives in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

DOLEN PERKINS-VALDEZ is the New York Times bestselling author of two critically acclaimed historical novels: Wench and Balm. Her first novel won the American Library Association’s Black Caucus Award for Debut Fiction. Recently, she has published essays in the Guardian and elsewhere. She is a 2019 nominee for the United States Artists Fellowship.

PATRICIA (PATTY) SMITH is the author of the novel The Year of Needy Girls (Kaylie Jones Books, 2017), a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her nonfiction has appeared most recently in the anthologies Older Queer Voices: The Intimacy of Survival and Nine Lives: A Life in Ten Minutes Anthology as well as Parhelion Literary Magazine, where it was nominated for Best of the Net. Her essay, “Border War,” which appeared in Broad Street Magazine, received a Special Mention by Pushcart. A teacher of American literature and Creative Writing at the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School in Petersburg, she lives in Chester with her partner.

MICHEL STONE’s novels Border Child (2017, Doubleday/Anchor) and The Iguana Tree (2012, Hub City Press,) have been compared to the writings of John Steinbeck and both books have been optioned for film. She is a recipient of the South Carolina Fiction Award and the 2018 recipient of the Patricia Winn Award for Southern Literature. Stone has published numerous stories and essays. Her novels have been favorably reviewed by The San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Texas Observer, Kirkus (starred review), and many others. She’s the immediate past board chair of the Hub City Writers Project, and she’s a Fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.