Amy Danzer
Director, Summer Writers' Conference
Staff
Contact: summerwriters@northwestern.edu
Betsy Finesilver Haberl
Assistant Director, Summer Writers' Conference
2022 Conference Faculty
Julia Borcherts
Julia Borcherts is the publicity manager for Kaye Publicity, a Chicago-based literary PR firm. She earned her M.F.A in Creative Writing and her M.A. in the Teaching of Writing from Columbia College Chicago. Before joining Kaye Publicity, she was a daily columnist for two Chicago Tribune publications and a frequent contributor to Time Out Chicago, Windy City Times and many other media outlets. She also serves as an adjunct professor in the Department of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, in the English Department at DePaul University, and in the Masters in Written Communications program at National Louis University.
Paula Carter
Paula Carter is the author of the flash memoir No Relation. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She is an alum of Ragdale and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.
Sara Connell
Sara Connell is a bestselling author and the founder of Thought Leader Academy where she helps coaches, writers and entrepreneurs become bestselling authors and speakers. She has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, The View, FOX, Katie Couric and TEDx. Her writing has appeared in: The New York Times, Forbes, Tri-Quarterly, Good Housekeeping, and Parenting. Her first book Bringing In Finn was nominated for ELLE magazine Book of the Year.
Gioia Diliberto
Gioia Diliberto is the author of seven books – three historical novels and four biographies – and a play. Her writing, which focuses on women's lives, has been praised for combining rich storytelling and literary grace with deep research to bring alive worlds as varied as Jazz Age Paris and nineteenth century Chicago, 1970s New York and World War II France. Gioia’s work has been translated into several languages, and she has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, and Vanity Fair. She teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.
Rebecca Morgan Frank
Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of four collections of poems: Oh You Robot Saints!,Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country, and The Spokes of Venus, all from Carnegie Mellon University Press; and Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have appeared in such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland, The Southern Review, and The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series. She is co-founder and editor of the online magazine Memorious, and she serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. She will teach an online poetry workshop for the Northwestern University MA in Writing and MFA in Prose and Poetry programs this fall.
Haki Madhubuti
Haki R. Madhubuti, MFA, PhD is an award-winning poet, and one of the architects of the Black Arts Movement. He founded Third World Press in 1967 (the oldest continuously publishing independent Black book publisher in the world). His first four books of poetry from the Black Arts Movement, Think Black (1967), Black Pride, with an introduction by Dudley Randall (1968), Don't Cry, Scream! with an introduction by Gwendolyn Brooks (1969), and We Walk the Way of the New World (1970), all published by Broadside Press of Detroit, Michigan sold over 140,000 copies between 1967-1971, making him one of the best-selling poets in the world. Madhubuti has published over 36 books (some under his former name, Don L. Lee). His book, Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? The African American Family in Transition (1991) has more than one million copies in print. His poetry and essays have been published in over 100 anthologies and journals between 1997-2022. Madhubuti has taught at many colleges and universities, including Columbia College of Chicago, Cornell University (making him the first Black poet-in-residence at an Ivy League University), Howard University (first poet-in-residency), Chicago State University (first Black male faculty member to be named University Distinguished Professor), and DePaul University (the last Ida B. Wells-Barnett University Distinguished Professor). He has shared his poetry and essays on four continents and over thirty-eight states in the United States. His latest book, Taught By Women: Poems As Resistance Language, New And Selected (2020), pays homage to women who influenced him. He is currently completing, We Are a Hated People: Poems and Essays of Who We Are.
twpress3@aol.com
Rebecca Makkai
Rebecca Makkai's latest novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime -- four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University. She is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.
Maya Marshall
Maya Marshall is the author of All the Blood Involved in Love and Secondhand. Cofounder of underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision, Marshall is the 2021–2023 Poetry Fellow at Emory University. She has taught at Northwestern University and Loyola University Chicago and holds fellowships from MacDowell and Cave Canem among others. Marshall's writing is forthcoming or has been published in Boston Review, Crazyhorse, in Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is an editor at Haymarket Books.
Faisal Mohyuddin
Faisal Mohyuddin’s debut full-length poetry collection, The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear 2018), won the 2017 Sexton Prize for Poetry, was selected as a 2018 Summer Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society, and was named a “highly commended” book of 2018 by the Forward Arts Foundation. Also the author of the chapbook The Riddle of Longing (Backbone 2017), he is the recipient of the Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner and a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award. He serves as an educator adviser to Narrative 4, a global not-for-profit dedicated to fostering empathy through the exchange of stories, and teaches English at Highland Park High School in Illinois. He will teach an elective for the Northwestern University MA in Writing and MFA Prose and Poetry programs next spring.
Doug Seibold
Doug Seibold has been a publishing professional in Chicago since 1986. For more than 15 years he worked as a freelance writer and as an editor for organizations that published magazines, books, and educational content. In 2003, he founded Agate, which is now a diversified independent publishing company with five distinct imprints. In 2005, he created Agate Development, an educational content development service that produces content for large education publishers, for-profit education companies, corporations, and other organizations. In 2006, Agate acquired Surrey Books, a 25-year-old Chicago-based book publisher, which is now run as an imprint of Agate. In 2012, Agate established a partnership with the Chicago Tribune to publish books created from Tribune content. In 2012, 2016, 2018, and 2019, Publishers Weekly magazine recognized Agate in its annual feature on the fastest-growing small presses in America.
Christine Sneed
Christine Sneed is the faculty director of the MFA program in Northwestern's School of Professional Studies and teaches fiction-writing, a course on the publishing industry, and poetry for prose writers. She is the author of several books, most recently, The Virginity of Famous Men. In October, her novel Please Be Advised will be published, along with a short fiction anthology she edited, Love in the Time of Time's Up. Her short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, New England Review, The Southern Review, and many other publications. She has received AWP's Grace Paley Prize, Chicago Writers' Association Book of the Year Award, Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, Ploughshares Zacharis Award, among other honors, and has been a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize.
Megan Stielstra
Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: Everyone Remain Calm, Once I Was Cool, and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, winner of the 2017 Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Review of Books. Her work appears in Best American Essays, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Tin House, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and theatres, festivals, and classrooms across the country. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and weird, wonderful Zoom spaces in your living room.