Staff
Amy Danzer, Director
Betsy Haberl, Assistant Director
To contact: summerwriters@northwestern.edu
Betsy Finesilver Haberl
2021 Conference Faculty
Scott Blackwood
Scott Blackwood’s previous novel See How Small won the 2016 PEN USA Award for fiction, an NPR “Great Reads” best book of 2015, a New York Times “Editor's Choice” pick, an Amazon “Spotlight” best book for January of 2015, a People magazine best books of the spring 2015, and was one of thirty books chosen as Texas Books of the Decade (2010-2019) by the Texas Observer. His previous novel We Agreed to Meet Just Here earned a 2011 Whiting Award for Fiction, the AWP Prize for the Novel, and the 2010 Texas Institute of Letters Jones Prize for Best Texas Fiction. His short fiction collection In the Shadow of Our House was a San Antonio Express News and Forward Magazine best collections of 2001. Blackwood’s novel excerpts and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in the New England Review, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, the Gettysburg Review, The New York Times and Janet Burroway’s Imaginative Writing. His creative nonfiction for Chicago magazine, “Here We Are,” was a 2016 National Magazine Award Finalist for Feature Writing and his two-volume set, The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records 1917-1932, was nominated for a 2015 Grammy Award for bringing to life the origins of blues and jazz and as part of the story of the Great Migration. He’s teaching Creative Nonfiction for Northwestern University this summer.
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.
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.
Juan Martinez
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 entitled Broken English for the Northwestern University MA in Writing and MFA in Prose and Poetry programs this fall.
Natalie Moore
Natalie Moore is WBEZ's South Side Reporter where she covers segregation and inequality.
Her enterprise reporting has tackled race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. Natalie’s work has been broadcast on the BBC, Marketplace and NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. Natalie is the author of The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, winner of the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and a Buzzfeed best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation.
Natalie writes a monthly column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Her work has been published in Essence, Ebony, the Chicago Reporter, Bitch, In These Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian. She is the 2017 recipient of Chicago Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award. In 2010, she received the Studs Terkel Community Media Award for reporting on Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods. In 2009, she was a fellow at Columbia College’s Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, which allowed her to take a reporting trip to Libya. Natalie has won several journalism awards, including a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. Other honors are from the Radio Television Digital News Association (Edward R. Murrow), Public Radio News Directors Incorporated, National Association of Black Journalists, Illinois Associated Press and Chicago Headline Club. The Chicago Reader named her best journalist in 2017.
Prior to joining WBEZ staff in 2007, Natalie was a city hall reporter for The Detroit News. She has also been an education reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and a reporter for the Associated Press in Jerusalem.
Natalie has an M.S.J. in Newspaper Management from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Journalism from Howard University. She has taught at Columbia College and Medill. Natalie and her husband Rodney live in Hyde Park with their four daughters. She will teach a nonfiction workshop for the Northwestern University MA in Writing and MFA in Prose and Poetry programs this fall.
Lori Rader-Day
Lori Rader-Day is co-chair of the crime fiction readers’ conference Murder and Mayhem in Chicago and a former national president of Sisters in Crime, a 4,000-member writers’ and readers’ association. Rader-Day has previously taught at Ball State University, Roosevelt University, Yale University, Midwest Writers Workshop, and StoryStudio Chicago, among others. She received an MA in creative nonfiction from Ball State University and an MFA in creative writing from Roosevelt University. She will teach an online popular fiction workshop for the Northwestern University MA in Writing and MFA in Prose and Poetry programs this winter.
Donna Seaman
Donna Seaman is the Editor for Adult Books at Booklist; a member of the Content Leadership Team and National Advisory Council for the American Writers Museum, and a recipient of the Louis Shores Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing, the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. Seaman has written for the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications, and contributed biocritical essays to the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature and American Writers. Seaman has been a writer-in-residence for Columbia College Chicago and has taught at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. She created the anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness; her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. She will teach a nonfiction workshop for the Northwestern University MA in Writing and MFA in Prose and Poetry programs in spring
Christine Sneed
Christine Sneed is the faculty director of the MFA program in Northwestern's School of Professional Studies and also teaches fiction-writing and a course on the publishing industry. She is the author of two novels and two story collections—the most recent is The Virginity of Famous Men. Her short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, New England Review and a number of other publications. She is currently editing a short fiction anthology, Love in the Time of #TimesUp, due out in 2022. She’s received AWP's Grace Paley Prize, Chicago Writers' Association Book of the Year Award, Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, Ploughshares Zacharis Prize, among other honors, and has been a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize.
Michael Zapata
Michael Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction and the City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program Award. He is on the core faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.