Amy Danzer
Director, Summer Writers' Conference
Staff
Contact: summerwriters@northwestern.edu
Betsy Finesilver Haberl
Assistant Director, Summer Writers' Conference
2023 Conference Faculty
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.
Gina Frangello
Gina Frangello’s fifth book, the memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint), has been selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and BookPage, and has been included on numerous “Best of 2021” lists including at Lithub, BookPage, and The Chicago Review of Books. Her sixth book, on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, is forthcoming from IG Publishing’s “Bookmarked” series. Gina is also the author of four books of fiction, including A Life in Men and Every Kind of Wanting, which was included on several “Best of 2016” lists, including at Chicago Magazine’s and The Chicago Review of Books. Now a lead editor at Row House Publishing, she also brings more than two decades of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review, and the Creative Nonfiction Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her column, “Not the Norm,” runs on the Psychology Today blog, and she runs Circe Consulting, a full-service company for writers, with the writer Emily Rapp Black. Gina can be found at www.ginafrangello.org.
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.
Miles Harvey
Miles Harvey is the author of The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch, selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice pick in 2020 and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. His other books include the national bestseller The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime. He teaches at DePaul University in Chicago, where he is director of the DePaul Publishing Institute and co-founder of Big Shoulders Books, a publishing entity devoted to social justice.
Juan Martinez
Juan Martinez is the author of the collection Best Worst American (2017) and the novel Extended Stay (2023). His work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Ecotone, NIGHTMARE, The Morning Transport, Glimmer Train, Huizache, McSweeney's, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, Small Odysseys, National Public Radio's Selected Shorts, Norton's Sudden Fiction Latino and Flash Fiction America, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor at Northwestern University and lives near Chicago.
@fulmerford
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.
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.
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 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.
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.