ZZ Packer was born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta and Louisville, Kentucky. She graduated from Yale, and afterward received degrees from Johns Hopkins and The Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, and a Lillian Golay Knafel fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Story, Ploughshares, GRANTA, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories 2000, Best American Short Stories 2003 and 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories.
Her non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The Believer, The American Prospect, The Oxford American, The Guardian, The New York Times Book Review, Newsweek Digital Online andThe New Yorker Online. She has appeared on the BBC World and on MSNBC as a Huffington Post contributor.
She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the American Academy of Berlin Prize (postponed). In 2007 GRANTA Magazine named her one of America’s Best Young Novelists. Her collection of stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere won the Commonwealth First Fiction Award, an ALEX Award and was a National Book Award 5 under 35 winner. It became a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2004, and was selected for the Today Show Book Club by John Updike.
ZZ Packer is editor of New Short Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008. She is at work on a novel about the Reconstruction and Buffalo Soldiers entitled The Thousands, an excerpt of which appeared in The New Yorker’s decennial “20 Under 40 Fiction Issue;” the previous issue having honored writers such as Junot Diaz, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri and Michael Chabon.
She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, Tulane University, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins. She’s most recently taught writing at MIT and Williams College, where she was also a writer-in-residence, as well as Harvard University and Vanderbilt, where she currently teaches in the MFA program.
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Anitha Devi Pillai (Dr) is an applied linguist, author, and poet. She is an academic at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. At NIE, she teaches courses on literacy practices, writing pedagogy and creative writing. She concurrently holds the position of a research fellow with Indian Heritage Centre, National Heritage Board, Singapore, and serves on the boards of the Indian Community Oral History Committee as well as the Publications Consultative Panel of Ministry of Communications and Information.
Her primary area of research focuses on the Singapore Malayalee community. In 2013, she won a National Heritage Board grant to study the literacy practices and ethnic heritage of the Singapore Malayalee community and subsequently published From Kerala to Singapore: Voices from the Singapore Malayalee Community in 2017.
Some of her other books include From Estate to Embassy: Memories of an Ambassador (2019), and Sembawang, which she translated from Tamil to English in 2020. Her translated novel was shortlisted for both the NUS History Prize and Best Literary Work in 2021. Other publications are A View of Stars (in 2020), A Tapestry of Colors 1 & 2 (in 2021), and The Story of Onam (in 2021).
She’s an avid lover of poetry and many of her poems such as A Kiss on your Forehead, Mother Tongue and Home is a Three-syllable Word are taught in schools and at the university in Singapore, Australia, Philippines, and India. Her creative works focus on heritage, identity, and culture.
: Tina Pisco: Writer with an established track record in short stories, novels, poetry, non-fiction, and performance poetry.
Frank O’Connor Fellowship 2021-2022
Tyrone Guthrie Residency 2021
First Writer-in Residence for Cork City Libraries 2020-2021
Arts Council Personal Development Grant 2020
Artist in Residence Clonakilty Community Arts Centre, Clonakilty, Cork (2015 - 2017)
Writer-in Residence at Casa Ana, Ferriola, Andaulsia, Spain (2015)
Writer-in Residence at Tigh Fili, Civic Trust House, Cork (2009-2011)
Over the four months of the Frank O’Connor Fellowship, I ran workshops on the craft of writing short stories, launched Conal Creedon’s “Pancho and Lefty Ride Again” during the Cork Short Story Festival, and delivered public lectures on Frank O’Connor’s work in Cork City Central library. I continued to write and completed five stories in my second collection, The Dithering. Tales from the peri-Apocalypse.
During my seven month residency with Cork City Libraries, I ran writing creative non-fiction workshops, wrote a monthly blog, hosted events, and facilitated a multi-lingual collaborative writing project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNeSq8b-XbM&t=33s&ab_channel=corkcitylibraries . I also wrote eight short stories, for my second collection, The Dithering. Tales from the peri-Apocalypse.
My work has been published in a number of journals, magazines and anthologies: The Fish Garden, Woman’s Way, IT magazine, IMAGE, Colony Literary Review, Spolia Magazine 2015, Fifty Over Fifty Anthology 2016, Twisted Tales Anthology 2015, The Irish Times 2017, The Holly Bough 2018, Autonomy Anthology 2018, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Awards Annual 2019, Cork Words2 Anthology 2021, The Fourth River 2023 (Chatnam University MFA programme),Channel magazine Issue9 2023, the London Independent Short Story Prize anthology 2023 (finalist) and Doire Press Cork Stories Anthology 2024.
Cathal Póirtéir is a writer and broadcaster who works in Irish and English. For over thirty years he worked as a producer and presenter on RTÉ radio, regularly making programmes that focused on Irish-language literature, folklore and history. He also facilitated many Irish-language writers in commissioning short stories, poetry and plays for the radio, and wasinvolved in many programmes which dealt with literature in Irish. He edited several books in Irish and English including an anthology of short stories in Irish. Cathal holds an MA in Irish Folklore from UCD and has lectured widely at home and abroad. His collection, Tonnchrit Inntine, was nominated for an Irish Times Literary Award and his stageplay, Púcaí Dallóg, won an Oireachtas literary award. He has written original radio drama and adapted two novels and a series of Irish folktales for radio. He is Irish-language consultant to Books Ireland, Eagarthóir Gaeilge at writing.ie and an occasional contributor to Treibh in The Irish Times.
Marina PORCELLI (fiction writer, essayist; Argentina) is the author of the novella Cuaderno de invierno [ A Winter Notebook] (2021), a collection of essays on gender Nausica. Viaje al otro lado de la otredad [Nausicaa. Journey to the Other Side of Otherness] (2021), the story collections La cacería [The Hunt] (2016) and De la noche rota [Of the Broken Night] (2009/2021), and others. Her work has garnered her the 2014 Edmundo Valadés Ibero-American Award and the 2021 Eduardo Mallea National Essay Award; she has attended residences in Mexico, Canada, and China. A frequent contributor to Latin American newspapers, she writes the column “Nocaut Lírico” [The Lyrical Knockout] about gender and boxing for Playboy Mexico. Her participation was made possible by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. She participated in the International Writing Program in 2023.
Julia lives in Melbourne, Australia, on unceded Wurundjeri land. Her novel, The Earth Does Not Get Fat (2018) was longlisted for the Indie Book Awards (debut fiction). Her short story collection, Bloodrust and Other Stories, was published in 2022. Julia’s short stories and prose poems have been recognised and published: Lightship Anthology (UK), Glimmer Train (US), New Writing (UK), TEXT (AU), Séan Ó Faoláin Competition (IE). Julia is Associate Professor and Discipline Leader (Creative Writing, Literature, and Publishing) at Swinburne University, Melbourne. She is President|Chair of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the peak academic body representing the discipline of Creative Writing in Australasia. Julia is a practice-led researcher, an enthusiastic supporter of transdisciplinary, open and collaborative research practices, with a particular interest in neuro|psychoanalytic approaches to writing and creativity.
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