Agenda
4:00-5:00 p.m. Topics presentation and preplanned questions
5:00-5:30 p.m. Q&A
Details
Free registration via Zoom. Submit anonymous questions for the Q&A below. Contact info@readtheworkshop.com for details. Livestreaming available on Facebook and YouTube, recording posted by November 23 on The Workshop.
Moderator
Eshani Surya
Eshani Surya is a fiction writer based in Greenville, South Carolina. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in [PANK], Catapult, Paper Darts, Joyland, and Literary Hub, among others. Eshani is also a flash fiction reader at Split Lip Magazine. She holds an MFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Find Eshani on Twitter posting as @__eshani or at her website, eshani-surya.com.
Panelists
Hannah Ford
Hannah Ford grew up in the Midwest before moving south to Charleston and ultimately landing in Columbia. She earned her MFA from the University of South Carolina and teaches composition and rhetoric and creative writing there, as well as at Columbia International University. Her work has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Sawpalm, The 3288 Review, Jonah Magazine, Lipstickparty Mag, and others.
Find Hannah on Twitter posting as @fordcommahannah.
Jackie Hymes
In addition to being The Workshop’s digital content coordinator, Jackie (she/they) is a hard-of-hearing queer disabled poet and aspiring creative nonfiction writer. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of California, Riverside, where she received a scholarship to attend the Community of Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared in Winter Tangerine, NAILED Magazine, The Legendary, and Chapparal. When not engaged in the writing life, Jackie builds SEO campaigns for a tech startup and studies to be a sex educator.
Email Jackie: jhyme001@ucr.edu
Desiree Evans
Desiree Evans (she/her) recently earned her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she studied fiction and poetry. She is also an alum of the writing workshops hosted by VONA, Kimbilio [Fiction], Callaloo, and Hurston Wright. Her work appears in the Offing, Gulf Coast, Nimrod, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Foreshadow, amongst others.
Visit Desiree on the web at desiree-evans.com and posting on Twitter/Instagram as @literarydesiree.
Maddie Norris
Maddie Norris, the 2019 recipient of Ninth Letter‘s Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, earned her MFA at the University of Arizona and, before that, was the Thomas Wolfe Scholar at UNC Chapel Hill. Her work can be found in Territory, Essay Daily, and Opossum, among others. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about the death of her father, niche medical history, and the pitfalls of romantic love.
Find Maddie at maddienorris.com.
Shelley Senai
Shelley Senai is a recent graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and currently serves as the assistant fiction editor at Raleigh Review. Her work can be found in Citron Review and Reservoir. In 2018, she received an emerging artist award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation in Boston. She resides outside of Boston with her husband and two young children, and is currently finishing her first novel.
Find Shelley at her website, shelleysenai.com.
Annesha Mitha
Annesha Mitha is a Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her work is published or forthcoming from McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, American Short Fiction, The Kenyon Review, and The Margins, among others. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Kundiman. She is a volunteer counselor with Crisis Text Line, and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a hound named Flower.
Find Annesha at her website, anneshamitha.com.
Stephanie Lane Sutton
Former MFA Years blogger Stephanie Lane Sutton writes poetry, essays, and fiction. Her chapbook of stories, Shiny Insect Sex, was published by Bull City Press in 2019. Her writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, the Offing, and Black Warrior Review, among others, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and PEN America’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She has a creative writing MFA from the University of Miami.
Find Stephanie at her website, stephanielanesutton.com.
Sarah Thankam Mathews
Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up in India and Oman. She has been awarded fellowships by the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she earned her MFA, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She has work forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2020, edited by Curtis Sittenfeld. A novel is at work on her.
Find Sarah at her website, smathewss.com.
