LONGLEAF WRITERS CONFERENCE

MAURICE CARLOS RUFFIN is the author of The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, published by One World Random House in August 2021. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. It was longlisted for the 2021 DUBLIN Literary Award the Center for Fiction Prize and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. The novel was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Award for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Kenyon Review, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

NICKOLE BROWN received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was first published in 2007 by Red Hen Press and a new edition was reissued by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015, and the audio book of that collection became available in 2017. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years until she gave up her beloved time in the classroom in hope of writing full time. Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches periodically at a number of places, including the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA, and the Hindman Settlement School. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at a three different animal sanctuaries. Currently, she’s at work on a bestiary of sorts about these animals, but it won’t consist of the kind of pastorals that always made her (and most of the working-class folks she knows) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it—these poems speak in a queer, Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature beautiful, but damaged and dangerous. A second chapbook from this project, an essay-in-poems called The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry in January 2020.

DUSTIN PARSONS is the author of Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams (University of Georgia Press 2018). He has an MA from Kansas State University and an MFA from Bowling Green State University. He has previously served as the non-fiction editor of The Mid-American Review. Awards for his writing include an Ohio Arts Grant and a New York Fine Arts grant in creative non-fiction, the American Literary Review Prize in fiction, the fiction prize from The Laurel Review and a “notable” in the Best American Essays. He was awarded a residency fellowship at Wyoming’s Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts. He teaches  creative writing workshops and courses in American literature at University of Mississippi. He lives in Oxford with his wife, the poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and their two wily boys. 

JESSICA JACOBS is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), named one of Library Journal‘s Best Poetry Books of the year, winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University and the Goldie Award from the Golden Crown Literary Society, and a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell, American Fiction, Eric Hoffer, and Julie Suk Book Awards. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry, was an Over the Rainbow selection by the American Library Association and a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Julie Suk Awards. Her chapbook In Whatever Light Left to Us was published by Sibling Rivalry Press.Jacobs holds an M.F.A. from Purdue University, where she served as the Editor-in-Chief of Sycamore Review, and a B.A. from Smith College. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including Orion, New England Review, Crazyhorse,  and Guernica. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, and professor—leading workshops around the country and teaching for Hendrix College, UNC-Wilmington’s MFA program, and Writing Workshops in Greece, among other programs—and now serves as the Chapbook Editor of Beloit Poetry Journal and the Distinguished Poet of the Western Region for the Gilbert-Chappell Mentorship Series.

KATY SIMPSON SMITH was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the author ofWe Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and the novelsThe Story of Land and Sea,Free Men, andThe Everlasting,which theNewYorkTimesnamed among the Top 10HistoricalFictionof 2020. Her writing has also appeared in theNew York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American,Granta,andLiterary Hub. She lives in New Orleans, and recently served as the Eudora Welty Chair for Southern Literature at Millsaps College.

DAVID JAMES POISSANT is the author of the novel Lake Life (Simon & Schuster, 2020), a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, Publishers Weekly Summer Read, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Best Southern Book of 2020, and a New York Public Library Book of the Day. His story collection The Heaven of Animals was a winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a Florida Book Award, a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, One Story, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and in textbooks and anthologies including New Stories from the South, Best New American Voices, and Best American Experimental Writing. His books are currently in print in seven languages. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters.

ANNIE HWANG is a literary agent for Ayesha Pande Literary agency and began her career at Folio Literary Management where she had the pleasure of working with debut and seasoned authors alike. As a former journalist, Annie possesses a keen editorial eye which she brings to her approach to agenting, taking an active role in the careers of her clients. Annie represents voice-driven literary fiction and select nonfiction. In particular, she gravitates toward subversive and irreverent literary fiction and impactful mission-driven narrative nonfiction that grapples with the complexities of our world. A fierce champion of underrepresented voices, Annie is always on the hunt for gifted storytelling that stretches its genre to new heights. @AnnieAHwang

CAROLINE EISENMANN joined the Frances Goldin Literary Agency in 2017 after spending four years at ICM Partners. In adult literary and upmarket fiction, Caroline is particularly seeking novels that engage with social issues, speculative elements (especially those used in the service of an emotional truth), underrepresented voices, stories about obsession, ruthless narrators, and work that centers around intimacy and its discontents. In nonfiction she is drawn to idea-driven work driven by expansive curiosity, especially projects that render the hidden structures of the world more legible. She’s also looking for deeply reported narratives (particularly those that take the reader into the heart of a subculture), literary memoir, cultural criticism, and essay collections. Authors represented by Caroline have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller list and been short or longlisted for the National Book Award in fiction, the National Book Award’s 5 Under 35 Award, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.