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2026 Visiting Writers

Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi.  She’s won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil.  Fennelly has published three books of poetry and three of prose, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W.W. Norton) which was an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book.  Her seventh book, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs is forthcoming from Norton in 2026. A contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire and other outlets, she lives with her husband, Tom Franklin, and their three children in Oxford, MS. https://www.bethannfennelly.com/

 

Jennifer Haigh

Jennifer Haigh’s first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won thePEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her successive books – the novels Baker Towers, The Condition, Faith, Heat and Light and Mercy Street, and the short story collection News From Heaven – have won the Bridge Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, the PEN/L.L. Winship Award, the PEN New England Award in Fiction and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her work has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been published in eighteen languages. Her new novel, Rabbit Moon, was published in 2025.  

2026 Faculty

Maria Kuznetsova
Prose / CNF

Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and came to the United States as a child. She is the author of the novels Oksana, Behave! and Something Unbelievable, and her short stories and essays can be found in dozens of venues including Slate, One Story, The Southern Review, Guernica, The Missouri Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Sun, The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, and more. She is also an associate professor at Auburn University, where she is the fiction editor of the Southern Humanities Review. She lives in Auburn, Alabama with her family. 

Tom Franklin
Prose

Thomas Gerald Franklin is an American writer originally from Dickinson, AL. After high school, Franklin worked his way through college, earning a B.A. at the University of South Alabama, in Mobile. He completed his M.F.A. at the University of Arkansas, in 1998 where he met his wife, poet Beth Ann Fennelly. He is currently an associate professor at the University of Mississippi.

Poachers (1999), the title story of which won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Short Story. In an interview for the website Mississippi Writers and Musicians, its author writes of the book as being stories that address the injustice and irony that life can sometimes have as well as the corruption present in daily life. His first novel, Hell at the Breech (2003), is better described as being regional fiction. It is a fictionalized version of an 1892 feud called the Mitcham War that took place in Clarke County, AL, near the author’s home. Other books include Smonk (2006), Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (2010), which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award, and The Tilted World (2013), which Franklin co-wrote with his wife.

Nickole Brown
Poetry

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 published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems about her grandmother called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015 and won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. The audio book of that collection came out in 2017. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years and was the co-editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series for ten.

Adam Vines
Poetry

Adam Vines is professor of English and director of Creative Writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has published five collections of poetry and was editor of a poetry anthology. His poems have appeared in journals such as Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, and Poetry. He is the editor of Birmingham Poetry Review, which won the Small Press Publisher Award in 2020 and has had poems reprinted many times in Pushcart, Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Adam has spoken at dozens of writing conferences and universities about editing and writes reader reports for poetry manuscripts, anthologies, and scholarly monographs for two top-tier university presses.

Michael X. Wang
Prose

Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, a coal-mining city in China’s mountainous Shanxi Province. He immigrated to the United States when he was six and holds a PhD in Literature from Florida State University and an MFA in Fiction from Purdue. His story collection, Further News of Defeat, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writer Award. It was also a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award. His debut novel, Lost in the Long March, came out from The Overlook Press. He has judged the PEN/Open Award and the Flannery O’Connor Book Award. Currently, he is working on two novel projects and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi. 

Matt Bondurant
Prose

Matt Bondurant’s most recent book, Oleander City tells the true story of the tragic deaths of all ninety-three children from the Sisters of the Incarnate Word orphanage – except for one little girl who miraculously survived – and how a storied boxing match between two of America’s most legendary boxers changed the fortunes of the city and exposed an insidious secret society determined to return Galveston to its former glory at all costs. His novel, The Night Swimmer, was featured in the New York Times Book Review, Outside Magazine, and The Daily Beast, among others. His second novel The Wettest County in the World is an international bestseller, a New York Times Editor’s Pick, a San Francisco Chronicle Best 50 Books of the Year, and was made into a feature film (Lawless) by Director John Hillcoat, starring Shia Labeouf, Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Gary Oldman, and Guy Pearce. His first novel The Third Translation is an international bestseller, translated into 14 languages worldwide. He has sold three original screenplays including a development deal with HBO/Cinemax to write and executive produce an original one-hour dramatic series, as well as a dramatic series for Warner Brothers Television. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi where he serves as the Director of the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi.

Matt Bondurant’s most recent book, Oleander City tells the true story of the tragic deaths of all ninety-three children from the Sisters of the Incarnate Word orphanage – except for one little girl who miraculously survived – and how a storied boxing match between two of America’s most legendary boxers changed the fortunes of the city and exposed an insidious secret society determined to return Galveston to its former glory at all costs. His novel, The Night Swimmer, was featured in the New York Times Book Review, Outside Magazine, and The Daily Beast, among others. His second novel The Wettest County in the World is an international bestseller, a New York Times Editor’s Pick, a San Francisco Chronicle Best 50 Books of the Year, and was made into a feature film (Lawless) by Director John Hillcoat, starring Shia Labeouf, Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Gary Oldman, and Guy Pearce. His first novel The Third Translation is an international bestseller, translated into 14 languages worldwide. He has sold three original screenplays including a development deal with HBO/Cinemax to write and executive produce an original one-hour dramatic series, as well as a dramatic series for Warner Brothers Television. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi where he serves as the Director of the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi.

Seth Brady Tucker
Poetry

Seth Brady Tucker’s third book, The Cruelty Virtues was published by 3:A Taos Press in 2025. His second collection, We Deserve the Gods We Ask For won the Gival Press Poetry Award and went on to win the Eric Hoffer award, and his first book won the Elixir Press Editor’s Choice Award. He has won a number of individual writing awards including the Shenandoah Bevel Summers Fiction Prize and the Literal Latte Short Fiction Award. among others. His recent work appears in such magazines and journals as Copper Nickel, Los Angeles Review, Driftwood, Iowa Review, December, Pleiades, Shenandoah, PoetryNorthwest, Chattahoochee Review, and many others.  For over a decade, Seth has been the executive director of for Longleaf. Seth has degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, Northern Arizona University, and top-ranked Florida State University (PhD, 2012). Currently, Seth’s novel and first short fiction collection are represented by Glass Literary Management, New York. Seth teaches poetry and fiction workshops at the Light House Writer’s Workshop in Denver as well as the Colorado School of Mines in Denver where he is a full teaching professor. He is originally from Wyoming, and once served as an Army 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper in Iraq.

Denton Loving
Poetry

Denton Loving lives on a farm near the historic Cumberland Gap, where Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia come together. He is the author of three poetry collections: Feller, Crimes Against Birds, and Tamp which was a finalist for the Weatherford Award and recipient of the inaugural Tennessee Book Award for Poetry. He has received scholarships and fellowships from organizations such as the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, the Eckerd College Writers Conference, and the Key West Literary Seminars. He earned the Master of Fine Arts in Writing and Literature from Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. He is a co-founder and editor at EastOver Press and its literary journal Cutleaf. His writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Kenyon Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Ecotone.

Tess Weitzner
Agent, Frances Goldin Literary

Tess Weitzner joined the Frances Goldin Literary Agency in 2023 after more than three years at Trident Media Group. A graduate of Middlebury College, she previously interned at Macmillan, The New England Review, and O/R Books. She was also a 2019 Bread Loaf student-scholar in fiction, as well as a research assistant for the author and journalist Charles Glass. And, after a long stint coaching and performing with a youth circus, she is drawn to anything that flies high, plays with fire, and embraces difference.

She is primarily looking for upmarket fiction, literary fiction, and narrative nonfiction narrow and deep in scope that might play with unreliable narrators, interrogations of power and violence, reclamations of identity, or dark-as-night humor. Fresh takes on horror, magical realism, camp, and kitsch will always be met with zeal.   

Tess Weitzner joined the Frances Goldin Literary Agency in 2023 after more than three years at Trident Media Group. A graduate of Middlebury College, she previously interned at Macmillan, The New England Review, and O/R Books. She was also a 2019 Bread Loaf student-scholar in fiction, as well as a research assistant for the author and journalist Charles Glass. And, after a long stint coaching and performing with a youth circus, she is drawn to anything that flies high, plays with fire, and embraces difference.

She is primarily looking for upmarket fiction, literary fiction, and narrative nonfiction narrow and deep in scope that might play with unreliable narrators, interrogations of power and violence, reclamations of identity, or dark-as-night humor. Fresh takes on horror, magical realism, camp, and kitsch will always be met with zeal.   

Nicole Cunningham
Agent, Trellis Literary

Nicole Cunningham joined Trellis Literary Management in 2025, after nine years with The Book Group. She represents an exciting list of authors across a wide range of adult fiction, as well as select nonfiction.

Nicole is seeking literary, upmarket, and book club fiction. Across genres, she falls in love at the level of the line first, and wants to be dazzled by the quality, control, and creativity of the language itself. She’s drawn to fiction that’s immersive, smart, and voice-driven, and better yet if it combines a propulsive plot with deep dive character work. She loves upmarket novels with a magical or speculative bent (including some very grounded fantasy), thrillers with a strong sense of place, book club with a beating heart and a razor-sharp bite, and literary or upmarket fiction with a romance at its center. She’d love to find more fiction at the sweet spot of literary sensibility with a high concept hook.

In nonfiction, Nicole wants to read fresh and finely tuned essay collections, cultural criticism, and well-researched, entertaining narrative nonfiction that has the bingeable quality of her favorite podcasts.

Nicole Cunningham joined Trellis Literary Management in 2025, after nine years with The Book Group. She represents an exciting list of authors across a wide range of adult fiction, as well as select nonfiction.

Nicole is seeking literary, upmarket, and book club fiction. Across genres, she falls in love at the level of the line first, and wants to be dazzled by the quality, control, and creativity of the language itself. She’s drawn to fiction that’s immersive, smart, and voice-driven, and better yet if it combines a propulsive plot with deep dive character work. She loves upmarket novels with a magical or speculative bent (including some very grounded fantasy), thrillers with a strong sense of place, book club with a beating heart and a razor-sharp bite, and literary or upmarket fiction with a romance at its center. She’d love to find more fiction at the sweet spot of literary sensibility with a high concept hook.

In nonfiction, Nicole wants to read fresh and finely tuned essay collections, cultural criticism, and well-researched, entertaining narrative nonfiction that has the bingeable quality of her favorite podcasts.

Alex Reuber
Agent, HG Literary

Alex is pursuing books that, either by style or story, demand he keep reading. He loves literature in translation, novels set outside the U.S., and stories that offer the reader a new or unconventional way of seeing. Novels that skew upmarket and literary are welcome, as are any narrators looking back and trying to make sense of their life.

For nonfiction, he’s interested in memoir, psychology, narrative, literary studies, art history, popular science, philosophy, and cultural studies. He’s also seeking artists in other disciplines that have ventured into prose. Writers that instill a sense of curiosity and wonder in others, no matter the subject, should get in touch and tell him about their work.

Alex began his publishing life as a bookseller at WORD Bookstores and an intern with New Directions and W.W. Norton & Company. He then spent five years as an international book scout, then literary agent, at Greenburger Associates before joining HG Literary in 2024.

See our Lineups from previous years

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