Role: Chair

Oscar Villalon is the managing editor at ZYZZYVA. His writing has been published in Stranger’s Guide, Freeman’s, The Believer, Literary Hub, and other publications. A former book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, he lives with his family in San Francisco.

(Photo credit: Oscar Villalon)

Kwame Dawes (Chair) is the author of 22 books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. He is a George W. Holmes University Professor at the University of Nebraska, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner. His honors include an Emmy Award, the Forward Prize for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing, and the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry.

(Photo credit: El Secretario)

Ann Goldstein is a former editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by Elena Ferrante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Elsa Morante, among others, and is the editor of The Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (Photo credit: E. Tammy Kim)

Jewell Parker Rhodes is the award-winning author of several books for adults and young people including the New York Times bestsellers Ghost Boys and Black Brother, Black Brother. Dr. Rhodes is the Founding Artistic Director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the Virginia G. Piper Endowed Chair and Narrative Studies Professor at Arizona State University.

(Photo credit: Jay Watson)

Luis Alberto Urrea (Chair) is a Guggenheim Fellow, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the bestselling author of 18 books. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, and an Edgar Award. His most recent book, The House of Broken Angels was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

(Photo credit: Brave Lux, Joe Mazza)

Nell Painter (Chair), the author of The History of White People; Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol; and Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over, is Madame Chairman of MacDowell’s Board of Directors. She writes opinion pieces for the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, and other journals when not painting self-portraits and reading artist’s books that visualize people and history.

(Photo credit: Dwight Carter)

Cathryn Mercier (Chair) directs the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature and the graduate degree programs in Literature for Children and Young Adults at Simmons University. She contributed to the anthologies Keywords for Children’s Literature and Teaching Young Adult Literature.  She has served on the committees for the Newbery Medal, Caldecott Medal, the Geisel Award, the Sibert Medal, the Children’s Literature Legacy Award, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards. She has been a board member of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects.