Alex Mar is a writer based in her hometown of New York City. Her first book, “Witches of America,” was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015 in nonfiction, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, one of The Millions Most Anticipated Books of 2015, one of The Believer’s Favorite Books, Huffington Post Books Most Notable of 2015 and a Marie Claire Top Book-Club Pick. Some of her recent work has appeared in The Believer, New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Elle, Tin House, The Oxford American (where she is a contributing editor) and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015.

Francisco Cantú served as an agent for the U.S. Border Patrol from 2008 to 2012. A former Fulbright fellow, he recently received an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Arizona. His essays and translations appear frequently in Guernica, and his work can also be found in “The Best American Essays 2016,” Ploughshares, and Orion, among others. He lives in Tucson, Arizona. “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border” is Cantu’s account of his time tracking human border crossers. It was published by Riverhead Books in February 2018 and became an instant New York Times best-seller.

Kevin Fedarko has written for Esquire, National Geographic, The New York Times, and other publications. He studied at Columbia University and Oxford before joining the staff at Time, where he served on the foreign affairs desk, then later worked as a senior editor at Outside. His first book, “The Emerald Mile,” which was a New York Times bestseller, won the National Outdoor Book Award and the Reading the West Award, and was a finalist for both the PEN Literary Sports Writing Award and the Banff Mountain Book Award. Fedarko lives and works in Flagstaff.

Geetha Kothari is the nonfiction editor of The Kenyon Review. Her writing has appeared in various anthologies and journals, including New England Review, Massachusetts Review and others. Her essay “If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?” is widely taught in universities and has been reprinted in several anthologies, including in “Best American Essays.” She is the editor of “Did My Mama Like to Dance? And Other Stories about Mothers and Daughters” and recently published a short story collection, “I Brake for Moose and Other Stories.”  

Carole DeSanti is vice president and executive editor at Viking Penguin, Penguin Random House. Known for championing high-quality literary and commercial fiction, Carole’s fiction list includes Dorothy Allison’s contemporary classic “Bastard out of Carolina,” Melissa Bank’s “The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing,” the novels of Terry McMillan, Booker Prize finalist Ruth Ozeki’s “A Tale for the Time Being” and the No. 1 best-selling novels of Deborah Harkness, among others.  Her nonfiction includes titles in the memoir, health and psychology area, including David Servan-Schreiber’s acclaimed “Anticancer, A New Way of Life”  and George Hodgman’s New York Times best-selling memoir “Bettyville.” Her critically acclaimed novel “The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R.” was published in 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Yolanda Wisher is the 2016-17 poet laureate of Philadelphia. Wisher has been a force within Philadelphia’s literary scene for the past two decades, upholding poetry as a public art. She holds a B.A. in English and Black Studies from Lafayette College and an M.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from Temple University. She is the author of the poetry volume “Monk Eats an Afro” and co-edited the anthology “Peace is a Haiku Song” with mentor and first Philadelphia poet laureate Sonia Sanchez. She has led and curated many innovative and community-driven programs with local and national partners, including The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Rosenbach Museum and Library, Jefferson University, Historic Germantown, LiveConnections and the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture. In April 2017, in collaboration with Philadelphia Contemporary, she organized the Outbound Poetry Festival. Her writings have been featured in a variety of media including GOOD Magazine, PennSound, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Citizen, among others. A Pew Fellow, Cave Canem Fellow and Hedgebrook Writer in Residence, she is currently the 2017-2018 CPCW Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dialogue can be a powerful tool for characterization, motivation, plot advancement and emotion. Great dialogue works on several levels. It provides context and subtext. It shows the reader what your character says, how he says it and what he really means. Bad dialogue is hard to read and bogs down the action of your story. How do you make sure your dialogue elevates rather than deflates? In this workshop, presented by award-winning novelist Tiffany Quay Tyson, who’ll join us via Skype from Denver, where she teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, we’ll explore rhythm, pacing, phrasing, attribution and more. Registration not required.

This workshop, taught by novelist and writing professor Helen Schulman, is for anyone, experienced or not, who wants to write a story!  Over the course of five days we will use the natural beauty of Aspen, as well as its crazy-quilt mix of personalities and high-low aesthetics to inspire new work.  We'll concentrate on such building blocks of fiction as: how to craft an opening, create characters, put them in a scene together, build descriptive writing chops, write (and steal) dialogue and find stories inside us and in the world around us. The workshop should be fun, warm, inclusive and respectful.  We'll also read published stories in and out of class as writers, which means reading strategically: learning to mine the work we love most for craft elements.