2024 WRITER’S RESOLUTIONS RETREAT LEADERS
Kayla Min Andrews is a biracial, Korean American writer living in New Orleans. She has a piece forthcoming from The Massachusetts Review and has been published in Cagibi for fiction, Halfway Down the Stairs for nonfiction, and Asymptote for literary translation. Her work was nominated for a Best of the Net 2020. She was a finalist in the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival’s Very Short Fiction Contest in 2023. Kayla assisted Putnam on the posthumous publication of her mother’s novel The Fetishist, including editing the manuscript. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at Randolph and is working on a novel.
Daphne Armbruster is an emerging writer native to New Orleans. Her work revolves around girlhood and gayhood, the glamour and grit and guilt and joy of queer life. When she isn’t writing, she’s acting in local theater and short films. She spends much of her time bringing the writing community in New Orleans together through her work as Director of Community Outreach with the writing collective, Third Lantern Lit. She feels lucky to live in such a supportive literary scene.
Meakin Armstrong is an Editor-at-Large at Northwest Review. Previously, he was the founding Senior Fiction Editor at Guernica, where he worked for over 15 years. He is also a frequent reader and judge for literary prizes, such as the Young Lions Award at the New York Public Library. Meakin has received several writing awards, including a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship for fiction and a scholarship to the Summer Literary Seminars in Russia. His work has been featured in multiple journals, four nonfiction books, and two fiction anthologies. Currently, he is working on a novel about the 1980s-era club kids in the American South.
Morgan Babst is a native of New Orleans. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in such publications as The Washington Post, Saveur, The Oxford American, Guernica, Garden and Gun, the Harvard Review, and the anthology Horse Girls, with two of her essays listed as Notable in Best American Essays. Her debut novel, The Floating World, was named one of the best books of 2017 by Kirkus, Amazon, Southern Living, and the Dallas Morning News and was a New York Times Editors’ Pick.
Eloy Bleifuss joined Janklow & Nesbit Associates in 2019 where he is cultivating a list of fiction and nonfiction clients. He started out in publishing at Simon & Schuster where he worked in editorial at S&S, Touchstone, and Scribner. Eloy is seeking genre-forward upmarket and commercial fiction. He likes writing that is dark, uncanny, funny, and queer. Anything with a speculative or thriller element is a plus. A graduate of Vassar College, he hails from Chicago and now lives in Brooklyn.
Tracy Cunningham is managing director of the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival and has had a long career teaching, planning events, and working with non-profit organizations. She holds master’s degrees in both English and in Educational Leadership and has been a national speaker and teacher-consultant with the National Writing Project. She taught high school English, creative writing, and journalism, as well as composition at the university level. Tracy is Co-Director of the New Orleans Writing Marathon, an immersive writing experience for writers of all levels. She won the Light Up for Literacy Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities in 2022 for her work promoting writers and writing.
Nora Gonzalez is originally from New York City and graduated from the University of Chicago, where she majored in English Literature with a focus on Modernism. She joined The Gernert Company in 2020, after working as an assistant book scout at Del Commune Enterprises. Nora is interested in representing narrative nonfiction, memoirs, cookbooks, illustrated works, poetry, literary, and upmarket fiction. As a member of the foreign rights team and a Spanish reader, she has a particular interest in translation, and is also seeking Spanish-language authors, as well as other international writers.
Anya Groner is a journalist, fiction writer, and essayist, with work in Guernica, The New York Times, The Oxford American, Orion Magazine, and The Atlantic. Her audio reporting and production is featured in Monument Lab’s podcast Plot of Land as well as in WWNO/WRKF’s podcast Sea Change. Groner is a recipient of numerous awards, including those from the Cincinnati Review, Studio in the Woods, Virginia Quarterly Review, Meridian Magazine, and the Louisiana Board of Regents. She teaches creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and the New Orleans Writers Workshop.
Lisa Ko is the author of the novels Memory Piece (forthcoming March 2024) and of The Leavers, which was a 2017 National Book Award for Fiction finalist, won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award. The Leavers was a national bestseller and was named a best book of the year by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, the Los Angeles Times, and others. Ko’s writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere.
Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer who grew up between Shanghai, northern China, and the south of France. After receiving her B.A. from Yale University, she worked in foreign policy and has co-authored and translated two books on Chinese politics and economics. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, Best American Essays, The Florida Review online, WBUR, and more. She is the deputy editor at Off Assignment. Her debut novel, River East, River West, is out Jan 9, 2024 with William Morrow/HarperCollins.
Annell López is a Dominican immigrant. She is the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and the author of the short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason, forthcoming in 2024 from the Feminist Press. A Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, her work has also received support from Tin House and has appeared in American Short Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. López received her MFA from the University of New Orleans. She is an assistant fiction editor for the New Orleans Review and is working on a novel.
Richard Louth taught English literature and writing courses for 45 years as a Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he was founding Director of the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project. As founder of the “New Orleans Writing Marathon” (NOWM), he has led Writing Marathons in New Orleans and other cities across the country for over 20 years. He edited The Writing Marathon: In Good Company Revealed and has published in Speak, Louisiana Literature, and Country Roads.
Susan Martens, Ph.D is Associate Professor of English at Missouri Western State University, where she is director of the Prairie Lands Writing Project. Since 2006, she has done extensive research on the Writing Marathon, including her dissertation, and has led, taught, and researched the effects of the Writing Marathon.
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices Elle, the Prix des Libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. It has been translated into 11 languages. A 2023 United States Artists fellow, Marzano-Lesnevich’s essays appear in The New York Times, Harper’s, and the 2020 and 2022 editions of The Best American Essays. Their next book, the transgenre and transgender work of memoir and haunted nonfiction Both and Neither, is forthcoming from Doubleday and publishers internationally.
Siwar Masannat is a Jordanian writer. Her most recent book, cue: poems, is forthcoming from Georgia Review Books/University of Georgia Press this March. 50 Water Dreams, Masannat’s debut collection of poetry, was selected by Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Competition and published in 2015. Masannat serves as Managing Editor of the African Poetry Book Fund and Prairie Schooner. One of the longest running literary journals in the United States, Prairie Schooner has been published out of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln since 1926.
Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer born in Hialeah, Florida and raised in Miami. He has a B.A. in English and a B.A. in Philosophy from Florida International University and an MFA from the University of New Orleans. Romaguera has lived in Oakland, California, and has spent the majority of his time since 2011 in New Orleans. His publications include The Daily Beast, Curbed National, PANK Magazine, New Orleans Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, Louisiana Literature, GrubWrites, and Peauxdunque Review. Romaguera has worked as a Staff Writer for French Quarter Journal and Where Y’at Magazine. He has been a beat reporter for NOLA Defender, writing stories about protests, the activist movement, and stories involving Latinx peoples within New Orleans. He covered the New Orleans Pelicans for ESPN and TrueHoop affiliate Bourbon Street Shots for multiple seasons as well. Romaguera is a monthly columnist for Ploughshares and is currently the Fiction Editor at The New Southern Fugitives and the Editorial Intern at Electric Literature.
Michaela Whatnall is an agent at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. They received a degree in English and linguistics from Emory University, completed the Columbia Publishing Course, and in 2023 they were selected as a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree. Michaela’s background in school and library marketing accounts for their strong interest in children’s literature, particularly contemporary middle grade and young adult fiction of all genres. In adult fiction they are seeking contemporary, speculative, and historical upmarket fiction, as well as grounded fantasy. They are open to select narrative nonfiction for both children and adults, graphic novels, and picture books.
