Get to Know Our Speakers
Visit our Speakers Page for the full list of our 2025 Festival lineup.
Meet our New Orleans Writers
TWFest loves our local writers! Learn more about some of our speakers living in New Orleans who you can see at this year's festival.
Get to know our TWFest Contest Judges in their interviews with our publicist, Reine Dugas. Meet Chin-Sun Lee, Karisma Price, Justin Maxwell, and Annell López.
Chin-Sun Lee, Karisma Price, and Justin Maxwell will also be leading sessions in our Writer's Craft series at this year's Festival. You won't want to miss their workshops!
Chin-Sun Lee is the author of the debut novel Upcountry (Unnamed Press 2023), listed among Publishers Weekly’s Big Indie Books of Fall 2023 and Debutiful’s Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2023. She’s one of Poets & Writers’ 5 Over 50 Debut Authors of 2023 and is also a contributor to the New York Times-bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (Blue Rider Press/Penguin 2014). Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Joyland, and The Believer Logger, among other publications.
Karisma Price is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. A poet, screenwriter, and media artist, she is the author of I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Oxford American, Four Way Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, and elsewhere. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize, was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and is the 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. A native New Orleanian, she holds an MFA in poetry from New York University, where she was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow. Karisma is currently writing a television pilot.
Justin Maxwell teaches playwriting in the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. His playwriting book The Playwright’s Toolbox was published by Applause Books in May 2024. Currently, he’s adapting Tennessee Williams’ novel Moise and the World of Reason into a full-length play. His “100 MDQs for Plays of Praise” was presented as part of Erik Ehn’s 100K project. His play An Outopia for Pigeons is out from Original Works Publishing, and Your Lithopedion is out from Next Stage Press. His play Palimpsests of Agrippina Minor was awarded at ATLAS-BoR Grant in 2020-21 His prose has appeared in multiple journals including Theatre/Practice, Eleven Eleven, The Fourth River, Minnesota Playlist, Contemporary Theatre Review, American Theatre Magazine, and others. He is a former Co-Chair of the Playwriting Symposium at the Mid-America Theatre Conference.
Annell López is the author of the short story collection I’ll Give You A Reason published by the Feminist Press. She’s also the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. Her work has received support from Tin House and the Kenyon Review Workshops and has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Brooklyn Rail, Refinery29, and elsewhere. Annell received her MFA from the University of New Orleans. She is working on a novel.
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