TWF 2025 Award-Winning Writers
Megan Abbott is the award-winning author of eleven crime novels, including You Will Know Me, Beware The Woman and the New York Times bestseller The Turnout, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Paris Review and the Wall Street Journal. Dare Me, the series she adapted from her own novel, is now streaming on Netflix. Her next novel, El Dorado Drive, comes out in June 2025.
Christine Carbo is the author of the Glacier Mystery novels, an ensemble series set in and around Glacier National Park. Her books include The Wild Inside, Mortal Fall, The Weight of Night, and A Sharp Solitude. She is a recipient of the Women’s National Book Association Pinckley Prize, the Silver Falchion Award, the High Plains Book Award, and is a finalist for the Barry Award. She has an MA in English and linguistics and taught college-level courses for over a decade. She still teaches, in a vastly different realm, as a Pilates instructor. A Florida native, she lives with her family in Whitefish, Montana.
Michael Cunningham is the author of six novels: A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as a story collection, A Wild Swan and Other Tales, and a book of nonfiction, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. The Hours won the PEN Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. It was made into a film starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman. His new novel, Day, was published in November 2023.
Gwen Florio “is one of those writers who regularly publish series and stand-alones that leave a lasting impression,” says the New York Times. Her fiction draws on a lengthy journalism career that took her across the country and overseas to several conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. Her debut novel, Montana, won the national Pinckley Prize for debut crime fiction by women and a High Plains Book Award. She’s published eleven since, with Best Be Prepared the most recent. Her next, A Senior Citizen’s Guide to Life on the Run, is set for publication in May.
Gillian Flynn is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Gone Girl, for which she wrote the Golden Globe–nominated screenplay; the New York Times bestsellers Dark Places and Sharp Objects; and a novella, The Grownup. A former critic for Entertainment Weekly, she lives in Chicago with her husband and children.
Adrianne Harun is the author of two short story collections, The King of Limbo, a Washington State Book Award finalist, and Catch, Release, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award. Stories from her collections have been listed as Notable in both Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories. Her first novel, A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain, was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award, a finalist for both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Washington State Book Award and winner of a Pinckley Prize for Debut Crime Fiction. A new novel, On the Way to the End of the World, was recently published. A longtime resident of Port Townsend, Washington, Adrianne ran a garage, Motorsport, with the legendary Alistair Scovil and has also worked as a teacher and an editor for many years.
Angie Kim is the New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls, a GMA and Barnes & Noble book club pick, winner of the Virginia Literary Award, and Oprah Daily’s #1 novel of 2023. Her debut novel, Miracle Creek, won the Edgar Award and was named one of the 100 best mysteries and thrillers of all time by Time magazine. A Korean immigrant who moved to Baltimore in middle school, Kim studied philosophy at Stanford University and attended Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Since Laura Lippman’s debut, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the “essential” crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her “special, even extraordinary,” and Gillian Flynn wrote, “She is simply a brilliant novelist.” Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her teenager. In 2025, she was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, a lifetime achievement award whose recipients have included Agatha Christie, Michael Connelly, Graham Greene, P.D. James, Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley.
Bernice L. McFadden is an Assistant Professor of English at Tulane University and the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Sugar, The Warmest December, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, Glorious, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), The Book of Harlan (winner of a 2017 American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction), and Praise Song for the Butterflies (long-listed for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction). She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of three awards from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her latest book is First Born Girls, a memoir.
M.A. Nicholson is a New Orleans poet, editor, and educator. An M.F.A. graduate from the University of New Orleans—where she served as Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine—M.A. was the recipient of the 2021 Andrea-Saunders Gereighty Academy of American Poets Award and was Kenyon Review’s 2024 Peter Taylor Fellow. M.A. has work featured in Best New Poets 2022 and Winter in America (Again anthologies, as well as Peauxdunque Review, Diode Poetry Journal, New Orleans Review, Trampoline Poetry, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Around the Gate, was selected for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection prize.
Marcie R. Rendon
Kate Segriff (she/her) is stunningly awkward but has an excellent game face. She is a Toronto-based writer and filmmaker, and her work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Greensboro Review, Prism International, and Best Canadian Poetry, among others. She won the Edinburgh Story Prize, the London Independent Story Prize, and the Connor Prize for Poetry, among other awards. Her feminist short films have been selected for over 50 film festivals worldwide. Her first collection of short stories was published by Riddle Fence Debuts in 2024. She is working on a novel about a Cadillac-obsessed octogenarian with a suspect moral compass.
Boyce Upholt is a journalist and essayist whose writing has appeared in the Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He is the winner of a James Beard Award for investigative journalism, lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, and is the author of The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi.
