by Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager
We’re welcoming in the new decade by pulling out all the stops for MCWC 2020 this year! With smaller workshops, more of them on offer, and a redesigned Publishing Bootcamp, MCWC 2020 is shaping up to be our best yet.
Each workshop meets all three mornings of the conference and features three hours of instruction, exercises, and manuscript discussion led by our expert faculty, listed below. Limited to just eleven participants, these intimate workshops provide a personalized learning experience focused on the art and craft of writing.
Afternoon events include open mics and seminars on a variety of topics. Our Paths to Publishing panelists will share their wide range of publishing success stories, and our Blind Critique panelists are ready to give you feedback (anonymously) on your opening lines.
Scholarship applications open January 1 and close February 15. During this period you can also apply for the Master Class, taught this year by Julie Buntin. For full application details, visit mcwc.org. General registration opens on March 1, but you can explore our website to start planning your conference experience now. All workshops are first-come, first-served, so don’t wait to grab your spot once registration opens!
Elissa Washuta
Julie Buntin
Anita Fellicelli
Keynote Speaker: Elissa Washuta
Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Potlatch Fund. Elissa is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.
Master Class: Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin’s debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, translated into ten languages, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including the Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Vogue, the New York Times Book Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and the MacDowell Colony, and is an editor-at-large at Catapult. Her novel-in-progress is the winner of the 2019 Ellen Levine Fund for Writers Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan.
Short Fiction: Anita Fellicelli
Anita Felicelli is the author of the short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent, which won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. She is also the author of Chimerica: A Novel, which was one of The Millions’s Most Anticipated Books of the Second Half of 2019. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Catapult, Joyland, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Gabe Habash
Rahawa Haile
Christine Hyung-Oak Lee
Novel: Gabe Habash
Gabe Habash is the author of the novel Stephen Florida, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the American Booksellers Association Indies Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year. He was formerly the fiction reviews editor for Publishers Weekly and now teaches at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Times, Guernica, Lithub, and more.
Nonfiction: Rahawa Haile
Rahawa Haile is an Eritrean-American writer from Miami, Florida. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Outside Magazine, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, AFAR, Audubon, and Pacific Standard. Recently, her essays have been featured in the Best American Travel Writing 2018 anthology as well as Best American Travel Writing 2019. In Open Country, her memoir about thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, explores what it means to move through America and the world as a black woman and is forthcoming from Harper.
Memoir: CHRISTINE HYUNG-OAK LEE
Christine Hyung-Oak Lee is the author of the memoir Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, which was featured in The New York Times, Self Magazine, Time Magazine, and NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Guernica, the Rumpus, and BuzzFeed, among other publications. She is an editor at the Rumpus and teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California’s MFA program.
Kij Johnson
Kerry Madden-Lunsford
Tomas Moniz
Speculative fiction: Kij Johnson
Kij Johnson writes short stories and novels, and has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Sturgeon Awards, as well as the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kansas. She is also the associate director for the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and teaches intensive summer workshops on novel-writing each summer for them.
MG/YA: KERRY MADDEN-LUNSFORD
Kerry Madden-Lunsford is the Director of Creative Writing at UAB and teaches in the MFA program at Antioch University. Her children’s novels include Gentle’s Holler, Louisiana Song, and Jessie’s Mountain. Her first novel, Offsides, was a New York Public Library Pick for the Teen Age. Her book Up Close Harper Lee made Booklist’s Ten Top Biographies for Youth. Her newest book, Ernestine’s Milky Way, was published by Schwartz & Wade/Random House in 2019.
EMERGING WRITERS: Tomas Moniz
Tomas Moniz edited Rad Dad, Rad Families, and the children’s book Collaboration/Colaboración. He’s the recipient of the SF Literary Arts Foundation’s 2016 Award, the 2016 Can Serrat Residency, the 2017 Caldera Residency and the 2018 SPACE on Ryder Farm residency. He’s recently been published by Barrelhouse, Acentos Review and Longleaf Review. In 2019, he released a chapbook, All Friends Are Necessary, with Mason Jar Press and his debut novel, Big Familia, with Acre Books.
Michelle Peñaloza
Susan Stinson
Poetry: MICHELLE PEÑALOZA
Michelle Peñaloza is the author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize. She is also the author of two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak, and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes. Her poems and essays have been published in Poetry Northwest, New England Review, Pleiades, River Styx, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. The proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, Michelle was born in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She now lives in rural Mendocino County, California.
Historical Fiction: Susan Stinson
Susan Stinson is the author of Spider in a Tree, a novel inspired by Northampton, Massachusetts in the time of eighteenth century preacher and slave-owner Jonathan Edwards. She is winner of the Lambda Literary Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. Her novel Martha Moody is soon to be reissued by Small Beer Press. Her other novels are Venus of Chalk (Lambda Literary finalist) and Fat Girl Dances with Rocks. She has received grants, residencies, and fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and Hawthornden Castle, among others. She has taught historical fiction writing at Amherst College.
Ayesha Pande
Marya Spence
Shirin Yim Leos
Ayesha Pande, Agent
Before launching her boutique agency fifteen years ago, Ayesha was a senior editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She has also held editorial positions at HarperCollins and Crown Publishers. She serves on the Board of the AAR (Association of Author’s Representatives), and is a member of PEN and the Asian American Writer’s Workshop. She is drawn to distinctive, original voices in literary or popular fiction, young adult, women’s, and international fiction. She is also seeking authors of nonfiction, including biography, history, popular culture, cultural commentary, and memoir and is particularly keen to champion authors from communities that have traditionally been silenced.
Marya Spence, Agent
Raised in California’s Bay Area, Marya joined Janklow & Nesbit Associates in 2012 after getting her MFA at NYU, her BA in English at Harvard, and working and interning at such publications as The New Yorker, PAPER Mag, Travel & Leisure, Vanity Fair, Publishers Weekly, and more. She represents a diverse range in fiction and nonfiction including, literary and upmarket novels, cultural criticism and voice-driven essays, narrative journalism with a humorous or critical edge, and pop culture. Her writers have debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List and won or been finalists for such honors as the PEN Ackerley Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the California Book Award for First Fiction, James Beard Media Awards, National Magazine Awards, and more. She lives in New York City.
Shirin Yim Leos, Editor
Shirin Yim Leos (formerly Bridges) is an award-winning author, an ex-publisher, and a successful developmental editor. In the last twelve months alone, her editing clients have secured a three-book deal from MacMillan, a two-book deal from HarperCollins, a two-book deal from Penguin, and a simultaneous book-plus-movie deal from Random House and Amblin Entertainment. When not writing and editing, Shirin spends much of her time teaching and coaching writers. She was the Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, and has conducted workshops on publishing and writing for Stanford University, University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, California State University - Fresno, University of Washington, Illinois State University, and Dominican University as well as for writing conferences in the United States, Australia, and Singapore.
Cameron Lund
Ginny Rorby
Paths to Publishing: Cameron Lund
Cameron Lund is a young adult author, singer/songwriter, and cheese enthusiast. Originally from the middle of the New Hampshire woods, she moved to the beach to study film at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has stayed out west ever since. Cameron’s debut novel, The Best Laid Plans, will be released with Razorbill (PenguinTeen) on April 7th, 2020. A long-term fan of the MCWC, she ran the social media accounts and blog in 2016, and was a conference attendee in 2017 and 2018. She’s thrilled to be able to return as a panelist.
Paths to Publishing: Ginny rorby
Ginny holds an MFA in Creative Writing and is the author of six novels for middle grade and young adult readers: How to Speak Dolphin; Lost in the River of Grass—winner of the 2012/2013 Sunshine State Young Readers Award; Hurt Go Happy—winner of the 2008 American Library Association’s Schneider Family Book Award; The Outside of a Horse; and Dolphin Sky. Her most recent, Freeing Finch, was released in October 2019. She has been an MCWC board member for twenty-four years and was co-director with Suzanne Byerley from 1996 to 2004.