Michelle Brafman is a writer and educator. Her debut novel, “Washing the Dead,” was featured in Book Riot’s compilation of 100 essential books on women and religion. Her second work, “Bertrand Court,” showcases stories that have garnered numerous accolades, including a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Michelle’s essays have graced the pages of Oprah Daily, O Quarterly, Slate, LitHub, The Forward, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tablet, and other publications.
She instructs fiction writing at the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing program and is the founder of Glen Echo Workshops, where she leads monthly multi-genre workshops and teaches summer college essay writing classes.
Margaret Talbot has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2004. Formerly a Contributing Writer at The New York Times Magazine and Executive Editor of The New Republic, her articles and essays have been featured in esteemed collections, including “The Best of the Best American Science Writing” and “The Art of the Essay.”
Talbot, a recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, was a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. Her memoir/biography, “The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century,” published in 2012, received acclaim from USA Today as a “fascinating social history of America” and Slate praised it, saying “Talbot has woven a tale as romantic and vivid as any film could hope to be, while still seeing every bit of it plain.”
Her latest work, “By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution,” co-authored with her brother David Talbot, was released by HarperCollins in 2021.
In this workshop we will examine the challenges and joys of autobiographical writing, and the ethics of including your family in your work. We will read passages from autobiographical novels featuring the authors’ family members, discuss methods of transforming memory into art, and conclude with a writing exercise.
Tope Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC. He serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University.
He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.
Everyone seems to be carrying around ideas for a memoir these days. Should you write one? Why? What mistakes should you avoid? Workshop participants will examine and discuss recently published memoirs. They will also open their literary suitcases for inspection.
Randon Billings Noble is an essayist who has two books published by the University of Nebraska Press: her collection Be with Me Always (2019) and her anthology of lyric essays, A Harp in the Stars (2021). Other work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. Currently she is the founding editor of the online literary magazine After the Art and teaches in West Virginia Wesleyan’s Low-Residency MFA Program and Goucher’s MFA in Nonfiction Program.
You can read more at www.randonbillingsnoble.com.