Writing Grief

Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: Everyone Remain Calm; Once I Was Cool; and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life. Her work appears in Best American Essays, New York Times, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Tin House, LitHub, Longreads, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, the Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as theaters, festivals, and classrooms across the country. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and is an editor with Northwestern University Press.

Samantha Irby is an American comedian, essayist, blogger, and television writer. She is the creator and author of the blog bitches gotta eat, where she writes
humorous observations about her own life and modern society more broadly. Her books We Are Never Meeting in Real Life and Wow, No Thank You were both New York Times best-sellers, and she is a recipient of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for bisexual nonfiction. She has been a writer and/or co-producer for TV shows including And Just Like That..., Work in Progress, Shrill, and Tuca & Bertie.

Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist, co-host of Radiolab and author of international best-seller Why Fish Don’t Exist, which was chosen as a
Best Book by The Smithsonian, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Brainpickings, Washington Post, and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Book Prize. Her written work has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, VQR, and beyond. She has also won honors from The National Academy of Sciences, the Associated Press, the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Swarthmore College. She serves as a Contributing Advisor to nature magazine Orion and co-founded NPR’s Invisibilia.

Matthew Salesses is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech and the author of eight books, most recently The Sense of Wonder, national bestseller Craft in the Real World (a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, & others), and the PEN/Faulkner Finalist and Dublin Literary Award longlisted novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. Forthcoming is a memoir, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time. His writing can be found in Best American Essays, The New York Times, The Guardian, VICE, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, PEN, Guernica, Time, Witness, & elsewhere.

Vauhini Vara is a journalist, editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and playwright. Her writing—on technology, business, and many more topics—has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, & elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and won the Colorado Book Award, the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize, and the Times of India AutHer Award. Her story collection, This is Salvaged, won the High Plains Book Award and the Kalinga Literary Festival Fiction Book Award.