Writing Motherhood

Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch (2021), her debut novel. A film adaptation, written/directed by Marielle Heller and starring Amy Adams, will be released in 2024. Formerly the 23/24 Trias Writer-in-Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she now serves as Assistant Professor of Screenwriting and Cinema Arts at the University of Iowa. Selected as an Indie Next Pick in August 2021, Nightbitch has gone on to be named a best book of the year by Esquire and Vulture and recognized as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications such as Harper’s, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, & The Sun. She is also a founding editor of draft.

Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen books of memoir, fiction, poetry, & children's lit—including her latest, Knocking Myself Up. Her memoir Valencia won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. Her essay collection, Against Memoir, was awarded the PEN/America Diamonstein-Speilvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to her writing, Michelle has instigated many cultural interventions aimed at increasing access and visibility for queer writers and artists. She co-founded the international performance tour Sister Spit, and is founding editor-at-large for online parenting zine Mutha. Michelle also produces and hosts the podcast Your Magic, and fronts a weekly live tarot show on Spotify Live.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the bestselling author of novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, Dora: A Headcase, and Allegories Of Violence. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction. The Misfit's Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books, and her collection of fiction, Verge, was released in 2020. Lidia’s newest novel is Thrust. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in-person and online. 

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is the author of My Monticello, called "a masterly feat" by the New York Times, and winner of the Library of Virginia Fiction Award, the Weatherford Award, the Balcones Fiction Prize, and the Lillian Smith Award, as well as a finalist for the Kirkus Fiction Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Award, the LA Times Debut Seidenbaum Prize, and long-listed for a Pen/Faulkner Fiction Award and the Story Prize. Johnson has been a fellow at TinHouse, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian, Kweli Journal, Joyland, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Her short story “Control Negro” was anthologized in Best American Short Stories, guest edited by Roxane Gay and read live by LeVar Burton.

Rivka Galchen is the prize-winning author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances, the short story collection American Innovations, and the miscellany on mothering and literature, Little Labors. A frequent contributor to
The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and The London Review of Books, she is also a regular columnist for the Book Review of The New York Times. Her work has been widely translated and in 2010 she was named by The New Yorker as one of 20 Writers Under 40. She has received an MD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and is the recipient of a William Saroyan International Prize for Fiction and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among other distinctions.