MFA: Upcoming Guests

Charles Baxter is the author of seven novels, three essay collections, three books of poems, and six collections of short stories, including Harmony of the World, winner of the AWP Fiction Award. He is also editor or co-editor of several wide-ranging books, including Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction & the Writing Life; The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting; and The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot, winner of the 2008 Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction. 

After a year of teaching high school in Pinconning, Michigan, Charles began his university teaching career at Wayne State University in Detroit. He then moved to the University of Michigan, where for many years he directed the MFA in Creative Writing Program. He was also a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa and at Stanford. Later he went on to teach at the University of Minnesota and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He retired in 2020. 

Charles was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985. His short story “Snow” was included in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, edited in 1998 by R.V. Cassill and Joyce Carol Oates. He received the PEN/Malamud Award in 2021 for Excellence in the Short Story. His novel The Feast of Love—a National Book Award Finalist in 2000—was made into a feature film starring Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear a few years later.

Jedediah Berry’s latest novel, The Naming Song, won the Massachusetts Book Award for fiction and was an LA Times Book Prize finalist. His first novel, The Manual of Detection, won the Crawford Award and the Hammett Prize and was adapted for broadcast by BBC Radio 4. He is the author of numerous stories and interactive works, including a story in cards, The Family Arcana. He is the co-creator, with poet Andrew McAlpine, of the Wildendrem adventure game setting, which began with the Ennie Award-winning The Valley of Flowers. Together with his partner, writer Emily Houk, he runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and games in unusual shapes. He lives in Western Massachusetts.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar’s poetry books include The Hour Between Dog and Wolf; Small Gods of Grief, winner of the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry; A New Hunger, an ALA Notable Book; and These Many Rooms. Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily, The Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day,” and in reviews such as Orion, Georgia Review, Vox Populi, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. Garrison Keillor read four of her poems on NPR’s “A Writer’s Almanac.” With her husband, the poet Kurt Brown, she translated a book by Flemish poet Herman de Coninck: The Plural of Happiness. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the James Dickey Poetry Prize, she edited five anthologies, taught at Emerson College, Sarah Lawrence College, and UCSB—and she is a very proud member of the founding faculty of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. Lately, her New & Selected, came out in 2024. She lives in California and served as Santa Barbara’s Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021.

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer, visual artist, and educator. He is the author of two poetry books: the full-length collection Common Grace and Ubasute, winner of the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. He is also the author and illustrator of the nonfiction book Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life. His honors include a MacDowell Stanford Calderwood Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a Connecticut Office of the Arts Artist Fellowship Award, and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature. His work has appeared in the podcast anthology Poetry Unbound and in the online anthologies Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Most recently his poem “Inheritance” was included in the anthology The Big Brutal Act, and “Dad Called it Camp” was included in The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration. Literary journals that have published his work include Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, The Cincinnati Review, Consequence, Shenandoah, Gordon Square Review, and Cave Wall. Caycedo-Kimura earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and currently teaches at University of Hartford and Trinity College.

Zoraida Córdova started writing when she was thirteen years old and hasn’t stopped. As a teen, she attended the National Book Foundation’s writing camp (directed by Meg Kearney, now the Solstice MFA Program’s director). She went on to study English Literature and Latino Studies at Hunter College and the University of Montana in Missoula. Since 2012, Zoraida has written more than two dozen novels and short stories, including The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, Valentina Salazar Is Not a Monster Hunter, and Star Wars: The High Republic: Convergence. Her 2016 novel Labyrinth Lost, book one in the Brooklyn Brujas trilogy, won an International Latino Book Award. When she’s not writing, Zoraida serves on the board of We Need Diverse Books and develops intellectual property for Cake Creative & Electric Postcard Entertainment as a Tastemaker. She’s the editor of the SFF anthology, Reclaim the Stars, co-editor of the bestselling anthology Vampires Never Get Old, and occasionally writes adult romance novels as Zoey Castile and other pseudonyms. Zoraida was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and calls New York City home. When she’s not working, she’s roaming the world in search of magical stories.

Anne-Marie Oomen is the author of four memoirs: Love, Sex and 4-H; Pulling Down the Barn; House of Fields; and As Long As I Know You: The Mom Book (the latter three all Michigan Notable Books). She also authored An American Map: Essays, The Long Fields: Essays, and a full-length collection of poetry, Uncoded Woman. She also co-wrote The Lake Michigan Mermaid: A Tale in Poems and The Lake Huron Mermaid: A Tale in Poems with Linda Nemec Foster. She won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs' Sue William Silverman Nonfiction Award for As Long As I Know You. She is also represented in New Poems of the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry. She edited Looking Over My Shoulder: Reflections on the Twentieth Century, an anthology of seniors’ essays funded by the Michigan Humanities Council. She has written seven plays, including the award-winning Northern Belles (inspired by oral histories of women farmers), and most recently, Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern, 2012 winner of the CTAM contest. She adapted the meditations of Gwen Frostic for “Chaotic Harmony,” a choreopoem. She is founding editor of Dunes Review and former president of Michigan Writers, Inc. Anne-Marie served as an instructor at the Lasell University's Solstice MFA in Creative Writing in Massachusetts and appears at conferences throughout the country. She and her husband, David Early, built their home near Empire, Michigan.

Mary Simmons is a queer poet from Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of Mother, Daughter, Augur. She earned her MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she also served as the managing editor for Mid-American Review. Her work has appeared in The Baltimore Review, ONE ART, trampset, Moon City Review, Variant Lit, The Shore, and elsewhere. She lives with her cat, Suki, at the edge of the woods.

Richard Smith worked in publishing for twelve years after getting his undergrad degree in English. In his thirties, he retooled as a psychologist and since then has maintained a clinical practice in Washington, D.C. He is on the board of the Center for Existential Studies and Psychotherapy, for which he periodically gives talks on existential themes in plays and novels, from Sophocles to Ta-Nehisi Coates. His first book, Not a Soul but Us, won the 2021 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and was released in 2022 by Bauhan Publishing. The book is a story in sonnets about a twelve-year-old shepherd boy orphaned and abandoned during the mid-14th-century plague pandemic. In spring 2026, Bauhan published his second book, Beyond Where Words Can Go—another historical narrative in sonnets, tracing a group of Tudor-era Benedictine monks before, during, and after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and England’s lurches through the Protestant Reformation.