Go Guru Creators & Guests

Patrick Nathan is an author.

Richard Bausch is an author of short stories and novels. He is also Professor in the Writing Program at Chapman University in Orange, California.Bausch's first novel, "Real Presence," was published in 1980. He has published twelve novels, eight short story collections, and one volume of poetry and prose. He co-edited or edited the 6th, 7th, and 8th editions of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.Bausch received his B.A. from Rhode Island University, and his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Luis Alberto Urrea is a poet, novelist, and essayist.

Andre Dubus III is an author. He teaches full-time at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.Dubus III's first novel, "Bluesman," was published in 1993.Dubus III received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin.

Joan Silber is an author, and a teacher of fiction at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program.Silber's stories have appeared in Tin House, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. Her first novel, "Household Words," was published in 1980. She has written nine books of fiction, and one book of nonfiction, "The Art of Time in Fiction."

Chris A. Bohjalian is an author and playwright. He is best known for his 2018 novel, "The Flight Attendant," which was made into a television series.Bohjalian has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, and The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. He was a weekly columnist in Vermont for The Burlington Free Press from 1992 through 2015. His first book, "A Killing in the Real World," was published in 1988. He has published more than 20 novels.Bohjalian received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College.

Karen E. Bender is an author of short stories and novels, and an editor. She is Fiction Editor of the online literary magazine Scoundrel Time. She is a professor of creative writing at Alma College, and has taught fiction writing at the Writer's Voice program in New York, as well as the MFA programs at Antioch Los Angeles, Chatham University, Tunghai University in Taiwan, and the University of North Carolina Wilmington.Bender's short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Story, The Kenyon Review, Guernica, Narrative, The Harvard Review and The Iowa Review. Her fiction has been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South and The Pushcart Prize series, and has been read as part of the "Selected Short" series. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Real Simple, and O magazine.Bender's story collection "Refund" was shortlisted for the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her first book, the novel "Like Normal People," was published in 2000 and was both a Los Angeles Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. She co-edited the nonfiction anthology "Choice."

Maile Meloy is an author of short stories and novels.Meloy’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and Best American Short Stories, and on This American Life and Selected Shorts. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Slate, Sunset, and O, and she wrote for the Netflix series “The Society.” Her first book, the collection “Half in Love,” was published in 2002.Meloy has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two California Book Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Karen Russell is an author. She won the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the “5 under 35” prize from the National Book Foundation, the NYPL Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and is a former fellow of the Cullman Center and the American Academy in Berlin. She currently holds the Endowed Chair at Texas State University’s MFA program.

Sue Halpern is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and author of the book, Summer Hours at the Rob.

Richard F. H. Polt is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University, typewriter enthusiast active on the Typosphere, and former editor of the quarterly ETCetera publication about manual typewriters.