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ARISA WHITE is a Cave Canem fellow, Sarah Lawrence College alumna, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of the poetry chapbooks Disposition for Shininess, Post Pardon, and Black Pearl. She was selected by the San Francisco Bay Guardian for the 2010 Hot Pink List and is a member of the PlayGround writers’ pool; her play Frigidare was staged for the 15th Annual Best of PlayGround Festival. A native New Yorker, living in Oakland, California, Arisa is a faculty advisor at Goddard College and was a visiting scholar at San Francisco State University’s The Poetry Center, where she developed a special collections on Black Women Poets in the Poetry Archives. Published by Virtual Artists Collective, her debut collection, Hurrah’s Nest, was a finalist for the 2013 Wheatley Book Awards, 82nd California Book Awards, and nominated for a 44th NAACP Image Awards. Her second collection, A Penny Saved, inspired by the true-life story of Polly Mitchell, was published by Willow Books, an imprint of Aquarius Press in 2012. Forthcoming in fall 2016 is the full-length collection You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened from Augury Books.

Craft tip: “It’s really important to talk out loud…when you’ve hit a wall, I think it’s good to imagine that wall as something you can speak to…as a conversation to be had with yourself.”

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Wendy C. Ortiz is a Los Angeles native. She is the author of Excavation: A Memoir (Future Tense Books, 2014), Hollywood Notebook (Writ Large Press, 2015), and the forthcoming Bruja (Civil Coping Mechanisms, Oct. 31, 2016).

Her work has been profiled or featured in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and the National Book Critics Circle Small Press Spotlight blog. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Hazlitt, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, Fanzine, and a year-long series appeared at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Craft tip (via working in an online workshop with Lydia Yuknavitch): Look at endings as a kind of death.

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Bio: Esmé Weijun Wang is an award-winning author and advocate. At esmewang.com, she provides resources that assist aspiring and working writers in developing resilience on the path to building a creative legacy. Wang’s emphasis on resilience originates from her own experiences as a writer, having learned the importance of adapting to difficult times from living with schizoaffective disorder and late-stage Lyme disease. She studied creative writing and psychology at Yale and Stanford, and received her MFA from the top-tier Creative Writing program at the University of Michigan. The author of THE BORDER OF PARADISE (Unnamed Press, 2016), as well as the chapbook LIGHT GETS IN, Wang has written for Catapult, Hazlitt, Lit Hub, Salon, and Lenny, and been written about in the New Yorker Online, Fusion, and the New York Times. She delights in organizational tools, handwritten letters, and her home base of San Francisco. Find her e-letter, as well as the complimentary Creative Legacy Check-In, at esmewang.com/e-letter.

UPDATE: On July 6, 2016, just as this episode went up, she won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize for her upcoming book, The Collected Schizophrenias. Congratulations, Esmé!

Craft Tip: Esmé attributes this idea to Professor Elizabeth Tallent (Stanford): If you feel an instinct to go toward a certain plot point or even a line or paragraph, challenge yourself. Often, the plot point you’re heading toward is actually a cliche and the reason you’re headed that way is that it’s the easiest way.

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Adrienne Celt was born in Seattle, WA and has lived in a great many places since then. (A non-exhaustive list: Iowa, California, Chicago, and St. Petersburg, Russia.) Currently, she resides in Tucson, AZ where she welcomes the summer rainstorms as distractions from the fact that there is no ocean for hundreds of miles.
Her debut novel The Daughters (W.W. Norton/Liveright 2015) won the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR. Her writing has also been recognized by the PEN/O. Henry Prize, a Glenna Luschei award, and residencies at Ragdale and the Willapa Bay AiR. She’s published fiction in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, Epoch,Prairie Schooner, and Ecotone, among other places, and her comics and essays can be found in The Rumpus, The Toast, The Millions, the Tin House Open Bar, and elsewhere. She publishes a webcomic (most) every Wednesday at loveamongthelampreys.com.

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Cari Luna is the author of The Revolution of Every Day, which won the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Jacobin, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, PANK, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

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