Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music.

His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Zell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn, his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award.

Thomas French, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has spent the past quarter century redefining the possibilities of journalistic storytelling, both in his writing and in his teaching around the world.

French was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for “Angels & Demons,” a series that chronicled the murder of an Ohio woman and her two teenage daughters as they vacationed in Tampa. Two of his other serials, “A Cry in the Night” and “South of Heaven,” were later published as books. His most recent book, Zoo Story, explored the inner world of Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo.

Kelley Benham French was a 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Never Let Go,” a three-part series on the birth of her extremely premature daughter, Juniper, born at 23 weeks gestation. The series, published in the Tampa Bay Times, explored the science and ethics of saving babies born at the edge of viability, and told the story of Juniper's 196 days in the neonatal intensive care unit.

She is the recipient of a number of national awards, including SPJ's Sigma Delta Chi Award and Bronze Medalilion, Scripps Howard's Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Writing, The National Headliner Award, the Casey Medal, and the Dart Award.

Annie Liontas' debut novel, Let Me Explain You, was featured in The New York Times Book Review as Editor's Choice and was selected by the American Booksellers Association as a 2015 Indies Introduce Debut and Indies Next Title. She is the co-editor of the anthology, A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors, and the recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places and Harbors and Spirits, and three works of fiction: the acclaimed 2014 novel, Song of the Shank, nominated for the Dublin Literary Prize; the widely celebrated novel, Rails Under My Back, winner of The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction; and the story collection, Holding Pattern, which won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.

His other awards include a Whiting Writer's Award, the Chicago Public Library's Twenty-first Century Award, a Recognition for Pioneering Achievements in Fiction from the African American Literature and Culture Association, and the 2003 Charles Angoff Award for Fiction from The Literary Review.

Kevin Moffett is the author of two books, Permanent Visitors, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events. He is a frequent contributor to McSweeney’s; and, his stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Believer, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.

He has received the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, the Pushcart Prize, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. The Silent History, a collaborative multi-part narrative he co-wrote with Matt Derby and Eli Horowitz, was released as an app for mobile devices in 2012, and as a novel in 2014. It is currently in development at AMC.

Alan Michael Parker is the author of seven collections of poetry: Days Like Prose; The Vandals; Love Song with Motor Vehicles; A Peal of Sonnets, Elephants & Butterflies, Ten Days (with painter Herb Jackson), and Long Division. He has also written three novels: Cry Uncle; Whale Man; and, The Committee on Town Happiness.

His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Pleiades, and The Yale Review, among other magazines.

Josip Novakovich emigrated from Croatia at the age of 20. He is the author of April Fool's Day, a novel, and four story collections (Ex-Yu; Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters). He is also the author of three collections of narrative essays, as well as two books of practical criticism.

He has received the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award. In 2013, he was a Man Booker International Award finalist.

Erica Dawson is the author of two collections of poetry: The Small Blades Hurt, winner of the 2016 Poet’s Prize and the 2014 Florida Book Award Bronze Medal for Poetry; and, Big-Eyed Afraid, winner of the 2006 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.

Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, Literary Imagination, Unsplendid, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. Her poems have been featured in several anthologies, including three editions of Best American Poetry, American Society: What Poets See, Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic-Depression, and, The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets.Ame

John Davis Jr. is the first guest in the Alumni Reading Series, a new feature of the Lectores Series. He is the author of Middle Class American Proverb and other books of poetry. He has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize, and he holds an MFA from the University of Tampa. His writings are published in literary journals throughout the South and around the world.

He teaches English and Literature part time for Florida Southern College, and creative writing full time at Harrison School for the Arts.

Sandra Beasley is the author of three collections of poetry: Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and, Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. She has also published a memoir, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl..

Recent honors for her work include the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, the Cornell College Distinguished Visiting Writer position, the Lenoir-Rhyne University Writer in Residence position, the University of Mississippi Summer Poet in Residence position, and two D.C. Commission on the Arts and HumanitiesFellowships. Her prose has appeared in such venues asThe New York Times Magazine, Washington PostMagazine, and The Oxford American.

Brock Clarke is the author of five books of fiction, most recently, the novels The Happiest People in the World, Exley, and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, a national bestseller and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice pick.

His books have been reprinted in a dozen international editions, and have been awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship, and an Ohio Council for the Arts Fellowship, among others. Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, and numerous other publications.