Special Program / The 2014 Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Conference (Archived Landing Page)

2014 Conference Presenters

About the Presenters

The Creative Nonfiction About the PresentersWriters' Conference presenters are journalists and best-selling authors and agents and editors and leaders in the field of creative nonfiction. But they're also professional teachers of the craft. 

Best of all, they are down-to-earth, friendly, and approachable; they'll tell you what they really think. The Creative Nonfiction Writers Conference features more than just classroom learning; this three-day event also provides plenty of opportunities for informal interactions and Q&A sessions.

To learn from and work with all of the conference presenters, register for all three days of the conference. 


Presenters

Lee Gutkind

Recognized by Vanity Fair as “the Godfather behind creative nonfiction,” Lee Gutkind is the author and editor of more than 25 books and founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University and a professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication there. 


Jane Bernstein

Jane Bernstein is the author of the memoirs Rachel in the World; Loving Rachel: A Family's Journey from Grief; and Bereft: A Sister’s Story. Her essays have been published in such places as the New York Times Magazine, Ms., and Prairie Schooner, and she wrote the screenplay for the Warner Brothers movie Seven Minutes in Heaven. She has been awarded two New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Fiction, two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships (one in fiction and one in media arts), two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Creative Writing, and a Fulbright Fellowship in 2004 to teach creative writing at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. She teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.


Hattie Fletcher

Hattie Fletcher has been the managing editor of Creative Nonfiction since 2004 and is the co-editor, with Lee Gutkind, of the forthcoming anthology True Stories, Well Told: from the First 20 Years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine.


Larry Levitsky

Larry Levitsky is a founder and CEO of InkShares, Inc. Announced in October of 2013, InkShares is a crowdfunded publishing company that aims to connect writers with readers and provide a set of developmental and marketing resources. Before founding InkShares, Larry was a business development consultant, with a focus on high-tech start-ups in online education. He has more than 20 years of executive management experience in online education, Internet technologies and book publishing, with such leading companies as Microsoft, Real Networks, and McGraw-Hill.

Read our interview with Larry >>


Emily Loose

Emily Loose is an independent book agent, editor and publishing consultant. She has worked as a senior acquisitions editor at three of the big five general trade publishing houses–Crown Publishers of Random House, The Penguin Press of Penguin Books, and Free Press of Simon & Schuster–signing and publishing seventeen New York Times bestsellers in that time; she has also worked for John Wiley & Sons and the Cambridge University Press. She has specialized in science, history current affairs, popular/social science, narrative nonfiction, and business.


Dinty W. Moore

Dinty W. Moore is the editor of Brevity magazine and author of numerous books, including The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life, Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, and the memoir Between Panic & Desire, winner of the Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize. He recently edited The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers.


Leslie Rubinkowski

Leslie Rubinkowski is the author of Impersonating Elvis and teaches in Goucher College's MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction. She has also taught at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies and worked for six newspapers over a twenty-year journalism career. Her essays have appeared in Harper's, River Teeth, and Chautauqua.


Anjali Sachdeva

Anjali Sachdeva worked for five years as a journalist in the United States and the Republic of Ireland before earning her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh, and is a regular instructor at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. Her recent work has appeared in Sonora Review, Gulf Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. She is the Co-director of Online Education at Creative Nonfiction.


Michael Simms

Michael Simms is the author of five books of poetry: Notes on Continuing Light, Migration, The Fire-eater, The Happiness of Animals, and Black Stone, as well as the co-author of The Longman Dictionary and Handbook of Poetry. He is the editor of over 100 collections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. He has taught writing and literature at the University of Iowa, Southern Methodist University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Duquesne University. Currently he teaches writing and publishing in the MFA Program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh.


Peter Trachtenberg

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of the memoir 7 Tattoos; The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning (Little Brown, 2008); and Another Insane Devotion (Da Capo, 2012), a book about the search for a missing cat that’s also an encoded exploration of love and marriage. His essays, journalism, and short fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, BOMB, TriQuarterly, O, The New York Times Travel Magazine, and A Public Space. His commentaries have been broadcast on NPR’S “All Things Considered.”


VIEW FULL CONFERENCE SCHEDULE »