First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing Mitzi Rapkin

Blair Braverman is a writer, adventurer, and long-distance dogsledder who has completed some of the toughest sled dog races in the world. Her non-fiction books include Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube and Dogs on the Trail: A Year in the Life. She is a columnist and contributing editor for Outside magazine and a contributor to The New York Times, This American Life, Vogue, and many other venues. Her third book and debut novel is called Small Game. She lives in northern Wisconsin with her husband, Quince Mountain, and their team of sled dogs, called BraverMountain Mushing. 
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Stephanie Feldman is the author of the novels Saturnalia and The Angel of Losses, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award, and finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, Flash Fiction Online, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Rumpus, Uncharted Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Weird Horror, and more. She lives outside Philadelphia with her family.
 
 
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Jack Driscoll is a two-time NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient and the author of twelve books, including the story collections, Wanting Only to Be Heard, winner of the AWP Grace Paley Short Fiction Prize and The World of a Few Minutes Ago, winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award and Michigan Notable Book Award. Driscoll is the founding father of the Interlochen Center for the Arts creative writing department and now teaches in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program. His new book is called Twenty Stories.
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Chris Belcher is a writer, professor, and former sex worker. She completed a PhD in English at the University of Southern California, where she now teaches Gender and Sexuality Studies and in the Writing Program. Under her working name, Natalie West, she edited the acclaimed anthology We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival. Born and raised in West Virginia, she now lives in Los Angeles with her partner and two orange cats. Her memoir is called Pretty Baby.
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Chicago-born Peter Orner is the author of two novels: The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love, and three story collections Esther Stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others. Peter’s essay collection/ memoir, Am I Alone Here? Notes on Reading to Live and Living to Read was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His new collection is called Am I Alone Here?
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Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and lives in America. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; it was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her latest novel, The Furrows: An Elegy, was named by Time Magazine as a 100 Must-Read Books of 2022 and is also a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2022. She is currently a professor of English at Harvard.
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