2012 Keynote Speaker, Panel Moderator, Fiction Master Class Leader

Fred Leebron directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Queens. He also is a professor of English at Gettysburg College, and a former director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His novels include "Six Figures," "In the Middle of All This" and "Out West." He has received a Pushcart Prize, a Michener Award, a Stegner Fellowship, and an O. Henry Award. He is co-editor of "Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology" and co-author of "Creating Fiction: A Writer's Companion."

2012 Keynote Speaker

Elissa Schappell is the author of two books of fiction, most recently Blueprints for Building Better Girls, which was chosen as one of the "Best Books of the 2011" by The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and O Magazine, and Use Me, a New York Times "Notable Book," and an Los Angeles Times, "Best Book of the Year" and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. She is also co-editor with Jenny Offill of two anthologies, The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. Currently, she is a Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair where she writes the "Hot Type" and "Just My Type" book columns, and is a Founding-editor, now Editor-at-Large of Tin House magazine. Her short stories, non-fiction, book reviews and essays have appeared in such places as The Paris Review, The New York Times Book Review, BOMB, Vogue, SPIN, One Story and The Literarian. She teaches creative writing at NYU and in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

2012 Panelist, Nonfiction Master Class Leader 

Jessica Handler is the author of the forthcoming Writing Through Grief (St. Martins Press, 2013.) Her first book, Invisible Sisters: A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2009) is one of the "Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read." Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Brevity, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and More Magazine. Honors include residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writers Center, the 2009 Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellowship, and special mention for a 2008 Pushcart Prize. She is one of nine contemporary Southern women authors featured in the February 2011 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. www.jessicahandler.com

2012 Panelist, Poetry Master Class Leader 

Morri Creech is the Writer in Residence at Queens University of Charlotte, where he teaches courses in both the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program and in the Low-Residency M.F.A. Program. He has won a number of awards for his poetry, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Modern Poetry Foundation. He has published widely in such journals and magazines as "Poetry," "The Sewanee Review," "The New Republic," "The New Criterion," "The Southern Review," and "The Yale Review," and his work has been included in such anthologies as Penguin/Longman's "Poetry: a Pocket Anthology" and "The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets."