First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Tom Perrotta is the bestselling author of eleven works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into Oscar-nominated films, and The Leftovers, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed, Peabody Award-winning HBO series. His other books include Bad Haircut, The Wishbones, Joe College, The Abstinence Teacher, Nine Inches, Mrs. Fletcher, and Tracy Flick Can’t Win. His new novel is Ghost Town. His work has been translated into a multitude of languages. Perrotta grew up in New Jersey and lives outside of Boston.
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Jim Newton is a journalist, teacher, and author of Justice for All, Eisenhower, Worthy Fights, and Man of Tomorrow. He was at the Los Angeles Times for twenty-five years as a reporter, bureau chief, editorial page editor, columnist, and editor at large. He lives in Pasadena, California, and teaches at UCLA, where he founded and edits the award-winning public affairs magazine Blueprint. His new book is Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead and an American Awakening.
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Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University. This is about his novel The Snow Queen recorded in 2014.
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Allegra Goodman is the author of Isola, Sam, Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Commentary, and Ploughshares and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories.  Her new novel is This is Not About Us.
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Rachel Khong’s first novel Goodbye, Vitamin, won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction. Her second novel, Real Americans, was a New York Times bestseller.  She was the managing and executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine and edited a cookbook called All About Eggs. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission district.  Her new short story collection is called My Dear You.
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