2024 Conference Faculty  

• Sarah Bedingfield

  Sarah has been an agent with Levine Greenberg Rostan since 2016. She represents high-concept literary novels, unique psychological suspense, big-hearted and surprising family dramas, historical fiction telling unfamiliar stories, and underrepresented and diverse voices.

  She reads most types of literary and upmarket commercial fiction, especially works that show powerful imagination, revelatory character arcs, compulsive plotting and unpredictable points of view illustrating important themes. Emotional, inventive stories told through nuances of motherhood, human connection or feminist issues, novels with light speculative elements, and darker narratives that build can’t-look-away tension tend to be her favorites, particularly those set in wild, unexpected places. She loves anything that highlights nature or the environment in some fashion, especially in extremes. Sarah does not typically represent genre fiction.

   

• Sarah Bowlin

  Sarah Bowlin joined Aevitas Creative Management as an agent in 2017. Before becoming an agent, she spent a decade as an editor of literary fiction and nonfiction, first at Riverhead Books and most recently at Henry Holt & Company. 

  She is interested in work that simultaneously captivates and challenges and in her time as an editor she worked with many acclaimed and award-winning writers including Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Sheila Heti, Salvatore Scibona, Helen Phillips, Rachel Khong, and Julie Buntin. As an agent, she works with emerging and established voices including the Giller Prize-winning Souvankham Thammavongsa, PEN Bingham Award-winning novelist Vanessa Veselka, and acclaimed voices in fiction and nonfiction including Aysegul Savas, Lynn Steger Strong, Gene Kwak, Ashley Nelson Levy, Jasmin Hakes, R.K. Russell, Sabrina Orah Mark, Elisa Albert, Ismail Muhammad, Janika Oza, and Kevin Nguyen, among others. She is interested in bold voices and work that bends genre or forms—specifically stories of strong or difficult women and unexpected narratives of place, identity, and the shifting ways we see ourselves and each other. Originally from the South, she now lives in Los Angeles.

• Libba Bray

  Libba Bray is the New York Times bestselling author of The Gemma Doyle trilogy (A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, The Sweet Far Thing); the Michael L. Printz Award-winning Going Bovine; Beauty Queens, an L.A. Times Book Prize finalist; and The Diviners series. She is originally from Texas but makes her home in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband, son, and two sociopathic cats.  

• Billy Collins

  Billy Collins, no stranger to the Southampton Writers’ Conference, is a former distinguished professor at Lehman College (CUNY).  He has also been a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, Ohio State, Beloit College and Arizona State. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he served as U.S.  Poet Laureate.  His latest collection of poems, Musical Tables, was published last year.

• Crystal Hana Kim

  Crystal Hana Kimis the author of the novels The Stone Home (William Morrow, 2024) and If You Leave Me (William Morrow, 2018), which was named a best book of the year by more than a dozen publications. Kim is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and the winner of a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family. 

• Matthew Klam

  Matthew Klam is the author of the novel, Who Is Rich?, a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book, nominated for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, and Sam the Cat, winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for a Debut Short Story Collection, and a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, First Fiction. He's a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts. His writing has been featured in such places as The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New York Times Magazine, The O'Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction.

• Victor Manibo

  Victor Manibo is a Filipino speculative fiction writer living in New York. As a queer immigrant and a person of color, he writes about people who live these identities as they navigate imaginary worlds. A 2022 Lambda Literary Emerging Voices Fellow, he is the author of the science fiction noir novel THE SLEEPLESS. His next novel, ESCAPE VELOCITY, is forthcoming from Erewhon Books in Spring 2024. Aside from fiction, he also spins fantastical tales in his career as a lawyer. He lives in Queens with his husband, their dog, and their two cats. Find him online at victormanibo.com and on most social media platforms @victormanibo.

• Susan Scarf Merrell

  Susan Scarf Merrell is the author of Shirley: A Novel, now a major motion picture starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. She is also the author of A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She co-directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel incubator program, BookEnds, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She served as fiction editor of The Southampton Review. Essays, book reviews and short fiction appear most recently in The New York Times, Newsday, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common Online, The Washington Post, and East Magazine.

• Diana Khoi Nguyen

  Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of the chaplet Unless (Belladonna*, 2019), and poetry collections: Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and recipient of the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery and Colorado Book Awards, and Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024). Her writing appears in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Asymptote; her video work was exhibited at the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art in 2023. A MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, as well as a member of the Vietnamese diasporic artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s), Nguyen’s other honors include winning a "Discovery" Poetry Contest, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an artist-in-residence at Brown University. Currently, she teaches creative writing in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA program and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

• Nadia Owusu

  Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urbanist. Her memoir, Aftershocks, was selected as a best book of 2021 by over a dozen publications, including Time, Vogue, Esquire, and the BBC, and has been translated into five languages. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick, named one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, and selected by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai for her Literati book club.

  Nadia won a Whiting Award in nonfiction and has received fellowships from Yaddo and Art Omi. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Granta, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, and others. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University and the Mountainview MFA program. 

• Heidi E. Y. Stemple

  Heidi didn’t want to be a writer when she grew up. In fact, after she graduated from college, she became a probation officer in Florida. It wasn’t until she was 28 years old that she gave in and joined the family business, publishing her first short story in a book called Famous Writers and Their Kids Write Spooky Stories. The famous writer was her mom, author Jane Yolen. Since then, she has published more than thirty-five books and numerous short stories and poems, mostly for children.

  Heidi lives and writes on a big old farm in Massachusetts that she shares with one very large cat who lives inside, and a dozen deer, a family of bears, three coyotes, two bobcats, a gray fox, tons of birds, and some very fat groundhogs who live outside. Once a year she calls owls for the Audubon Christmas Bird Count.

• Frederic Tuten

  Frederic Tuten grew up in the Bronx and later lived in Latin and South America and Paris. He wrote about Brazilian CinemaNovo and taught film and literature at the University of Paris 8.

  He has written about art, literature and film in ArtForum, The New York Times, Vogue; was an actor in an Alain Resnais movie; taught with Paul Bowles in Morocco; co-wrote the cult-classic Possession, and along the way, earned three Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry award, a PhD in literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  He is the author of five novels (The Adventures of Mao on the Long March; Tintin in the New World; Tallien: A Brief Romance; Van Gogh’s Bad Café; The Green Hour), a memoir (My Young Life) and a book of inter-related short stories: Self Portraits. In 2022, he released two books: a collection of short stories, The Bar at Twilight, and On a Terrace in Tangier, a book of forty drawings and stories. 

• Meg Wolitzer

  Meg Wolitzer’s novels include  The Female Persuasion,  The Interestings,  The Uncoupling,  The Ten-Year Nap,  The Position, and  The Wife, which was made into a film that garnered Glenn Close an Academy Award nomination. Wolitzer, who has also written books for young readers, was guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017.  Her short fiction has appeared in  McSweeney’s, Ploughshares,  The Pushcart Prize, and  The Best American Short Stories. She has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Skidmore College, and the 92nd Street Y, and along with singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, Wolitzer was a guest artist in the Princeton Atelier at Princeton University.

• Emma Walton Hamilton

  Emma Walton Hamilton is a best-selling and award-winning author, editor, stage, television and podcast writer/producer and arts educator. Together with her mother, Julie Andrews, she has co-authored over thirty books for children and adults, nine of which have been on the New York Times best-seller list, including The Very Fairy Princess series (#1 NY Times Bestseller), Andrews’ second memoir, Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years and most recently, The First Notes: The Story of Do, Re, Mi.A Bridport Prize-winning poet, Emma recently published a poetry collection entitled Door to Door (Andrews McMeel Publishing) and her book for parents and caregivers, Raising Bookworms: Getting Kids Reading for Pleasure and Empowerment, premiered as a #1 best-seller on Amazon.com in the literacy category and won a Parent’s Choice Gold Medal.

  Emma was a two-time Emmy Award nominee for her role as Executive Producer and Writer for Julie’s Greenroom, a children’s television program about the performing arts created for Netflix, starring Julie Andrews and co-produced by the Jim Henson Company. Emma is also a Grammy Award-winning voice-over artist, having provided voicing for numerous audiobooks, including Julie Andrews’ Collection of Poems, Songs and Lullabies (2010 Grammy Award, Best Spoken Word Album for Children), as well as numerous radio, television, theater and industrial spots. She and her mother co-host and co-produce Julie’s Library, a story-time podcast for family audiences produced by American Public Media.

  A faculty member for Stony Brook University’s MFA in Creative Writing and Literature, Emma teaches all forms of children’s book writing and serves as Director of the annual Children’s Literature Conference, as well as Executive Director of the Young Artists and Writers Project (YAWP), an interdisciplinary writing program for middle and high school students.  

• Jade Wong-Baxter

  Jade Wong-Baxter joined the Frances Goldin Literary Agency in 2021, after spending three years at Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents. She received her B.A. in English Literature and Chinese from Vassar College in 2017. Jade is looking for adult literary/upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction, with an emphasis on narratives by and about people of color, as well as the perspectives of marginalized identities. 

  In fiction: Jade is drawn to stories that combine a compelling voice with clear narrative momentum. She particularly enjoys coming-of-age narratives; novels exploring queer identity; stories set within a specific subculture or hidden world; grounded speculative (no high fantasy or science fiction, please); a strong sense of place; AAPI and Asian diaspora stories; and novels about immigrant families. In nonfiction: across genres, Jade enjoys projects that weave together specific personal narrative with a broader sociological curiosity. She is particularly looking for memoir, cultural criticism, social justice-oriented journalism, linked essay collections, and AAPI history or culture. 

Other guests include:

Sarah Bedingfield - Agent - Levine Greenberg Rostan

Sarah Bowlin - Agent -Aevitas

Jade Wong-Baxter - Agent - Frances Goldin

Susan Scarf Merrell - Author, director of BookEnds

Meg Wolitzer - Author

and more