2025 Conference Presenters
Prepare to embark on a literary journey like never before as we proudly introduce the extraordinary authors headlining the WriteAngles Conference. Our lineup of presenters, agents and teachers represents a diverse tapestry of storytelling prowess, each weaving narratives that captivate, inspire, and resonate with the essence of the written word. From seasoned novelists to groundbreaking poets, our authors bring a wealth of experience and creativity to the heart of WriteAngles.
Here are the different Authors, Agents and Teachers and their roles in the Conference:
Writing the Future
When And Why do I need an Agent?
Publishing for Poets
- Anita Pappas-Raposa | Poetry as Inspiration
- Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa | Writing Against Erasure
- Jennifer Jacobson | Revision/Re-Vision: Making our Work Stronger
- Lindsay Whiting | Why Self-Publishing?
- Michael Favala Goldman | I feel a Draft: Poetry and Close Reading
- Tolley Jones | Start in the Middle: The Power of the Small Moment
- Tzivia Gover | No Dream Deferred Fostering diversity and cultural inclusion through Dream–Writing
- Joy Baglio | Embracing the Strange: An introduction to Speculative
- J. A. Mcintosh | Marketing from the First Work You Write
- Lisken Van Pelts Dus | Freedom Through Constraints
- J. D. Davids | Generating Liberation: Embodied Strategies for Writing in Repressive Times
- Anne Stuart | Truth Be Told: The Art of Standup Storytelling
- Áine Greaney: Writing Personal Essays that Sing and Zing
- Christopher J. Sparks | Through the Thicket : Writing with Precision and Presence
- Jan Maher | We Was Framed!
- Cheryl J. Fish | In 1000 words or Less: Writing Compelling Flash Fiction Now
- Sasha Aronson | Writing With AI
Panel Discussion
Writing the Future
Moderator: Mark Schlack
Panelists: Allegra Hyde, Marisa Williams, Steven Brewer, Andrea Hairston
Mark Schlack writes sci-fi and spec fic in Northampton, MA. His work includes Replay Earth and the upcoming The Turn. He has written and edited extensively about advanced technologies for various magazines and websites over the last 35 years.
Allegra Hyde is the author of the story collection The Last Catastrophe, an Editors’ Choice selection at The New York Times and a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award. Her debut novel Eleutheria was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize, and featured on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Her first story collection, Of This New World, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Hyde has also received four Pushcart Prizes and the O. Henry Prize. Her work has been selected for anthologies including The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Travel Writing, and Best of the Net. She has received fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Artist Residency, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Elizabeth George Foundation, the U.S. Fulbright Commission, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Smith College.
Marisa Williams grew up in Texas and Louisiana. They received an undergraduate education at Ball State University, as well as earned a Master of Arts in English from Oregon State University. Their academic interests encompass Horror Noire, Southern Gothic Literature and Postcolonialism. Marisa is a current PhD student of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Steven Brewer is a teacher of scientific writing at UMass Amherst, Secretary of SFWA, and author of Revin’s Heart, Better Angels: Tour de Force, and the forthcoming A Familiar Problem, published by Water Dragon Publishing. Brewer identifies diverse obsessions: interests in natural history, life science, and environmentalism; a passion for languages; a fascination with Japanese culture; and a mania for information technology and the Internet. Brewer lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with his extended family.
Andrea Hairston ran away from the physics lab to the theatre when she was a young thing and has been a scientist, artiste, and hoodoo conjurer ever since. She is a novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, and L. Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor Emerita of Theatre and Africana Studies at Smith College. Novels: Mindscape, reissued by Tor/Macmillan, August, 2025, a Carl Brandon Award winner and finalist for the Phillip K. Dick and Otherwise Awards; Archangels of Funk, shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction; Will Do Magic For Small Change, a New York Times Editor’s pick and finalist for the Mythopoeic, Lambda, and Otherwise Awards; Redwood and Wildfire, a Washington Post Best Book of 2022, Otherwise and Carl Brandon Award winner; Master of Poisons on the 2020 Kirkus Review’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. Short fiction appears in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future; New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color; Trouble the Waters; and Lightspeed Magazine. Plays and essays appear in Lonely Stardust. Andrea bikes at night year-round, meeting bears, multi-legged creatures of light and breath, and the occasional shooting star.
Panel Discussion
When and why do I need an agent?
Moderator: Julie Schlack
Panelists: Sorche Fairbank, Jeff Herman, and Mariah Stovall
Julie Wittes Schlack is a regular contributor to Cognoscenti, NPR station WBUR’s journal of ideas and opinions, the author of This All-at-Onceness (Pact Press, an Imprint of Regal House), a linked essay collection named one of Kirkus Review’s 100 Best Indie Books of 2019, and of the novel Burning and Dodging (Black Rose Writing, 2022).
Sorche Fairbank is a small, selective agency and member of AALA (formerly the AAR), the Author’s Guild, the Agents Round Table, PEN, and Grub Street’s Literary Advisory Council, Fairbank Literary Representation is happily in its twenty-second year. Clients range from first-time authors to international best-sellers, prize-winning journalists to professionals at the top of their fields. They can be found with all the major publishers, as well as in the New York Times, Harper’s, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Granta, Best American Short Stories, and more.
Jeff Herman opened his literary agency (The Jeff Herman Agency, LLC) in the mid-1980s while in his mid-20s. Since then he has made over one-thousand book deals, including many bestsellers. His own books include JEFF HERMAN’S GUIDE TO PUBLISHERS, EDITORS & LITERARY AGENTS (more than 500,000 copies sold), and WRITE THE PERFECT BOOK PROPOSAL (coauthored with Deborah Herman). Herman has presented hundreds of workshops and keynotes about writing and publishing, and has been interviewed for dozens of publications and programs.
Mariah Stovall is an agent at Trellis Literary Management, which she joined upon its founding in 2021. She previously worked at the agencies Howland Literary and Writers House and the publishers Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Gallery Books. She represents literary and upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction. Across genres, she gravitates toward outsiders and stylish, inventive storytelling. She represented the debut novels by Mai Sennaar, Melissa Mogollon, and Chantal V. Johnson, all of which were short- or longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She’s based in Newark, New Jersey.
Workshop Facilitators
Gail Thomas has published six books of poetry, most recently Trail of Roots and Leaving Paradise. Her poems appear widely in journals and anthologies. Awards include the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press for Odd Mercy, Narrative Poetry Prize from Naugatuck River Review, the Massachusetts Center for the Book’s “Must Read” for Waving Back, and Editor’s Prize from Quartet. She teaches for Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshops and supports immigrant and refugee families in Western Massachusetts.
Workshop: Publishing for Poets
Anita Pappas-Raposa is a writer of nonfiction and poetry. She resides in Agawam and Osterville, Ma. Her most recent work is a collection of essays and poems reflecting and observing life as a recent widow entitled Before and After. Previous writing includes The Long Way Home and My Mother’s Journey. Excerpts from these works have been published in The Springfield Republican, The Cape Cod Times and WriteAngles Journal. As a retired English instructor, she is excited to present a workshop connecting the inspiration of poetry to other writing styles.
Workshop: Poetry as Inspiration
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s first novel, Daughters of the Stone, was shortlisted for the 2010 PEN Bingham Award. Her second novel, A Woman of Endurance, (Spanish edition: Indómita), Amistad, HarperCollins 2022 was selected to represent Puerto Rico in the Library of Congress Great Reads, Great Places initiative at the 2024 National Book Festival in Washington, DC. The English-language edition won the 2024 International Latino Award Bronze medal for historical fiction and the ILA Gold Medal for best Spanish-language translation. (Aurora Lauzardo Ugarte, translator)
Workshop: Writing Against Erasure
Jennifer Jacobson’s writing appears in the Master’s Review, Chronogram, Linea, Switch, jubilat, (and elsewhere) with honorable mentions from Glimmer Train, Hunger Mountain, Symphony Space, and the Tennessee Williams Festival. The recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Creative Teaching Fellowship and the National Storytelling Network’s Brimstone Award, Jennifer is completing her first novel about love, rebellion, and the deadly consequences of lying. The story is set in Hangzhou, China, where Jennifer taught in 1989 and witnessed pro-democracy efforts that led to the massacre of innocent protesters in Tiananmen Square. Jennifer is currently developing a staged reading of her short story, “Flight.”
Lindsay Whiting is a Book Coach who helps self-publishers plan, prepare, publish, and promote nonfiction books. She has worked in print and publishing for the whole of her career, including newspaper and book publishing, print production and sales, digital prepress education, and marketing. Lindsay is also an experienced collage artist. Her first book, Living into Art, Journeys Through Collage is the story of her journey. Living into Art was named a Finalist in ForeWord’s Book of the Year, and also chosen as Honorable Mention in the inspirational category of the Annual Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Book Awards.
Workshop: Why Self-Publish?
Michael Favala Goldman is an award-winning poet, jazz clarinetist, and translator of Danish literature. Michael’s nine books of original poetry include Small Sovereign and What Minimal Joy which took first place at the 2022 Los Angeles Book Festival and the 2024 IPNE Awards respectively. Among his seventeen translated books is Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, which made the New York Times Best Books of the Century as book three of The Copenhagen Trilogy. His work has appeared in scores of publications including The New Yorker, Rattle, and The Harvard Review. He has been running poetry critique groups monthly since 2018.
Since 2020 Tolley Jones has been writing a monthly, regionally syndicated column for the Daily Hampshire Gazette about living as a Black woman in New England. She has worked for thirty years with children and families, supporting early literacy. Tolley earned a BA in English from Smith College in 1995. A member of the Straw Dog Writers Guild, Tolley was the featured writer in the Guild’s “Voices of Resistance” series in March 2025. She is currently compiling a collection of her essays.
Workshop: Start in the Middle: The Power of the Small Moment.
Tzivia Gover is a certified dreamwork professional and an award–winning author of eight books, including books about sleep, dreams, and everyday joy. She taught in adult basic education and literacy settings for over 20 years, including creating a poetry program at the Holyoke Care Center which was recognized with an award by the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities. She has taught developmental writing at the college level, and for the Clemente Course for the Humanities in conjunction with Bard College and The Care Center. She has her MFA in writing from Columbia University.
Workshop: No Dream Deferred Fostering diversity and cultural inclusion through Dream–Writing
Joy Baglio is the founder of Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, a literary arts organization offering writing workshops based in Northampton MA and virtually. Her short stories are widely published and forthcoming in journals such as One Story, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere – including two stories optioned for film/TV. She’s received fellowships from Yaddo, Ragdale, The Kerouac Project, The Elizabeth George Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee, among others. Joy holds an MFA from The New School and is represented by Peter Steinberg, at United Talent Agency & Sean Daily Hotchkiss, for film/TV.
Workshop: Embracing the Strange: An Introduction to Speculative Fiction
J. A. Mcintosh is the author of Swift River Secrets, a novel about the murder of a docent at the Swift River Valley Historical Society (SWVHS) in New Salem, MA. She also writes the Meredith, Massachusetts series about families in a central Massachusetts town. She has a B.A. in journalism and mass communication; a MFA in popular fiction; and a J.D. degree. She is the president of the SRVHS. Ms. McIntosh is also a member of the Straw Dog Writers Guild, Mystery Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime.
Workshop: Marketing from the First Word You Write
Lisken Van Pelt Dus’s most recent full-length collection of poems, How Many Hands to Home (Mayapple Press 2025), joins What We’re Made Of (Cherry Grove 2016) and two chapbooks, Everywhere at Once and Letters to My Dead. Raised in England, the US, and Mexico, she now lives western Massachusetts, where she teaches writing, languages, and martial arts. She loves leading workshops and teaching poetry.
Workshop: Freedom Through Constraints
JD Davids (he/him) is a Brooklyn-based, chronically ill and disabled queer writer and parent, HIV and disability justice activist, research advocate, harm reductionist and sexual liberationist. He shares stories and strategies through The Cranky Queer Guide to Chronic Illness. At CUNY Graduate Center’s Biography and Memoir program, he’s writing a memoir on becoming a sex god during the COVID-19 pandemic and conducting archival research on under-acknowledged HIV and queer activism. He’s a member of the At Louis Place writing community and the What Would an HIV Doula Do collective
Workshop: Generating Liberation: Embodied Strategies for Writing in Repressive Times
Anne Stuart is a writer, editor, and adjunct college professor. She is currently an editor at MIT Sloan Management Review. Previously, she was a senior editorial staffer for several national publications, including Inc., CIO, and Harvard Magazine; earlier, she was a reporter for several daily newspapers and The Associated Press. Her freelance work has appeared in many other publications. As a stand-up storyteller, she’s been featured on NPR’s Moth Radio Hour and PBS’s Stories From the Stage. She’s also told stories live on stage at Moth StorySlams around Boston, at Speak Up Storytelling in Hartford, and at other venues.
Áine Greaney is an Irish-born writer who lives in Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Creative Nonfiction, Salon, The New York Times, Books Ireland, Another Chicago Magazine and others. She teaches writing at libraries, conferences and wellness/healthcare organizations. She combines creative writing with her day job writing for a research center at a large, Massachusetts hospital.
Christopher J. Sparks is a writer, historian, and web strategist. As historian of Northampton State Hospital, he has conducted extensive oral history interviews and archival research, blending narrative history with personal reflection. His memoir-in-progress, Minotaur, explores themes of identity and memory. Christopher founded Valley Society, a Black writers guild, and served as president of Straw Dog Writers Guild. His work has been featured in local historical archives, and he has developed innovative methods for observational writing through his exploration practice. A former web strategist at UMass, he crafts content strategies and builds communities around complex narratives
Workshop: Through the Thicket: Writing with Precision and Presence
Jan Maher‘s novels, Heaven, Indiana and Earth As It Is and short-story collection The Persistence of Memory and Other Stories have each been designated Kirkus Reviews “Best Of.” Her award-winning plays include “Intruders,” “Ismene,” and “Widow’s Walk.” Books for educators are Most Dangerous Women: Bringing History to Life through Readers’ Theater; and History in the Present Tense: Engaging Students through Inquiry and Action (with Douglas Selwyn). She is co-founder and co-coordinator of The LAVA Center, a community arts and humanities center in Greenfield, where her play As We Were: Nine Days in October debuted as a staged reading in 2023.
Workshop: We Was Framed!
Cheryl J. Fish published her debut novel, Off the Yoga Mat, in 2022. An expanded edition of her poetry collection Crater & Tower, poems reflecting on the Mount St. Helens Volcanic eruption and the terrorist attack of 9/11/01, is being published by Shanti Arts. Fish’s short fiction has appeared in Cheap Pop, Iron Horse, Liars League, Spank the Carp, Boog City, Gargoyle, Apricity Press, KGB BarLit. She was nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize and is a creative writing editor at the journal Ecocene. She co-curates a reading series, VillageStorySalon, at The New York Public Library, and teaches workshops online and in person at venues such as the Queens Public Library, Art in the Basin, and the San Miguel Writers Conference.
Workshop: In 1000 Words or Less: Writing Compelling Flash Fiction Now
Sasha Aronson (she/they) is a New England-based writer, actor, and director. Her work has been staged in New York City at The Tank, 59E59 Theaters, and the Secret Theatre, as well as at the LAVA Center in Greenfield, Mass. She also has a career background in teaching and holds a Master’s in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University and a Bachelor’s degree in Literature from Colby College. Her current work investigates co-creation with AI, interactive theater, and ‘techno-medicine’— the possibility that emerging technologies can support presence, healing, and expanded ways of knowing
Workshop: Writing with AI