This fall, the University of Texas at Austin's Michener Center for Writers welcomes visiting faculty Molly Antopol, Joanna Klink, Maya Perez, and Natasha Trethewey. 

Molly Antopol’s debut story collection, The UnAmericans, won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation, and the Ribalow Prize. The book was longlisted for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the California Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Her writing has appeared in many journals and won a 2015 O. Henry Prize. She’s the recipient of a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, where she teaches courses in fiction and nonfiction writing.

Joanna Klink is the author of They Are Sleeping, Circadian, Raptus, and Excerpts for a Secret Prophecy. She has received awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Jeannette Haien Ballard, Civitella Ranieri, the Bogliasco Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Trust of Amy Lowell. She received an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. in Humanities from Johns Hopkins University. She was the Briggs-Copeland Poet at Harvard University and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana.

Maya Perez is a writer and producer. Her writing has appeared in Joyland, Electric Literature, The Masters Review, and Misadventures Magazine, and she is co-editor of three collections of interviews with screenwriters and filmmakers: On Story–The Golden Ages of Television, On Story–Screenwriters and Filmmakers on Their Iconic Films, and On Story–Screenwriters and Their Craft, all published by the University of Texas Press. She is an executive producer on the television series On Story, now in its ninth season on PBS. On Story won a Lone Star EMMY Award® for Best Interview/Discussion Program Series in 2018 and for Best Arts/Entertainment Program in 2014. It was nominated for a Lone Star EMMY Award® in 2016. Perez’s honors include fellowships from SFFILM/Westridge, the Sundance Institute, and New York Stage & Film, and she was named one of MovieMaker Magazine and Austin Film Festival’s “25 Screenwriters to Watch” for 2016. She received a BA from Vassar College and an MFA as a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin. In fall 2020, Maya Perez will teach the Michener Center’s First Year Seminar. 

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of four collections of poetry, Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, Native Guard—for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—and Thrall. In 2010 she published a book of non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In 2020, she published the memoir Memorial Drive. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities.