​57th Annual UND Writers Conference: ‘Fables & Futures’

Mystery. Whimsy. Tales yet to be told. Join us on the UND campus from Wednesday, March 25, through Friday, March 27, for the 57th Annual UND Writers Conference, “Fables & Futures.”

For centuries, fables have been the long threads guiding us through the labyrinths of the past, the present and the future. We tell each other tales to chart a course along the turbulent seas of our times and to imagine what creatures of the deep might lurk there. And we return to stories, retelling beloved classics in new and modern ways, when we need a torchlight to guide us through the woods in the darkest nights. Fables, fairy tales and lore remain evergreen because they remind us of the secrets we’ve gathered, the knowledge we’ve shared across generations and the words that bind us together as a community.

This year’s UND Writers Conference, “Fables & Futures,” will kindle the familiar joy of pulling up a seat near the hearth and relishing the warmth of the storyteller’s voice. Here, you’ll find tales that are deeply human — all the more necessary, in this age of AI. Death-bed visitations, haunted houses, Beowulf reimagined in a gated community, journeys into the depths, new mythologies and literal house parties with the devil: these are only a few of the journeys you’ll find at this year’s Writers Conference.

At this year’s “Fables & Futures” conference, you can unspool these yarns and follow them wherever they lead — all while connecting with others through the art of storytelling. Each day of the conference will feature panel discussions and readings spotlighting our featured authors and artists. In the spirit of fables and tales, we’ll also foster a community of storytellers through creative activities open to all in-person attendees — community craft sessions, open mics, exhibit tours at the North Dakota Museum of Art and a collaborative art workshop. We’ll also be joined by featured literary agent Penelope Burns of Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents, so attendees can get the inside scoop on the publishing industry.

All conference events will be held in-person in UND’s Memorial Union. Parking is provided, and all events are free and open to all. We will also livestream all panel discussions and author readings via Zoom. Registration for Zoom events and in-person conference events is available through the Writers Conference website, undwritersconference.org. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram (@UNDWritersConference) for updates, author profiles and more.

Patrick Thomas Henry is the Director of the UND Writers Conference and author of the short story collection “Practice for Becoming a Ghost,” which was long-listed for the Story Prize.

George Saunders

The critically acclaimed work of George Saunders explores the meaning of human nature unto its ending, or extension, in death. Dancing between historical truth and the supernatural in his award winning 2017 novel “Lincoln in the Bardo,” Saunders delves into the meaning of love in loss. President Lincoln grieves the death of his eleven-year-old son, Willie. His unique prose is experimental in the examination of a father mourning his son, through which Saunders questions how humanity can love in the face of grief.

Expanding on his clever exploration of ghostly regrets in his brand new 2026 novel “Vigil,” Saunders examines the meaning of absolution. An angel, Jill “Doll” Blaine, must guide the wicked T.J. Boone to the afterlife. He feels he has nothing to regret in his economic success, until he is haunted by the ghosts of his past. Ever witty and topical in its storytelling, “Vigil” presents the malice of greed at the cost of the environment and oneself.

George Saunders has authored several collections of short stories and essays, a novella and a children’s book, similarly exploring themes of love, justice, reckoning and grief brought to life with a touch of fantasy. He earned an MA with an emphasis in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he has taught since 1997. Saunders has appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 1992 and has won several prestigious awards, including receiving the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Folio Prize and the Story Prize for “Tenth of December,” and the Man Booker Prize for “Lincoln in the Bardo.” He was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker Prize, as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Saunders will appear on the first day of the Writers Conference, Wednesday, March 25. He will participate on the noon panel that day. At 8:00 p.m. that evening, he’ll hold an on-stage conversation with Amber Sparks. Read more on his website,georgesaundersbooks.com.

Liv Schlosser is a senior majoring in psychology and English at UND, with three additional certificates, including creative writing.

Beatriz Cortez

Beatriz Cortez is a Salvadoran-born multidisciplinary artist, sculptor, and cultural thinker whose work explores life across multiple temporalities and histories of war and migration that ripple across Central America and the wider world. Her work has been recognized on national and international stages.

In 2024, Cortez was invited to participate in the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, one of the world’s most prestigious art showcases. She has presented solo exhibitions at major venues including Storm King Art Center and the Williams College Museum of Art (both 2023), as well as exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles and Mexico City. Her sculptural series has also been featured in high-profile group exhibitions such as the Boston Public Art Triennial (2025) and the Frieze Sculpture Program at Rockefeller Center.

Cortez has earned respected fellowships and awards, among them the Latinx Artist Fellowship (2023), Vera List Center Borderlands Fellowship (2022-24), the inaugural Frieze LIFEWTR Sculpture Prize (2019), and the Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020). Her work appears in major public and institutional collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Getty Research Institute, emphasizing her reach in both art and cultural discourse.

She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a PhD in Latin American literature from Arizona State University. Today, Cortez is associate professor of art at the University of California, Davis, where she continues to contribute to both academic scholarship and creative practice.

Cortez will deliver her artist’s talk on the Writers Conference main stage at 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, March 25. She will also participate on the 10:00 a.m. panel on Thursday, March 26. Learn more about Cortez’s work at her website, beatrizcortez.com.

Damilola Olobaniyi is a third year Ph.D. student in the English department at the University of North Dakota.

Maria Dahvana Headley

Novelist, translator, memoirist, dramatist, poet, lecturer, editor: while accurate, these words feel paltry when considering the work of the prolific Maria Dahvana Headley. Within her pages, stories of old and the modern world fight, tear, bleed and coalesce into a dazzling tapestry that weaves together human histories, fears and loves across millennia and amongst the stars.

Headley has described herself as a “monstermaker,” “mythmaker,” and “creature made of red lipstick [and] sequins” on her social media pages. In the introduction of “Beowulf: A New Translation,” for which she received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets as well as the Hugo Award for Best Related Work, she writes, “[I am] a person who grew up surrounded by sled dogs, coyotes, rattlesnakes, and bubbling natural hot springs nestled in the wild high desert of Idaho, a person who [. . .] would fall much closer in original habitat to Grendel and his mother than to Beowulf or even the lesser denizens of Hrothgar’s court.”

Headley is a New York Timesbestselling and World Fantasy Award-winning author of eight books and has been shortlisted for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, Tiptree, Locus, and Joyce Carol Oates Prizes. In 2023, “Vergil! A Mythological Musical” — her full-cast, ten-episode musical adaptation of “The Aeneid”— was released on Audible. Headley attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing Program. She has been supported by the MacDowell Colony, Arte Studio Ginestrelle and other organizations; delivered prominent lectures at Oxford and CUNY; and taught writing at Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, Dominican and other prominent universities and programs.

Headley will appear on the noon panels on Wednesday, March 25, and Thursday, March 26. She will read from her work at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 26. Learn more about her and her work on the UND Writers Conference website.

Caius Buran is a McNair Scholar and hopeful medievalist in UND’s English Department.

Anna Maria Hong

Anna Maria Hong’s writing embodies the intersection of older stories and those newly told and her work imagines what stories might look like in the future. Throughout Hong’s writings, she reveals those spaces where future stories encounter ancient fables or meet up with older forms of storytelling.

Hong graduated from Yale with a B.A. in Philosophy and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas. She has become a renowned author of poetry and fiction, often blending these genres.

Her collection of poetry, “The Age of Glass,” won the 2017 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Competition and the 2019 Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second collection, “Fablesque,” won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. Her poems tonally shift between themes of fear, time and ways in which the body is a source of stories and a place of its own. Her lyrical verse is poignant and rich and her use of the body and imagery centers self-actualization.

Across her work, Hong explores how old fables shape our perception of identity and gender by blending genre and timeframes. In her book, “H and G,” which won the Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize, Hong combines poetry and prose, and we witness where Hong flexes her ability to meld the two modes while blending fable and contemporary storylines. Hong details the fictional story of Hansel and Gretel in a multifaceted, three-dimensional way, exploring the themes of abuse, its impact and the looming forces of gendered and racial biases that influence human connection and identity.

Hong will join the “Fables and Futures” conference on Thursday, March 26, and Friday, March 27. She will be participating on the noon panels on each of those days, and she will read from her work at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, March 27. Learn more about her work on her website, annamariahong.net.

Ceallan Hunter is a senior at UND pursuing an English and visual arts degree, with certificates in creative writing and photography.

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) writer from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Her debut short story collection, “Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare,” is a USA Today national bestseller. She earned her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, and a B.A. in English from Dartmouth College. She is currently an affiliate faculty in fiction at Antioch University Los Angeles, as well as a lecturer in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She’s also a fiction editor at No Tokens journal.

Kakimoto’s debut book, “Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare,” is a collection of stories portraying her Hawaiʻi. Each story offers a glimpse into what can be described as visceral, yet blooming, portraying Hawaiʻi as it has been known and as it is lived through the eyes of characters spanning different ages and demographics across genres. The collection carries readers through experiences of adolescent becoming through menstruation and Kānaka superstitions, a tether between desire and loss amid ecological upheaval, familial conflict across islands, and confrontations with the cultural gaze on Hawaiʻi.

Her work expands to include essays and selected stories such as “Our Hawaiian Stories Are Not Meant to Be Easy for You” (The Guardian, Winter 2023), “Madwomen” (Southern Humanities Review, Winter 2020), among others. Through surreal storytelling, her work reframes the postcard image of Hawaiʻi as paradise, allowing a landscape marked by history and tension to emerge through her writing.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Joyland and Conjunctions. She has been named a “Writer to Watch” by Publishers Weekly, received the Honolulu Book Awards’ Author Under 35 Award, and has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature. She lives in Honolulu.

Kakimoto will appear at the UND Writers Conference on Thursday, March 26, and Friday, March 27. She will appear on the noon panel on each day. On Friday, March 27, she will lead a community craft session at 2:15 p.m., and she will read from her work at 8:00 p.m. Learn more on her website, megankakimoto.com.

Dani Ogawa is an MA student in English at the University of North Dakota. Her work has appeared in UND’s literary magazine, Floodwall, and elsewhere.

Ananda Lima

Ananda Lima is a distinguished poet, translator and fiction writer, whose words bring the reader to imaginative and inspiring places. Lima's work has been published in a variety of places, including American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review and Electric Literature. Her most recent publication, "Craft: Stories I Wrote For The Devil" is a delightfully complex short story collection, where the writer's stories are framed by her meetings with the Devil through time.

“Years ago, I had the idea that I would write a story about the devil as kind of a regular guy. But over the years, I started reading about the devil as a scapegoated figure that gets blamed for everything,” Lima told Jami Nakamura Lin with the Chicago Review of Books. “That concept is very similar to how they blame groups of people. [. . .] Sometimes it’s explicitly linked — they say, ‘This group is in cahoots with the devil.’ Sometimes they’re not linked, but they’re just treated in the same way.”

Lima’s discussions on race, immigration, and their intersections can also be seen in her debut work, “Mother/land.” This book of poetry depicts an immigrant mother and the dangers and joy America offers her and her son. “Mother/land” was also the winner of the Hudson Prize and shortlisted for The Chicago Review of Books Chirby Award.

Lima received a M.A. in linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in fiction from Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. She is currently a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago.

Lima will appear on panels on each day of the Writers Conference, and her reading is scheduled for 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, March 25. She will lead a community craft session at 2:15 p.m. on March 25. Learn more about Lima on her website, anandalima.com.

Jasmine Patera is a senior at UND studying English with a certificate in writing, editing, and publishing. She is the co-managing editor of Floodwall, UND’s student-run literary magazine.

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, editor, and academic, whose work explores the intersections of colonialism, queer identity and the linguistic landscape of Puerto Rico. As a former Poet Laureate of Philadelphia (2018–2019), he utilizes bilingualism as a means of power and survival and a site of resistance and negotiation. This negotiation creates the space between English and Spanish, in which gender and national identity intersect, resisting the boundaries often imposed by both traditional society and colonial history.

Salas Rivera’s writing is deeply rooted in the political and the personal. “Lo Terciario/The Tertiary,” which was longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award, is a decolonial response to the PROMESA law. It reevaluates Marx’s framework and forces readers to rethink old questions by considering current colonial realities. “While They Sleep (Under the Bed is Another Country)” explores the themes of colonial trauma, broken voices, and the unsaid as a circular ongoing conversation aftermath of Hurricane Maria. It inspired the title of the exhibition “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art.” Salas Rivera cofounded The Puerto Rican Literature Project, which is a digital archive to document the island’s literary history and edited the anthology “La piel del arrecife,” focusing on Puerto Rican trans poetry.

After years in diaspora, Salas Rivera returned to Puerto Rico in 2019. He serves as assistant professor in the comparative literature program at the Mayagüez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico.

Salas Rivera will join the Writers Conference on Thursday, March 26, and Friday, March 27. He will participate on the noon panels on each day. On Friday, March 26, he will lead a 2:15 p.m. community craft session, and he will read from his work at 4:00 p.m. Read more about Salas Rivera’s work on his website, roquesalasrivera.com/.

Hediye Matz is a teaching assistant professor at UND.

Amber Sparks

Amber Sparks is a fiction writer known for her sharp, imaginative style that blends the surreal, fantastical and the uncanny. Originally from the Midwest, Sparks graduated from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, English, and theater. She later attained her master’s degree in political management and communications from George Washington University. Sparks now lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, daughter and cats.

From the moment she knew how to read, Sparks loved stories and storytelling. Growing up, her formal introductions to genre fiction and various tropes came through TV shows and films, as well as fairytale books from her father. It is here where Sparks’ love for the uncanny and strange, as well as her obsession with ghosts emerged, influencing her imaginative and self-described “domestic fabulism” style of writing. Sparks cites a notable list of her personal literary heroes, including but not limited to Karen Russell, Virginia Woolf, Diana Wynne Jones, Wallace Stevens and others.

Sparks’ creative work spans from the likes of short stories to essays and a novel, with her latest addition being “Happy People Don’t Live Here,” a captivating gothic tale that blends humor, murder mystery and eccentricity with the supernatural. Her most well-known collection, critically acclaimed by several publications, is “The Unfinished World and Other Stories,” a collection of short stories that play on poetry and prose conventions while discussing adulthood and childhood in a surrealist, lightly fantastical way.

Sparks will appear at the Writers Conference on Wednesday, March 25, and Thursday, March 26. She will participate on the noon panel on March 25, and the 10:00 a.m. panel on March 26. She will lead a community craft session at 2:15 p.m. on Thursday, March 26, and she will read from her work at 4:00 p.m. that day. She’ll also be in conversation with George Saunders on the first night of the conference. To read more about her work, visit Sparks’ website, ambernoellesparks.com.

Veronika Linstrom is a senior majoring in English at UND, as well as co-managing editor of Floodwall, UND’s student-run literary magazine.