Featured Speakers

Aida graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 2009. After graduating from Columbia University she joined Teach for America in her hometown of Chicago. Aida taught English and History at the Noble Academy, a Harkness-based public charter school in Chicago, for four years. There she created the curriculum that supported 9th grade students as they transitioned to Harkness learning. She was the inaugural Internal Harkness Mentor responsible for coaching and supporting 9-12th grade teachers as they implemented Harkness in their classrooms across disciples. Since 2019 she has worked with districts and states to improve outcomes for students as an advisor and facilitator of adult learning. She is now the Senior Director of Teaching and Learning at Panorama Education. 

Paul Harding's novel Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer prize. He is the author of other novels This Other Eden and Enon. Paul is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College. He is the director of the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University.

Author of the debut novel Ours, and the collection Mutiny, Phillip B. Williams is a winner of the 2022 American Book Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and others. He is the recipient of a 2020 creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Whiting Award, and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He serves as a faculty member at Randolph College’s low-res MFA.

Sudanese by way of Washington, D.C., Safia Elhillo is the author of award-winning work including The January Children (the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award) and Home Is Not a Country (Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor), as well as the national bestseller Girls That Never Die. Elhillo’s work appears in Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. Elhillo received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.”

Over the last two decades, Kentuckian Ben Sollee has distinguished himself as multi-faceted creative, blurring the lines between music, tech, and activism. Since his debut record in 2008, Mr. Sollee has released 6 studio records and nearly 10 EPs garnering praise from the New York Times and NPR. His music has been featured in tv shows such as Weeds and Parenthood. In addition, Sollee has a growing career as a composer for film, tv, and interactive media earning an Emmy Award in 2018 for his score on the ABC special Base Ballet. Beyond music, Mr. Sollee is known for his social and environmental advocacy working with organizations like Oxfam America, The Nature Conservancy, and Canopy KY to protect people and the land. 

Listen to Ben on Spotify!

Matt has taught English and coached football at Phillips Exeter Academy since 2007. He earned his BA from Yale University where he played varsity football and his MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Emerson College. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, he is the author of Tender the River, The Wounded for the Water, Club Icarus, and Cameo Diner: Poems. He teaches courses in Documentary Poetics, Moby Dick, Toni Morrison, and The Harlem Renaissance.

Tim Horvath is the author of Understories, and the novella Circulation.  He is a New Hampshire Literary Award winner and his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, AGNI, Harvard Review, Passages North, and Best Small Fictions 2021. His reviews have appeared in Georgia Review, Brooklyn Rail, and American Book Review. His most recent project is Un-bow, a collaboration with composer, cellist, and instrument inventor Rafaele Andrade. He is currently at work on a novel called The Spinal Descent, which explores the world of contemporary classical composers and musicians, as well as a second short story collection. He teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy and creative writing in a Stony Brook MFA program. He has also been a Yaddo resident and is a co-founder of a city-wide reading program in Manchester, NH.