Karim ALRAWI (playwright, fiction writer; Canada/UK/Egypt) writes stage plays in both Arabic and English. He is also the author of several radio and TV plays, and children’s books. He was resident writer at the Royal Court Theatre and the Theatre Royal Stratford East (England), has held writing residencies in the US and Canada, and teaching positions at universities in all three countries. His national and international honors include the John Whiting Award and the Samuel Becket Award. Karim participates courtesy of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Arts Council of British Columbia. (IWP Fall Residency '13)

Alisa Ganieva is a writer of fiction and essays. In 2009, her first long story—Salam, Dalgat! about her native land in the Caucasus—won the prestigious Debut Prize a major literary award for young writers. The significance of the achievement may be judged by the fact that approximately sixty thousand manuscripts were entered in the competition. Alisa is now the author of three novels, The Mountain And The Wall (Праздничная гора, AST, 2012) and Bride and Groom (Жених и невеста, AST, 2015) and Offended Sensibilities (Оскорбленные чувства, AST, 2018). Alisa is also a winner of the Triumph Prize, a noted Russian award for talented writers, artists, actors, and musicians (2010). 

Dora MALECH is a poet, professor, and visual artist. She is the author of two books of poetry, Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) and Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser Press, 2009). Her poems appear in numerous publications, including The New Yorker,Poetry, Poetry London, The Yale Review, Tin House, The New Census (Rescue Press, 2013), Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion (ABRAMS, 2015), and The Best American Poetry 2015 (Simon & Schuster, 2015). A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has been the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a Writers' Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center, and she has served as Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary's College of California. She was recently awarded an Amy Clampitt Residency for Spring 2017. She is a co-founder and former director of the arts outreach organization the Iowa Youth Writing Project. She lives in Baltimore, where she is on the faculty of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and is serving as an inaugural Engaged Faculty Fellow through the JHU Center for Social Concern in 2015-2016 (BTL faculty 2016, 2019).