The Leopardi Writing Conference

Jonathan Moore

Fiction Workshop Leader

Jonathan Moore is the author of six novels. These include The Poison Artist, which was a selection of the BBC Radio 2 Book Club, and The Night Market, which was optioned as a feature film by Amazon Studios, to be produced by Mandeville Films. His most recent novel, Blood Relations, was selected as a best book of the year by Apple Books. He has been shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award and the Neukom Literary Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen, as well as the Random House anthology series Dark Screams. To date, his work has been translated into ten languages.

As a high school student, Jonathan's love of books and literature led him to Interlochen Arts Academy, where he majored in creative writing. He then dropped out of four undergraduate colleges before finally receiving a diploma from the New College of California, a now-defunct school in the Mission District of San Francisco. Its campus consisted of a former funeral home and an old laundromat. Before attending law school at Tulane University in New Orleans, he lived in Taiwan for three years, guided whitewater raft trips on the Rio Grande, and worked as an investigator for a criminal defense attorney in Washington, D.C. He has also been an English teacher, a bar owner, a counselor at a wilderness camp for juvenile delinquents, and a textbook writer. He now lives in Hawaii with his wife and two children, and is a partner in the commercial litigation firm Kobayashi, Sugita & Goda.

Samina Ali

Nonfiction Workshop Leader

Samina Ali is an award-winning author, curator, and popular speaker. Her debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), was the winner of France's prestigious Prix Premier Roman Etranger Award and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction. Poets & Writers Magazine named it a Top Debut of the Year.

In the critically acclaimed global exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women's Art & Voices, Samina presents a groundbreaking collection of thought pieces and artwork from contemporary Muslim women who are defining their own identities and, in the process, shattering pervasive stereotypes.

Samina has spoken extensively at a wide range of universities, from Harvard and Yale Universities to community colleges, as well as at other institutions worldwide, including as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department and a featured presenter at the Nobel Women's Initiative 2017 International Conference. The recipient of fiction awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, she has been featured in The Economist, The Guardian, Vogue, National Public Radio (NPR) and elsewhere.

Continuing in the spirit of her widely popular Tedx talk, "What Does the Qur'an Really Say about a Muslim Woman's Hijab?", Samina is currently writing a nonfiction book that weaves her personal story with a passionate appeal for women's equality and justice.

Read more at http://saminaali.net/

Brandon Amico

Poetry Workshop Leader

Brandon Amico is the author of Disappearing, Inc. (Gold Wake Press, 2019). He is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Regional Artist Grant, and the winner of Southern Humanities Review's Hoepfner Literary Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, the Best American Poetry blog, Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review, and New Ohio Review, among other publications.

Gabe Gomez

Distinguished Guest Speaker

Gabe Gomez is the author of two collections of poetry. His first book The Outer Bands won the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize from Letras Latinas and the University of Notre Dame Press in 2006. His second poetry collection, The Seed Bank, was published by Mouthfeel Press in 2012. He has written essays and reviews of music, food, and art for various publications and has taught English and creative writing at the University of New Orleans, Tulane University, the College of Santa Fe and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He holds a BA in creative writing from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA in creative writing from Saint Mary's College of California. He lives in Santa Fe, NM.

Mary Volmer

Distinguished Guest Speaker

Mary Volmer is the author of two novels: Crown of Dust (Soho Press, 2010) and Reliance, Illinois (Soho Press, 2016). Her essays, reviews, and short stories have appeared in various publications, including MUTHA Magazine, the Farallon Review, Women's Basketball Magazine, Fiction Writers Review, Historical Novel Society Review, The New Orleans Review, Brevity, and Ploughshares. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook and was a Distinguished Visiting Writer in Residence at Saint Mary's College (CA) where she now teaches. www.maryvolmer.com

Sharon Pelletier

Distinguished Special Guest

Born and raised in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, Sharon Pelletier moved to New York in 2009 and joined Dystel, Goderich & Bourret in 2013 after working for Europa Editions and Barnes & Noble. While her interests are broad, Sharon is especially seeking upmarket fiction where a literary focus on craft meets a commercial attention to a propulsive plot, with realistic, fully developed characters whose emotional tensions are relatable even when their circumstances are unusual. Favorite fiction categories include suspense and book club fiction. On the nonfiction side Sharon is eager for compelling, fierce narrative nonfiction by journalists, experts, and emerging voices with a growing platform. In all categories she particularly welcomes marginalized voices.

Thomas Cooney

Founder and Co-Director

Thomas Cooney is a graduate of UCLA with a degree in Art History, and NYU with an MA in Modernism. From 1997 – 2012 he anchored the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Saint Mary's College of California where he served as Acting Director, Director, and Coordinator.  His short prose has been anthologized in The Answer, My Friend and Howl: A Collection of the Best Contemporary Dog Wit, and his travel essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Magazine (Liberation, Paradise Lost, Bollywood Dreams). A Graham Greene scholar, he has also served on several advisory boards, and from 2006 – 2008 was appointed for three consecutive years to serve on the recommendation committee for the awarding of International Fulbright Awards in the field of Creative Writing. 

Lain Hart

Founder and Co-Director

Lain Hart graduated from King's College, University of London, and completed an MA in Museum Anthropology at Columbia University in the City of New York. As a freelance writer and editor, and as an assistant to the curator of the Asian Ethnographic Collection of the American Museum of Natural History and the Education Department of the British Museum, he traveled throughout Europe and Southeast Asia, wrote and edited museum publications, and published non-fiction essays and articles in academic journals and books, including one award-winning collection. Currently, he is teaching composition, studying Italian, taking up birdwatching, and working for a writing education program serving high school students in Oakland, California.

Alan Pitts

Staff

Alan Pitts is an author, geologist, and educator who developed his expertise on the region as a PhD candidate at The University of Camerino, Italy, where he studied the stratigraphic architecture of shallow and deepwater depositional systems in Le Marche. His current focus is on using 3D photogrammetry and gigapixel imagery for geoscience research, and discovering the best espresso in Italy.

Pascal Walls

Staff

Friend of the Conference, Pascal Walls, AKA 'Mr Aperitivo', is a jack of all trades. By day, a graphic and web designer, by night, a vigilante tour guide. Having developed an affection for Le Marche, and particularly Recanati, he can be relied upon for travel information, recommendations, and assistance.