The Leopardi Writing Conference

Alix Christie

Fiction

Alix Christie is the author of Gutenberg's Apprentice, a historical novel published in 2014 that was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Prize and the VCA-Cabell First Novel Award. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the 2016 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Novella Award, and won the 2011 McGinnis-Ritchie award from the Southwest Review. She is currently a Literary Arts Fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center in California. A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, and a longtime foreign correspondent, Christie has reported from Europe for the Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com, Washington Post and many other publications. She lives in London, where she is at work on a second novel and reviews books and arts for The Economist.

Brett Fletcher Lauer

Poetry

Brett Fletcher Lauer is the author of the poetry collection A Hotel In Belgium, which was named a Top 40 book of 2014 by Coldfront Magazine, as well as the memoir Fake Missed Connections: Divorce, Online Dating, and Other Failures. He has co-edited numerous anthologies, most recently with Lynn Melnick, Please Excuse this Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation. He is the deputy director of the Poetry Society of America and the poetry editor of A Public Space. He lives in Brooklyn where he is the poetry co-chair of the Brooklyn Book Festival.

Christine O'Brien

Non-Fiction

Christine O'Brien grew up in Manhattan and Beverly Hills and earned a BA in English at UC Berkeley. She worked in television for many years as a production assistant and segment producer for ABC-TV and NBC Productions and in the film industry as an assistant to producer Alex Ponti and director Mel Damski. Her screenplay, The Maccabees, was optioned by Dan Blatt Productions. In 2012 she received a double MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California, where she was awarded the Agnes Butler Scholarship for Literary Excellence. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Seneca Review and The Slush Pile Magazine. Her essay “Cul de Sac” received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train's 2014 Short Story Award for New Writers. She is currently an associate adjunct professor of English at Saint Mary’s and lives in Walnut Creek. Her memoir, CRAVE, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in the fall.

Teresa Burns Gunther

Fiction

Teresa Burns Gunther's fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Alaska Quarterly Review, Madison Review, Dogwood Literary Journal, 2014: A Year in Stories, Best New Writing 2012, Literary Mama, Northwind Magazine, Stone's Throw, and many more. New work is anthologized in The Best of Pen & Brush, Inc (forthcoming). Her story collection "Hold Off the Night" was a recent semi-finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award and her stories are recognized in contests at Glimmer Train Press, Narrative Journal, Phoebe Journal, Cutthroat, Raymond Carver Short Story Award, New Millennium Writings and more. Her interviews and book reviews are published, or forthcoming, in Zyzzyva, Bookslut, Glimmer Train Press, Shambhala Sun, Literary Mama and others.

Teresa lives in Oakland, California where she is finalizing her novel, Shadow Lake. The founder of Lakeshore Writers Workshop in Oakland, she leads writing workshops and classes and offers developmental editing service and master classes. She taught a Master Class at Hedgebrook in 2017.

Mollye Miller Shehadeh

Poetry

Mollye Miller Shehadeh is a poet and photographer. She received an MFA in Poetry from The New School and in 2012 won the Poets&Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for her manuscript What Was Done, selected by Marie Howe. Her poems have been published in Prelude, Paperbag, Stop Sharpening Your Knives (S/S/Y/K), and elimae. She writes book reviews for The Colorado Review and has taught creative writing online and in the classroom. She lives in Baltimore. See her photography at mollyemiller.com.

Michael Gardner

Non-Fiction

Michael Gardner's essays have appeared in the Seneca Review, Sonora Review, and the anthology, From Boys to Men, which was nominated for the Lambda Literary Prize for Best Anthology. He has authored a few books, including most recently, Axel Vervoordt: Stories and Reflections (Flammarion, 2017), which was translated into French and Dutch, as well as a collection of interior design books, art catalogues, and a cookbook. He has an English degree from the University of Iowa and a Master of Fine Arts degree in nonfiction writing. He lives in Antwerp, Belgium.

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.

A view of the Adriatic Coast from Recanati

Ascoli Piceno, Le Marche

Statue of Giacomo Leopardi in Recanati

Map showing the location of the Region of Le Marche (in gold)