Instructors
Short Fiction
Maya Okafor
“Good fiction asks a question so clearly that the reader can't stop until it's answered. My job is to help you find your question — and then get out of the way.”
Maya Okafor's fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Best American Short Stories. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches at Bread Loaf.
Her debut collection, The Distance Between Rivers, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA.
Maya teaches the Short Story Intensive at Vagabond. Her workshops are known for pushing writers to find the engine of their stories — the single question every piece is trying to answer — and then not letting them off the hook until they've answered it.
Nonfiction / Essay
Theo Araujo
“An essay is an argument, not a confession. The personal is the vehicle, not the destination. I push writers to know what they're actually claiming — and then to earn it.”
Theo Araujo is the author of two essay collections published by Graywolf Press and a recipient of the Whiting Award. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, n+1, and The New York Review of Books.
His writing sits at the intersection of personal history and political argument — he is best known for essays that use private experience as a way into large structural questions. His second collection, What We Owe, was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times.
Theo teaches Long-Form Nonfiction at Vagabond. He is particularly interested in writers who are trying to do more than one thing at once: grieve and argue, confess and indict, report and remember.
Novel / Long Fiction
Suki Tanaka
“You already know more about your novel than you think you do. My job is to help you hear what it's telling you.”
Suki Tanaka is the author of three novels published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She has taught at the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Sewanee Writers' Conference.
Her novels are known for their structural precision and their willingness to withhold — she has described her approach as "building a house from the inside out, so the reader only understands the architecture when they've already moved in."
Suki teaches Novel in Progress at Vagabond. She works best with writers who have significant pages already — she is less interested in helping you start a novel than in helping you understand what the novel you're already writing is actually trying to do.
Poetry
Rosa Delgado
“Form is pressure. Pressure makes the poem. I want to teach writers to love the cage so much that they know exactly how to break out of it.”
Rosa Delgado is a poet whose collections have won the National Book Critics Circle Award and been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and teaches at NYU.
Her work moves between received forms and invented ones — she is as comfortable with a crown of sonnets as with a sequence of prose poems that dismantles the idea of a sequence. Critics have described her work as "formally exact and emotionally unguarded in equal measure."
Rosa teaches Form & Fracture at Vagabond. The course is built around a single argument: constraint is not the opposite of freedom, it is the precondition for it.