Undergraduate Writers’ Conference

Dawn Anahid MacKeen is a reporter and author of The Hundred-Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey, which chronicles her grandfather’s survival of genocide. The book was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and received an Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. It also merited a Wilbur Award for its portrayal of religious issues. Previously she was a staff writer at Salon, Newsday, and SmartMoney: The Wall Street Journal Magazine. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, ELLE, Real Simple, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC, and elsewhere.

Nik De Dominic is an essayist and poet. He is the author of the full-length collection of poems Goodbye Wolf (The Operating System ’20) and the chapbook Your Daily Horoscope (New Michigan Press ’15). Work appears in Guernica, DIAGRAM, Poetry Daily, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of the digital chapbook publisher The Offending Adam and the Poetry Editor of the New Orleans Review. De Dominic teaches at the University of Southern California and is the Co-Director of the Dornsife Prison Education Project. 

Sara Sligar is an author and academic based in Los Angeles, where she teaches English, creative writing, and narrative studies at the University of Southern California. Her first novel, Take Me Apart, was published in 2020 by MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux and was a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a finalist for the Ned Kelly Award for Best International Crime Fiction, and featured in publications such as the Washington Post, People, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and more. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in History from the University of Cambridge. Her second novel is forthcoming in 2023.

Ellen Wayland-Smith has published two books of American cultural history and is currently working on a memoir in essays. She is an Associate Professor in the Writing Program at USC.

Jessica Wells Cantiello is an Associate (Teaching) Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California, where she teaches lower- and upper-division writing courses and a first-year seminar she developed on American novels that made a difference. She has published widely in academic journals such as MELUS, Antipodas, African American Review and The Journal of Teaching Writing. Her most recent article dealt with the relationship between Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and she is in the process of working on a piece about teaching Toni Morrison’s only short story, “Recitatif.”