2025 Presenters

Kyle Arrington is a writer and storytelling consultant, having written and produced two features -- Dead Dad and Recovery -- and numerous episodes of CW's The Originals over its 5-season run. In addition, he worked on House, M.D., The Big C, Conan, was the Showrunner for Snapchat's Save Me, and has developed projects for ABC, Netflix, Sony, Vertigo Entertainment and others. He's currently in production on a documentary film, and works as a creative strategist & writing coach. In addition to his writing, Kyle teaches TV Writing at his alma mater, the Florida State University Film School's MFA Screenwriting program.

Andrea Askowitz is the author of the memoir My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy. She’s written for The New York Times, Salon, Glamour, The Rumpus, Huffington Post, The Writer, NPR, and PBS, where she’s currently nominated for an Emmy. Andrea hosts and produces the podcast Writing Class Radio and is at work on a new memoir. 

https://andreaaskowitz.com/

Lynne Barrett’s story collection Magpies received the Florida Book Awards gold medal. Her fiction and essays can be found in Rivanna Review, Orange Blossom Review, The Hong Kong Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Necessary Fiction, 50-Word Story, Mystery Tribune, One Year to a Writing Life, and Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment, and Healing. She edited the anthology Making Good Time: True Stories of How We Do, and Don’t, Get Around in South Florida and wrote the writers handbook What Editors Want. She’s received the Edgar Award for best mystery story and teaches Creative Writing at Florida International University.
More at www.LynneBarrett.com

John Dufresne is the author of 25 books of fiction and nonfiction. He’s the editor of three fiction anthologies and co-editor of another. He has received numerous awards for his fiction, including a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, the New York Times Notable Book of the Year (Louisiana Power & Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little), the Florida Book Award Gold Medal, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. His recent novel, My Darling Boy (2025), was published to much acclaim, receiving a starred review from Kirkus, an Amazon Editor’s Pick, a New Yorker brief review, and a Publisher’s Weekly review: “Fans of T.C. Boyle’s satire or Dave Barry’s buffoonery will find their sides aching from laughter,” and a New York Times Book Review describing the novel as “A heartbreaking novel of addiction, written with compassion and wit.”

Allison Langer is a Miami native, University of Miami MBA, writer, and single mom to three children, ages 12, 14 and 16. She is a private writing coach, taught memoir writing in prison and has been published in The Washington Post, Mutha Magazine, Scary Mommy, Ravishly, and Modern Loss. Allison wrote a novel about wrongful conviction and is actively looking for an agent. Currently, she is working on a memoir with her friend and inside student, Clifton Jones (2-Tall). Allison's stories and her voice can be heard on Writing Class Radio, a podcast she co-produces and co-hosts, which has been downloaded more than 650,000 times.

http://www.allisonlanger.com/

Karen Salyer McElmurray’s Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, was an AWP Award Winner for Creative Nonfiction. Her novels are The Motel of the Stars, Editor’s Pick by Oxford American, and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. As a fiction writer, she is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her work in nonfiction has been a recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for the Essay, the New Southerner Award, the Orison Anthology Award for Creative Nonfiction and, most recently, the LitSouth Award. She has co-edited, with poet Adrian Blevins, an essay collection called Walk till the Dogs Get Mean. Wanting Radiance, a novel, and Voice Lessons, a short collection of lyric essays, came out in 2021. Her newest work is an essay collection, I Could Name God in Twelve Ways.

Julie Marie Wade's recent collections include The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone for the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla for the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry, Fisk, By Analogy (CutBank Prose Chapbook Series, 2025), and The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her newest memoir, Other People's Mothers, was published in September 2025 by University Press of Florida.