Featured Authors: "Fables & Futures"
The UND Writers Conference is excited to welcome this year's featured authors to Grand Forks and the UND campus.
The authors, artists, and featured guests listed below will be joining us here in Grand Forks for the 57th Annual UND Writers Conference. We are thrilled to welcome them to the UND community. Join us in-person or online for their panel discussions, readings, and more from March 25–27, 2026.
Please note: we are currently finalizing our lineup of featured authors and artists! We will update this page and share more exciting news about our featured authors as soon as that information is available.
Learn More about Our Featured Authors and Artists
Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling, World Fantasy and Hugo Award-winning author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation (FSG, 2020), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and The Mere Wife (FSG, 2018), a contemporary novel adaptation of Beowulf. Her full cast musical adaptation of The Aeneid, titled Vergil: a Mythological Musical, came out from Audible in 2023. She delivered the Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Oxford in 2023, and has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence and Bennington, among many others.
When asked by Slate about her use of contemporary slang in her Beowulf translation, Headley responded, “My whole career has been grabbing bits of folklore and repurposing them, and testing out different meters and repurposing them. That’s the writer I am. But in terms of using some of the more recent slang, I was really just interested in how much of the English language has been constructed out of slang always. That’s just the nature of the language. It’s a language that grabs culturally, jumps class.”
Headley grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.
Anna Maria Hong is the author of the poetry collections Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition, and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize, and the novella H & G, winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize. Her writings appear in many publications including The Nation, American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, The Common, Poem-a-Day, and The Best American Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Amy Clampitt Poet Residency, the Hawthornden Foundation, and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, she is an Associate Professor at Mount Holyoke College.
Learn more about Anna Maria Hong on her author website, https://www.annamariahong.net/.
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) writer from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. She is the author of the story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury, 2023), a USA Today national bestseller that was named an Indies Introduce title and a September Indie Next pick by the American Booksellers Association. Her fiction has been featured in Granta, Conjunctions, Joyland, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Megan received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she was a Fiction Fellow. Currently a Fiction Editor for No Tokens journal, she lives in Honolulu.
Learn more Megan Kamalei Kakimoto on her website, https://www.megankakimoto.com.