Featured Authors & Artists: "Who Tells the Story"
The UND Writers Conference is excited to welcome this year's featured authors to Grand Forks and the UND campus.
The authors and artists listed below will join us here in Grand Forks for the 58th 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 22–24, 2027.
Use the buttons below to navigate directly to additional information about the featured authors and featured artist for our 2027 conference, "Who Tells the Story."
We will update this page with author bios, as we finalize our lineup for the 2027 UND Writers Conference.
Featured Authors
Jung Yun. Photo Credit: A. Scott
Featured Author: Jung Yun
Jung Yun is the author of All the World Can Hold, O Beautiful, and Shelter. Her novels have been long listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, selected as a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and recognized as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her short fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Tin House, The Massachusetts Review, The Indiana Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at George Washington University. She serves on the board of directors at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, the fiction jury for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the advisory board of Shore Lit.
Téa Obreht. Photo Credit: Ilan Harel
Featured Author: Téa Obreht
Since 2011, when Téa Obreht became the youngest-ever recipient of the Orange Prize for Fiction for her debut novel The Tiger’s Wife, the Belgrade-born novelist has been a writer to watch. Named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty, Obreht has wowed critics and readers with richly developed characters, subtle plot, and evocative sense of place. With her second novel, the New York Times bestseller Inland, which President Barack Obama called “terrific,” Obreht graduated from wildly talented newcomer to one of the finest fiction writers of her generation.
Delightfully mashing up several genres, including Western gothic, murder mystery and survival saga, her newest novel Sunrise has been hailed as “masterful” (The New York Times) and “thrilling and ingenious” (Laila Lalami, author of The Dream Hotel). “Readers will have a blast,” raves Publishers Weekly (starred review).
Obreht’s penchant for building surreal and folkloric worlds is skillfully woven into The Morningside, praised as “an ideal novel in which all is invented and everything is true” (Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams). Shortlisted for the first-ever Climate Fiction Prize, The Morningside was adapted from the short story of the same name that was part of The New York Times Magazine‘s pandemic-era Decameron Project.
Her debut, The Tiger’s Wife, was an international bestseller and National Book Award finalist. The novel is a brilliant latticework of loss, love, and family legend. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called the debut “stunning… a richly textured and searing novel.” Set in an unnamed Balkan nation still reeling from war, The Tiger’s Wife follows a young doctor, Natalia, as she pieces together the mysterious circumstances of her beloved grandfather’s death. The Tiger’s Wife was named among the best books of the year by The New York Time Book Review, Publisher’s Weekly, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, O: The Oprah Magazine, and many others.
Inland was listed among the 100 Must-Read Books of 2019 by TIME, The Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2019, the Best Literary Fiction of 2019 by Library Journal, and the 100 Best Books for Adults of 2019 by the New York Public Library. It was longlisted for both the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction and Dublin Literary Award, and was named a finalist for the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize among other honors.
In addition to a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, Obreht received the Rona Jaffe fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorkeras one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She splits her time between Wyoming and Ireland, and recently joined the Fiction Faculty at the Creative Writing program at Maynooth University in County Kildare.
Jennifer Eli Bowen. Photo Credit: Emily Baxter.
Featured Author: Jennifer Eli Bowen
Jen Bowen is the author of The Book of Kin, which received a Friends of American Writers Literature Award and was named a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award.
Her work appears in The Sun, Orion, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, among others. She has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Tim McGinnis Award, and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize. Her writing has been supported with a Bread Loaf Fellowship, a Jerome Foundation grant and more.
Jen is the founder and Artistic Director of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, an organization that brings arts programming to state prisons. Jen lives with her dogs and her restlessness in Saint Paul.
Kristine Langley Mahler
Featured Author: Kristine Langley Mahler
Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of three nonfiction books: the erasure essay collection Teen Queen Training (Autofocus Books, 2026) and the essay collections A Calendar Is a Snakeskin (Autofocus Books, 2023) and Curing Season: Artifacts (West Virginia University Press, 2022). Her work has been thrice named Notable in Best American Essays and has appeared in Salon, Seneca Review, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Fourth Genre, Literary Hub, Ninth Letter, and Brevity, among others, and in the anthologies Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music and If I Can Be Honest. Kristine received a BA from the University of Iowa and an MA from the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where she was awarded a Presidential Graduate Fellowship. Her work has been supported by an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council and through residencies at The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and Art at Cedar Point Biological Station. Since 2020, Kristine has been the director of Split/Lip Press, a small press dedicated to publishing boundary-breaking prose books. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie, Kristine makes her home outside Omaha, Nebraska.