Sam Boyer was once an Academy Nicholl Fellow, a CAPE New Writers Fellow, and a short-haired screenwriter at both USC’s film school and the Michener Center. He now works as a writer with Perfect Storm Entertainment (Fast & Furious), Zero Gravity (Ozark), Janet Yang Productions (Joy Luck Club), and The Asian American Foundation, among others. He lives in Pasadena, which isn’t really in Los Angeles, but is pretty close. He will teach the Michener Center’s First Year Seminar course for the Fall of 2024.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Maybe Bird, and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Jennifer received her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). Jennifer teaches for the Rainier Writing Workshop and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is the Literary Assistant to the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. Foerster grew up living internationally, is of European (German/Dutch) and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco. She will teach a Poetry Workshop at the Michener Center in the Spring of 2024.

Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. His debut novel The Residue Years won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His essay collection Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was named a best book of 2019 by fifteen publications. Jackson is also the author of Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion, described by the New York Times, as “A coffee-table book that elevates the subject to the same decorative status as a Dior or Gucci monograph.” Jackson’s other honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the NYPL, the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and TED. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire, and Men’s Health, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire. He holds the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professorship in the English Department of Arizona State University. Jackson will teach a Fiction Workshop at the Michener Center in the Fall of 2024.