The Desert Nights, Rising Stars
Writers Conference

Dean Bakopoulos’ Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon was a New York Times Notable Book; he co-wrote the screenplay adaptation of the novel, soon-to-be-released as a film starring James Franco and Rashida Jones. His second novel, My American Unhappiness was named one of the year’s best novels by The Chicago Tribune, and his latest novel, Summerlong, just released in paperback, was an independent bookstore bestseller. His fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Zoetrope, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Real Simple, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Progressive, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.  The winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bakopoulos teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program and is writer-in-residence at Grinnell College in Iowa, where he lives with his wife, novelist Alissa Nutting, and their children. He is at work on a fourth novel, In the Pines, and a collection of essays, Undoing, a portion of which earned Bakopoulos a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; he previously won an NEA grant in 2006 for fiction.