The Desert Nights, Rising Stars
Writers Conference

Andrew Dana Hudson is a speculative fiction writer and sustainability researcher. His stories have appeared in Slate Future Tense, Lightspeed Magazine, Vice Terraform, MIT Technology Review, Grist, Little Blue Marble, The New Accelerator, and more, as well as various books and anthologies. His nonfiction writing has appeared in Slate, among others. He is a member of the cursed 2020/2021 class of the Clarion Workshop.

Natalie Lima is a 2016 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and a VONA/Voices alum. She is 2019 alum of the winter Tin House Workshops and will be attending the summer workshop in July. She is a first-generation college graduate of Northwestern University and an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona, where she teaches introduction to fiction writing and freshman composition. Her essays and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Longreads, Catapult, Brevity, The Offing, and elsewhere.

Gionni Ponce is a Macondista prose writer living in Tempe, Arizona. She is a former 2020 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers' Conference Fellow. In 2019, she received a full-tuition scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and was named a Writer in South Asia Fellow by Indiana University in 2018. She is currently working on a short story collection centered on bilingualism and multi-generational conflict in Mexican-American families. Learn more on Twitter: @GPisMe

A marketer by day, and author by night, Willow Sanders writes sweet with heat Contemporary Romance and Romantic Suspense. Her debut novel, Dirty Little Secret won Breakout Author of the Year in 2012 from AuthorsDatabase.com and was the Book Buzz PR - Romance Novel of the year. She has been a municipal liaison for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) since 2004, both in Chicago and in Phoenix, is the Publicity Chair for Valley of the Sun RWA, the President of Desert Rose RWA, and also was named a 40 Under 40 Marketer by Connect Association last year.

Fargo Tbakhi (he/him) is a queer Palestinian-american writer and performer from Phoenix, Arizona. He is the winner of the 2018 Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship and the 2017 Kristin Valentine Scholarship in Performance Studies. He is a Pushcart nominee, and his work can be found in Cotton Xenomorph, Mizna, Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: a Journal of Poetry, Peach Mag, and elsewhere.