Meet Your Faculty
Megan Culhane Galbraith
Megan Culhane Galbraith is a writer, visual artist, and an adoptee. She is a founder of The Writer’s Collective, the Never Hush Workshops for Adoptees, and the GIV Young Writer’s Institute.
She is the author of a hybrid memoir-in-essays, The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book, published by Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press in 2021.
Her work was Notable in Best American Essays 2021 and 2017 and her writing and art are published or forthcoming in BOMB, HYPERALLERGIC, ZYZZYVA, The Believer, L.A. Review of Books, Bloom, Tupelo Quarterly, Blood Orange Review, Longreads Editors’ Picks, Hotel Amerika, Catapult, and Redivider, among others.
She is the recipient of fellowships from UCross, The Vermont Studio Center, Joshua Tree Writer’s Retreat, The Saltonstall Foundation, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and The Horned Dorset Colony.
Megan is the Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
www.megangalbraith.com
Garrard Conley
Garrard Conley [ˈɡærədˈkɑnli] is a founder of The Writer’s Collective and is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Boy Erased (Riverhead/Penguin 2016) and the novel All the World Beside (Riverhead/Penguin 2024). Now a major motion picture. Boy Erased was nominated for a Lamdba Literary Award and was featured as a top 2016 nonfiction book by O Magazine, Buzzfeed Books, and Shelf Awareness, among others. It has now been translated in over a dozen languages. , as well as the creator and co-producer of the podcast UnErased: The History of Conversion Therapy in America (Limina/Stitcher 2018).
His work has been published by The New York Times, Oxford American, Time, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Conley is a graduate of Brooklyn College’s MFA program, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow specializing in fiction.
He currently serves as an assistant professor of creative writing at Kennesaw State University.
A survivor of conversion therapy, Conley is an activist and speaker for Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau, lecturing at schools and venues across the country on radical compassion, writing through trauma, and growing up gay in the complicated South. He works with other activists to help end conversion therapy in the United States and abroad.
http://garrardconley.com/
Shawna Kay
Rodenberg
Shawna Kay Rodenberg is a founder of The Writer’s Collective and the author of Kin, a debut memoir deemed “essential reading” by the Washington Post and “gorgeously gritty” by Oprah Daily.
She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she now teaches nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in Salon, the Village Voice, and Elle. In 2016, Shawna was awarded the Jean Ritchie Fellowship, and in 2017 she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award.
A registered nurse, mother of five, and grandmother of two, she was raised in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and, briefly, on a cluster of religious communes in northern Minnesota. She’s obsessed, universally, with mysteries and mystics. She lives on a hobby goat farm in southern Indiana. Her second book, a sequel to her first, is in progress.
www.shawnakayrodenberg.com