Tim Weed is the author of two books: a short fiction collection, A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, named to the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize Shortlist, and a novel, Will Poole’s Island, one of Bank Street College of Education’s Best Books of the Year. His work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Millions, The Morning News, The Writer’s Chronicle, Colorado Review, Talking Points Memo, and many others.

Alden Jones‘s most recent book is the critical memoir The Wanting Was a Wilderness, a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She is also the author of the travel memoir The Blind Masseuse, named a notable travel book by National Geographic, Publishers Weekly, and the Huffington Post, and the story collection Unaccompanied Minors. Her fiction, nonfiction, and travel essays have appeared in the Best American Travel Writing, The Cut, The Boston Globe, AGNI, and many others. Alden has a long career in international education and has taught in various capacities in Cuba, Costa Rica, France, Spain, and elsewhere, and currently organizes free online creative writing workshops for writers in Cambodia, where she traveled on a 2023 Whiting Fellowship for higher education teachers. She spent the summers of 2001-2004 in Havana and Cojímar as a creative writing instructor and director of educational programs for American high school students and has sailed with Royal Caribbean Cruises as a Cuban Culture Expert. She is Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College, as well as a core faculty member of the Newport MFA in Creative Writing.

“I will follow Alden and Tim anywhere. Those two cast an easygoing thrall over all of us. Having been to the Cuba Writers Program in 2016, 2017, and 2018, I love Cuba’s slow reveal. On the Cuba Writers Program I felt more like a participant in the culture than an observer.”

Past Faculty, Guest Writers, and Guest Lecturers

Ann Hood is the best-selling author of the novels The Knitting Circle, The Obituary Writer and The Book That Matters Most and, most recently, the memoir Fly Girl, about her years as a flight attendant during the heyday of air travel. Her essays and short stories have appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Paris Review, Tin House, National Geographic Traveler, Food and Wine and the Atlantic. Hood has won two Best American Food Writing Awards, a Best American Travel Writing Award and a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, and two Pushcart Prizes.

Victor Fowler Calzada is one of the most influential poets and intellectuals writing from Cuba today. He is the author of ten books of poetry and five books essays and has won top literary prizes in Cuba for these works. His most recent books of poetry are La Obligación de Expresar (The Obligation to Express), winner of the Nicolás Guillén prize for poetry in Cuba, and El Maquinista de Auschwitz (The Train Conductor of Auschwitz), winner of the UNEAC prize for poetry. His most recent book of essays is Caminos Corporales y de Escritura (Paths of Embodiment and Writing), winner of the Alejo Carpentier Essay Prize.

Michel Encinosa Fú is the author of the books Sol negro, Niños de neón, Veredas, Dioses de neón, Dopamina, sans amour,  Enemigo sin voz, El Cadillac rojo y la gran mentira, Casi la verdad, Todos tenemos un mal día, and Vivir y morir sin ángeles. He has been included in more than twenty anthologies in Cuba as well as in Italy, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and the United States. He is considered one of the best writers of the science-fiction and fantasy epic genres in Cuba.