Michael Graf

Michael Graf is an Emmy Award winning filmmaker and was named one of the “Top 25 Screenwriters To Watch in 2021” by the International Screenwriters Association. He’s been shortlisted twice for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s prestigious Nicholl Fellowship and has won top screenwriting honors at film festivals in Paris, Park City and Nassau. He’s produced and optioned scripts include WINTER OF FROZEN DREAMS, THE LAST INDIAN WAR, THROWING HAMMERS and GREEN AND GOLD, starring Craig T. Nelson.

He’s also a member of the Director’s Guild of America, directed two Super Bowl campaigns and was the inaugural Writer In Residence at the UW Institute For Discovery. Michael’s directing style has been referred to as an “actor first approach” and he brings that same method to working with his writing students.

Christopher Chambers

Christopher Chambers is the author of two books of fiction, Delta 88 and Kind of Blue, and former editor of Wisconsin People & Ideas, Midwest Review, Black Warrior Review and New Orleans Review. His work has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories and been noted in Best American Essays. 

Christopher was born in Madison, and has since lived in North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, Alabama, Texas, and Louisiana. He's worked as a farmhand, a carpenter, a bartender, and a lifeguard. He's worked in a warehouse, a slaughterhouse, and in an English Department. He's an erstwhile Teamster and he's given up tenure. He's repossessed cars. He taught creative writing and screenwriting in New Orleans for 16 years. He's lived a rock's throw from the Mississippi River at both ends, on the west bank in Minneapolis and downriver in Algiers.

His work has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 5 Pushcart Prize nominations, and has been anthologized in French Quarter Fiction, Knoxville Bound, Maple Street Rag, and in the Best American Mystery Stories series.

He taught creative writing for twenty-five years, at the University of Alabama, Loyola University New Orleans, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Chambers retired from UW-Madison in 2020 when Continuing Studies discontinued its writing program. He currently teaches with the Madison Writers Studio and the Oakhill Prison Humanities Project.

Susanna Daniel

Susanna Daniel’s debut novel, Stiltsville, was awarded the PEN/Bingham prize, and her second novel, Sea Creatures, was a Target Book Club pick. Both novels were published by HarperCollins and Harper Perennial. Her latest novel, Girlfriending, is represented by Emily Forland of the Brandt Hochman agency.

In 2013, Susanna founded the Madison Writers’ Studio with author Michelle Wildgen. She’s a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Writers’ Workshop and a Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellow at the UW Institute for Creative Writing. She’s been awarded residencies at UCross and MacDowell, and her writing has been published in Sewanee Review, Newsweek, Slate, One Story, Wisconsin People & Ideas, Significant Objects, Epoch, and elsewhere. Before co-founding MWS, she taught creative writing at universities for ten years.

You can learn more about Susanna at her website, and you can contact her via email.