This event is open to MFA students and Zell Fellows only. Please email asbates@umich.edu for login instructions.

Claudia Ballard is a partner and literary agent at WME. She represents mainly literary fiction, from established short-story writers to debut novelists and beyond, as well as creative nonfiction and journalism. Her clients include Emma Straub, Kiley Reid, Curtis Sittenfeld, Alice Munro, Jenna Wortham, Alexandra Kleeman, Xuan Juliana Wang, Chloé Cooper Jones, and Madhuri Vijay amongst many others.

Julie Buntin is an assistant professor with the Helen Zell Writers' Program. Her debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, translated into ten languages, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including the Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Vogue, the New York Times Book Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and the MacDowell Colony, and is an editor-at-large at Catapult. Her novel-in-progress won the 2019 Ellen Levine Fund for Writers Award.