GIANCARLO DITRAPANO AND CHELSEA HODSON

Giancarlo DiTrapano was the editor of Tyrant Books and New York Tyrant. He published and edited books by Atticus Lish, Marie Calloway, Scott McClanahan, Clancy Martin, Brian Evenson, Eugene Marten, Megan Boyle, Brad Phillips, Blake Butler, Steve Anwyll, Michael Kimball, Sam Michel, Ken Baumann, and others. He wrote for Playboy, Vice, and other outlets. He lived in Naples and died in New York City.

Chelsea Hodson is the author of the book of essays Tonight I'm Someone Else. She is on the faculty at Bennington College’s MFA program, and was the first nonfiction instructor at Catapult. Her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Hazlitt, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony and PEN Center USA Emerging Voices. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Both Giancarlo and Chelsea share a love for work that is unflinching, visceral, and heartbreaking—this aesthetic informs everything about the workshop, from our manuscript response letters to our in-class discussions. When a student in our first workshop asked if three rounds of edits was a good rule to use before submitting to journals, we said it should be closer to a hundred rounds of edits. We believe in the workshop as a space where a piece of writing can be sufficiently interrogated, leaving the writer encouraged and excited to get back to work on the next draft.

giuseppe avallone