Crime Writing 2026

Nita Prose is the #1 New York Times and Canadian bestselling author of The Maid series, which has sold more than two million copies worldwide. A Good Morning America Book Club pick, The Maid won the Ned Kelly Award for International Crime Fiction, the Fingerprint Award for Debut Novel of the Year, the Anthony Award for Best First Novel, and the Barry Award for Best First Mystery. The Maid was also an Edgar Award finalist for Best Novel.

Wayne Arthurson is a writer and literary agent of Cree, Quebecois and Scottish descent from Edmonton, Alberta. He is the author of eight novels, including three from his Leo Desroches crime series and two from his Sergeant Neumann Mystery series. His novel Fall from Grace won the 2012 Alberta Readers' Choice Award, and his book The Red Chesterfield won the 2020 Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for best novella. He was the 2023/24 Writer in Residence for the University of Alberta and the 2016 Writer in Residence for the Edmonton Public Library. As a literary agent he represents a number of crime writers including Candas Jane Dorsey, Deryn Collier and Eric Beetner.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is author of the novel Winter Counts (Ecco/HarperCollins), winner of numerous literary awards and named by Time magazine as one of the best mystery novels of all time. His short fiction appears in the anthologies The Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories, Never Whistle at Night, Denver Noir, Midnight Hour, This Time for Sure, and others. His scholarship and nonfiction appear in the New York Times, Shenandoah, The Cambridge Companion to American Prison Writing and Mass Incarceration (Cambridge University Press), and other books and journals. He’s the editor of the anthology Native Noir (Akashic Books), and is the series editor of Native Edge, a new imprint of the University of New Mexico Press. He was Indigenous Artist in Residence at Brown University and has received fellowships from PEN America, MacDowell, Ucross, Ragdale, Sewanee, and Tin House. He’s Professor of English and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Stony Brook University in New York.

Alison Callahan began her publishing career as a reader for the fiction editors at The New Yorker and The Atlantic. After attending the Radcliffe Publishing Course, she worked at International Creative Management, HarperCollins, and Knopf Doubleday. In 2014, she joined Simon & Schuster, where she is currently Vice President and Executive Editor. In 2015, she helped launch the literary imprint Scout Press with Ruth Ware’s debut, In a Dark, Dark Wood. Along the way, the authors Alison has edited include Amy Schumer, Stanley Tucci, Erin Morgenstern, Ann Patchett, Liane Moriarty, America Ferrera, Iain Reid, Armistead Maupin, Daniel Alarcon, and Peter Straub, among many others. Alison’s interests include literary fiction with ambitious, cutting edge, and inventive plotlines and characters. She also enjoys stylistic and visionary stories that are just left of center, domestic dramas, fish out of water stories, and books that take readers outside of their comfort zones and perhaps cause them to view the world in a different way. Alison likes to keep her feet on the ground and her head in the clouds.