Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir
In the Dream House, the graphic novel
The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection
Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the
New York Times listed
Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."
Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the
New Yorker, the
New York Times,
Granta,
Vogue,
This American Life,
Harper’s Bazaar,
Tin House,
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern,
The Believer,
Guernica,
Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy,
Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Brooklyn.
Selected Writings:
Benjamin Percy is the author of seven novels, most recently
The Sky Vault. He is also the author of
The Unfamiliar Garden,
The Ninth Metal,
The Dead Lands,
Red Moon, and
The Wilding, as well as three books of short stories,
Suicide Woods,
Refresh, Refresh, and
The Language of Elk. His craft book,
Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction, was published in 2016, and he broke into comics in 2014, where he currently writes Wolverine, X-Force, and Ghost Rider for Marvel Comics. His work has appeared in
Esquire,
GQ,
The Paris Review,
The New York Times,
Ploughshares, and
Tin House. He co-wrote the feature film,
Summering, and is currently working on a series for Paramount Plus. His honors include a NEA fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award, two Pushcart Prizes, the Plimpton Prize, and inclusion in
Best American Short Stories and
Best American Comics. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and the Tin House Writers’ Workshop.
Selected Writings:
Camille Dungy Camille T. Dungy is the author of
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. She has also written
Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race,
Motherhood, and
History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, including
Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited
Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for
Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade. Dungy is the poetry editor for Orion magazine. Her work has appeared in
Best American Poetry,
100 Best African American Poems,
Best American Essays,
The 1619 Project,
All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, over 40 other anthologies, plus dozens of venues including
The New Yorker,
Poetry,
Literary Hub,
The Paris Review, and Poets.org. You may know her as the host of
Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.
Selected Writings:
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novels
The Waters,
Once Upon a River, a National Bestseller, and
Q Road. Her critically-acclaimed short fiction collections include
American Salvage, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award;
Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP prize for short fiction; and
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters (Autumn 2015). Her story “The Smallest Man in the World” was awarded a Pushcart Prize and her story “The Inventor, 1972″ was awarded the 2009 Eudora Welty Prize from Southern Review. She was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.
Selected Writings:
Danez Smith is the author of three collections, including Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead. They have won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Poetry, the National Book Critic Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Danez’s poetry and prose has been featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, Best American Poetry, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective. Former co-host of the Webby nominated podcast VS (Versus), they are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Princeton, United States Artists, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez has been featured as part of Forbes’ annual 30 Under 30 list and is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. They live in Minneapolis near their people.
Selected Work:
Kwame Dawes is the author of twenty books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and teaches at the University of Nebraska and the Pacific MFA Program. He is Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Kwame Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Winner of a Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies, in 2022 Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica.
Selected Writings:
Sarah Thankam Mathews is the author of All This Could Be Different, which was shortlisted for the Discover Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. Mathews’ debut novel was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Vogue, Vulture, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Slate, and Buzzfeed. She also has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories. In March of 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, she founded the mutual aid network, Bed-Stuy Strong, which raised and redistributed $1.2 million dollars in grassroots donations and supported 28,000+ fellow New Yorkers with groceries and other survival necessities. The organization has mounted other civic initiatives such as vaccine access, abolitionist support for the incarcerated, immigration, and the climate. Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen, where she currently lives in Brooklyn.
Selected Writings: