Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the linked story collection Half Gods, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the novel Meet Us by the Roaring Sea. She received the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, Lambda Literary Award, and PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. She has attended residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center, MacDowell, Yaddo, Callie’s Berlin, among others. She is an associate professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program and a 2024–25 Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

(Photo credit: Vidhya Manivannan)