Role: Author

Alejandro Varela has published work in The Georgia Review, The Point magazine, Boston Review, and Harper’s, among other outlets. His graduate studies were in public health. The Town of Babylon is Varela’s first novel, his second novel, The People Who Report More Stress is forthcoming.

(Photo credit: Matias Pelenur)

Marytza K. Rubio is a writer from Santa Ana, California. She has an MFA in Creative Writing: Latin America from Queens University of Charlotte and is the founder of Makara Center for the Arts, a nonprofit library in her hometown.

(Photo credit: Julie Leopo)

Leigh Newman is the author of Still Points North, a memoir about growing up in Alaska which was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, One Story, and Electric Literature. In 2020, she was awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize for Humor, a Pushcart Prize, and an ASME Award for Fiction.

(Photo credit: Nina Subin)

Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. Her work has been published in places including AGNI, SSENSE, and Best American Short Stories. Mathews was a 2020 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the recipient of a Rona Jaffe fellowship at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. All This Could Be Different is her first novel.

(Photo credit: Dondre Stuetley)

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of the short story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories and 99 Nights in Logar, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

(Photo credit: Jalil Kochai)

Tess Gunty earned an MFA in creative writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Joyland, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Tokens, Flash, and elsewhere. She was raised in South Bend, Indiana, and lives in Los Angeles.

(Photo credit: Lauren Alexandra)

Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Passages North, ZYZZYVA, and Electric Literature, and has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing. He received his MFA from the University of Minnesota, is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California and a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. If I Survive You is his debut book.

(Photo credit: Cola Casados)

Ramona Emerson is a Diné writer and filmmaker originally from Tohatchi, New Mexico. She has a bachelor’s in Media Arts from the University of New Mexico and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. After starting in forensic videography, she embarked upon a career as a photographer, writer, and editor. She is an Emmy Award nominee, a Sundance Institute Native Lab Fellow, a Time Warner Storytelling Fellow, a Tribeca All Access Grantee, and a WGBH Boston producer fellow. In 2020, Emerson was appointed to the Governor’s Council on Film and Media Industries for New Mexico. She currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she and her husband, the producer Kelly Byars, run their production company Reel Indian Pictures. Shutter is her first novel.

(Photo credit: Ungelbah Dávila Shivers)

Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us, is a poet, filmmaker, educator, and performer. She is the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. Along with Safia Elhillo, she is the editor of Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender-nonconforming, and/or trans.

(Photo credit: Mercedes Zapata)